Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,' new unredacted filings reveal

Newly unredacted court filings in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI have revealed internal executive admissions that AI scraping practices were tantamount to theft. According to the documents, Microsoft's Director of Applied Science privately characterized AI scraping as an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions and the largest theft of labor in human history, while internal memos warned of a doom loop that threatens the economic foundations of content suppliers. The unsealed filings show that Microsoft's Copilot answer engine reduced click-through rates for The New York Times' domain by as much as 93% compared to traditional Bing search. Evidence also detailed extensive data gathering, including an OpenAI dataset holding over 91,692 copies of plaintiff works, a Common Crawl repository with over 2 million nytimes.com documents, and joint initiatives like Project Mango containing 160,903 publisher works, alongside deliberate paywall circumvention methods. These revelations significantly weaken the defendants' fair-use defense by evidencing direct market substitution and commercial harm. If the court rules against Microsoft and OpenAI, it could establish costly licensing precedents and force extensive retraining of foundation models across the generative AI sector.