GoKawiilSealed briefs in NYT v. OpenAI reveal Microsoft, OpenAI leaders' fears over AI scraping
Newly unsealed portions of a legal brief in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show internal admissions from both companies' executives. Microsoft's director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, reportedly called AI training data scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI's Head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, described the chatbot as an 'existential threat' to publishers. The filing also cites data showing Copilot slashed click-through traffic to the Times by up to 93% compared to Bing search.