The unredacted filings in The New York Times' ongoing copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, as reported by TechCrunch, contain internal admissions about AI training practices. A January 2023 memo from Brent Hecht, Microsoft's director of Applied Science, characterized the companies' AI training as 'an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' and specifically described it as 'the largest theft of labor in human history.' This emerges from the same legal proceedings where The New York Times initially alleged the firms violated copyright law by training generative AI models on its content without authorization, with Hecht noting in the memo that 'it is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its 'content supply chain.'],
Microsoft's internal data presented in the filings demonstrates concrete harm to news publishers, showing that its Copilot 'answer engine' caused click-through rates for The New York Times' domain to drop as much as 93% compared to traditional Bing search results. An internal Microsoft presentation from January 2024 described this decline as a 'doom loop' that would 'hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.' The documents further detail the alleged scale of reproduction, stating that OpenAI's mid-training datasets alone contain more than 91,692 copies of works published by the New York Times, Daily News, and Center for Investigative Reporting, while a Common Crawl-derived dataset included over 2 million documents sourced from nytimes.com. The filings also describe methods allegedly employed to acquire this content, including scraping from the Bing Index and developing techniques to circumvent paywalls without detection, such as when OpenAI President Greg Brockman reportedly replied 'ah nice' to a researcher's disclosure of a 'hack to get around nytimes paywall.'
While these admissions originate from internal company communications within the lawsuit framework, the primary source does not furnish independent corroboration of these claims from external parties, regulatory bodies, or judicial findings. The TechCrunch reporting explicitly notes that much of the new information derives from The Times' own legal brief rather than the underlying sealed exhibits. Consequently, the article establishes what Microsoft and OpenAI internally communicated about their practices but does not independently verify the factual accuracy of characterizations like 'the largest theft of labor' or the precise magnitude of traffic impacts, remaining within the evidentiary boundary of the supplied litigation documents. The filings also acknowledge a 'real risk' that generative AI could 'significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained,' while OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, characterized publishers as facing an 'existential threat' from substitutive AI products, though these remain internal assessments rather than independently verified outcomes.