Sept 17 (Reuters) — OpenAI and Microsoft executives privately described their AI products as substitutes for journalism, according to court filings made public Thursday that The New York Times and other news outlets say gut the tech companies’ fair-use defense.
Previously redacted portions revealed quotes from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht during discovery.
Hecht called AI training on publisher content “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and “the largest theft of labor in human history.” He also suggested the scraping plan made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”
OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT wrote that publishers face an “existential threat” from AI products that “are largely substitutive, period.”
Filings allege paywall circumvention, 91,692+ copied publisher works in mid-training datasets, 2.06 million NYTimes.com documents in Common Crawl data, and Project Mango dataset with 160,903 unique publisher works. Microsoft data showed Copilot reduced NYT click-through rates 87–93% below traditional Bing.
OpenAI and Microsoft dispute liability and argue AI training is fair use. The Trump administration recently filed a brief supporting OpenAI’s unlicensed training use.