Tech article
Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal
Publisher description: Newly unsealed court filings show Microsoft privately called OpenAI's data practices "theft" while both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from it, and warned internally it would gut publishers.
TechCrunch | Sep 17, 2026 | Rebecca Bellan
Automated excerpt
Per the lawsuit, a top Microsoft executive privately described the companies’ AI training practices as “theft,” and OpenAI’s own leadership said its AI models posed an “existential threat” to the publishers and journalists whose work trained them. The unsealed material also details how the companies allegedly obtained and used that content by bypassing paywalls undetected, building training datasets via mass scraping, and deliberately stripping copyright notices from training data. OpenAI and Microsoft did not return requests for comment.
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