Microsoft executive labels AI scraping as 'largest theft of labor in human history' in new legal documents

New unredacted legal filings in a three-year-old copyright lawsuit reveal that Microsoft and OpenAI executives privately described AI scraping as 'theft' and a major threat to publishers. A top Microsoft executive called the practice 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI leadership warned of an 'existential threat' to journalists and publishers. The documents show how the companies allegedly bypassed paywalls, built training datasets through mass scraping, and stripped copyright notices from content. Microsoft's Copilot caused a 93% drop in click-through rates for The New York Times, with internal documents calling it a 'doom loop.' Satya Nadella testified that paywalled content should be licensed, and OpenAI's Nick Turley called chatbots an 'existential threat' to publishers. The filings also detail how OpenAI and Microsoft shared training data, with OpenAI's mid-training datasets containing over 91,692 copies of NYT and other news content. Internal memos described the scale of the scraping as 'an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.'