Unsealed court documents in the New York Times v. OpenAI lawsuit reveal admissions by Microsoft and OpenAI executives that large language models were trained on stolen content, creating a 'doom loop' that destroys web traffic and business models of the sources they trained on. Internal Microsoft documents acknowledge LLMs represent an 'astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' and the 'largest theft of labor in human history,' with clicks to news sites declining over 90 percent after content was used to train AI systems.
Microsoft and OpenAI executives admitted in sealed court documents unsealed Thursday that large language models were trained on stolen content and have created a 'doom loop' destroying the web and content creators' businesses. The New York Times copyright lawsuit filing reveals internal statements from both companies acknowledging that LLMs cannibalize traffic from their sources, threaten human labor, and represent an existential risk to media companies and creators.