Unsealed court documents from a lawsuit led by the New York Times reveal that senior Microsoft and OpenAI employees privately acknowledged that scraping news content for AI training was potentially unlawful and harmful. A Microsoft director described the practice as possibly "the largest theft of labor in human history" and a "mockery of fair use," while OpenAI's ChatGPT head warned that AI products posed an "existential threat" to news publishers by substituting for them. News organizations argue this internal evidence, combined with data showing significant drops in website traffic and instances of chatbots reproducing articles verbatim, undermines the companies' fair use defence and demonstrates they knowingly harmed the news industry.
