Microsoft Quietly Admitted AI Scraping Was the Largest Theft of Labor in Human History

A Microsoft director called scraping the news to train AI the largest theft of labor in human history. Those words are now sitting in an unsealed motion in The New York Times copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft.

TechCrunch and Ars Technica both carried the unsealed brief. The quotes sit in the Times motion. The underlying exhibits remain sealed, so the lines appear without their original context.

Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, in a January 2023 internal memo quoted in the filing, called scraping news for training "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" and perhaps the "largest theft of labor in human history." In another document he said the plan would "make a complete mockery of the idea of fair use."

A January 2024 Hecht presentation, also quoted in the brief, said Copilot's "answer engine" cut New York Times domain click-through rates by as much as 93 percent versus traditional Bing search. Hecht framed a "doom loop" that would hurt Microsoft's models and the web at the same time. Ars Technica said Microsoft recorded 83 to 93 percent CTR drops for some plaintiffs and 51 to 94 percent for others.

OpenAI's ChatGPT head Nick Turley wrote that publishers face an "existential threat" from products that are "largely substitutive" and will get more substitutive as they improve. Coverage also quotes cofounder Greg Brockman calling the models "excellent at news." The brief alleges paywall circumvention, mass scraping, and stripping of copyright notices from training data.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars that Hecht's documents "reflect one employee's individual perspective" and "do not represent the company's views." The case began in 2023. Earlier this month the Trump administration filed a brief defending unlicensed training, and judges have often been friendly to fair-use arguments. None of that is a finding of theft.

The same defendants are already facing a Seattle Times and Newsday complaint.

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