Newly unsealed court documents in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal admissions that undercut the companies' fair-use defense. Executives reportedly called AI chatbots an 'existential threat' to journalism and described the training process as one of the largest uses of copyrighted material without compensation, while data showed sharp declines in Times click-through traffic. The revelations have triggered a surge in options trading tied to the case's potential outcome.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-21
Newly unsealed court documents in The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal statements warning that their AI models were creating a 'doom loop' harming the web. A Microsoft applied science director reportedly described the companies' data scraping practices as the 'largest theft of labor in human history' and a mockery of fair use. Microsoft has distanced itself from these remarks, calling them one employee's personal opinion rather than the company's official stance.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-18
Newly unsealed court documents in the New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal admissions from both companies' executives. Microsoft's director of applied science Brent Hecht reportedly described AI training as the 'largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman acknowledged that generative AI products pose an 'existential threat' to publishers because they are increasingly substitutive of original content.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-17
As payments begin from Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement over pirated training data, some authors say publishers and literary agents are wrongly claiming their share of the $3,000-per-book payouts. Writers including April Henry report publishers claiming full payments or rights to books whose rights had reverted to the author years earlier. Watchdog Victoria Strauss says the pattern likely stems from sloppy recordkeeping rather than deliberate wrongdoing, and some publishers have already asked Anthropic to correct the errors.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-06
AI companies have started purchasing used physical books in bulk to feed data into their large language models. This practice follows a copyright settlement earlier this year in which courts determined that buying books and destroying them during the digitization process for AI training qualifies as fair use.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-03
The federal government filed a letter in court supporting OpenAI and Microsoft against the New York Times' 2023 copyright lawsuit over AI training data. The filing argues that using copyrighted articles to train large language models qualifies as fair use because it is 'extraordinarily transformative' and doesn't directly compete with the Times' journalism.
wired.com
· 2026-09-02
The Trump administration filed a statement of interest in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, siding with OpenAI's claim that training AI models on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use. Government attorneys warned that narrowing fair-use doctrine could hinder scientific and economic progress tied to large language models.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-02
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