Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' new unredacted filings reveal
The quote is real, and it is Microsoft's own scientist saying it about its own biggest partner. What it proves legally is a separate, much harder question that a dramatic sentence cannot answer by itself.
Explain Like I'm 5 — the whole thing in plain language.
A big lawsuit is happening: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft, saying they used the paper's articles to train AI without permission or payment. New documents from that lawsuit just became public, and they include an internal memo where a Microsoft scientist called what OpenAI was doing "the largest theft of labor in human history." That's Microsoft's own employee, criticizing the practice Microsoft is defending in court.
The documents also describe specifics: OpenAI's training data reportedly held over 91,000 copies of Times articles, some researchers allegedly deleted copyright notices so the AI wouldn't repeat them, and Microsoft's CEO said in sworn testimony that he'd have forced OpenAI to redo its training if he'd known paywalled articles were scraped. Microsoft also reportedly found that its Copilot product cut visits to the Times' own website by as much as 93%.
Here's the catch: none of this comes from documents you or I can read. It comes from the Times' lawyers describing sealed documents in their own legal filing — the version most likely to make the other side look as bad as possible. That doesn't mean it's untrue. It means a scary quote from a court filing is not the same thing as a finished legal case, and the actual question a judge has to answer — did this count as fair use, and did it hurt the Times financially — is still open. Courts so far have generally sided with AI companies on similar questions.