The New York Times and other media companies filed a court brief seeking billions in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement in AI training, citing internal emails and testimony from company executives who called the practice "astonishing theft" and acknowledged that AI products substitute for original journalism, undermining their fair use defense.
Unsealed court documents in the New York Times v. OpenAI lawsuit reveal internal admissions from Microsoft and OpenAI executives that large language models were built on stolen content and have created a 'doom loop' destroying the web and human labor markets. The filing describes LLM training as 'an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' and 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' with AI products cannibalizing the businesses they extracted content from.
Unsealed filings in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal a Microsoft executive called AI scraping "the largest theft of labor in human history." Internal documents show the companies obtained training data by bypassing paywalls and stripping copyright notices, with Microsoft's Copilot causing a 93% drop in Times click-through rates, undermining fair use defenses.