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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/17\/technology\/microsoft-openai-publishing-industry.html?emc=edit_nn_20260918&nl=the-morning&segment_id=226681",
    "parsed_content": "Artificial IntelligenceEffect on Work Force\u2018Recursive Self-Improvement\u2019Demand for ReformCalls for A.I. SlowdownPublic Health ConcernsAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTMicrosoft and OpenAI Workers Worry About \u2018Largest Theft of Labor\u2019 in HistoryNewly unsealed court documents showed concern within Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop A.I. systems.Listen \u00b7 5:45 min Share full articleOpen modal at item 1 of 2Open modal at item 2 of 2Microsoft and OpenAI contend their work was covered under legal protections for \u201cfair use\u201d of copyrighted material.Grant Hindsley for The New York Times, Andres Kudacki for The New York TimesBy Karen Weise and Mike IsaacReporting from Seattle and San FranciscoSept. 17, 2026Sign up for the On Tech newsletter. Get our best tech reporting from the week. Get it sent to your inbox.Newly unsealed court documents showed considerable concern within Microsoft and its close partner OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop artificial intelligence systems.As OpenAI was forging ahead with its work, Microsoft employees debated whether what OpenAI was doing represented the \u201clargest theft of labor in human history\u201d and could create a \u201cdoom loop\u201d that could ultimately threaten the quality of the large language models they were building.\u201cMillions of people around the world will soon consider large models \u2018hoovering up\u2019 all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,\u201d said one internal Microsoft document from 2023.Inside OpenAI, there was also worry that its ChatGPT chatbot could lead people away from reading news elsewhere. In a June 2023 memo, Nick Turley, who led the team developing ChatGPT, wrote that A.I. posed an \u201cexistential threat\u201d to publishers. And in February 2024, he wrote that A.I. products \u201cwill get more and more substitutive as they get better.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSnippets of those discussions were made public on Thursday as part of a closely watched lawsuit The New York Times filed against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023. Eleven other publishers have joined the suit. Judge Sidney H. Stein of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is considering motions for a summary judgment. Documents related to the case are slowly being unsealed as the judge considers those motions.The publishers argue that the tech companies violated copyright law by scraping millions of their stories off the internet and other databases, and using the text, without approval or pay, to train advanced A.I. systems.Microsoft and OpenAI contend their work was covered under legal protections for \u201cfair use\u201d of copyrighted material. They say the articles were sufficiently transformed into entirely new work by A.I., and were not substitutes that harm the value of the original work.A Microsoft spokesman, Alex Haurek, said in a statement that internal memos, written by Brent Hecht, Microsoft director of applied science, did not represent the company\u2019s views.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cMicrosoft\u2019s position is set out in its court filings, which explain why these transformative uses are consistent with copyright law and why Copilot is not a substitute for publishers\u2019 journalism,\u201d he said, referring to Microsoft\u2019s A.I. assistant.OpenAI did not return requests to comment.In a separate filing, Microsoft said Dr. Hecht was a research academic who also worked at Northwestern University. It said he was not a decision maker and was employed by Microsoft \u201cto present divergent and asymmetric perspectives.\u201d\u201cThe world can see what OpenAI and Microsoft thought all along about the fairness of their own behavior,\u201d Steven Lieberman, who represents the New York Daily News and seven other newspapers in the case, said in a statement. The New York Times declined to comment.The news companies said OpenAI deployed tools specifically to evade the paywalls set up by publishers. According to the documents, when a staffer wrote Greg Brockman, OpenAI\u2019s president, and told him about developing \u201ca hack to get around nytimes paywall,\u201d Mr. Brockman responded \u201cah nice.\u201dSatya Nadella, Microsoft\u2019s chief executive, also said in a deposition with lawyers that \u201canything that is paywalled should be licensed by anyone who wants to use it.\u201d He said that if he \u201chad been made aware that OpenAI had scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,\u201d he would have invoked Microsoft\u2019s right to require OpenAI to retrain its models.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTMicrosoft\u2019s Mr. Haurek said that Mr. Nadella \u201cspoke to broad principles and changes underway in how people find and consume information.\u201d The documents show concern within the companies that the news industry could not survive if its work was taken. Large A.I. models \u201care a product that destroys its supply chain,\u201d Dr. Hecht wrote. Some inside OpenAI also had concerns about copying the news articles, according to the unsealed documents. In 2020 Jack Clark, who was OpenAI\u2019s policy director, wrote a memo to Mr. Brockman and Sam Altman, OpenAI\u2019s chief executive. Mr. Clark, who later left to co-found Anthropic, wrote that the start-up\u2019s work \u201cis going to increasingly lead to us creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the \u2018culture\u2019 of society.\u201dMr. Clark warned \u201cOpenAI will become the symbol of how Silicon Valley is thoughtlessly stepping into other parts of life and leaving a mess on the carpet.\u201d(Anthropic referred a request for comment to OpenAI.)There were also signs that ChatGPT was not directing users to read relevant stories as they were written by publishers, according to the documents. In February 2023, an OpenAI software engineer wrote to colleagues that, \u201cno matter how prominently we show the links, users won\u2019t click.\u201dA.I. \u201cproducts are largely substitutive, period,\u201d OpenAI\u2019s Mr. Turley wrote.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
    "published_at": "2026-09-17T23:16:44+00:00",
    "author_name": "Karen Weise, Mike Isaac",
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    "ai_excerpt": "Newly unsealed court documents reveal internal concerns within Microsoft and OpenAI regarding the use of millions of news articles to train AI systems. Employees debated whether this constituted the 'largest theft of labor in human history' and posed an 'existential threat' to publishers.",
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