New York Times filing alleges Microsoft and OpenAI viewed news scraping as theft

Unsealed court documents in the New York Times copyright lawsuit quote a Microsoft director describing AI training on news content as an “astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and potentially the largest theft of labor in history. The filing also cites internal OpenAI acknowledgments of the substitutive impact on publishers. The revelations strengthen the publishers’ claims that the companies understood the scale and nature of the data use.