(Image credit: Getty / Cheng Xin) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit

(Image credit: Getty / Cheng Xin) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 2 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement in late 2023, with the case apparently still ongoing almost three years later. Now, the publication’s legal team has asked the court for a summary judgment after it filed a revealing legal brief based on statements and documents from the defendants. According to 404 Media , these documents remain sealed or redacted at the request of both companies, with the revelations showing potentially damaging statements from their leadership, including claims AI scraping is the biggest theft of labor in human history and an existential threat to publishers. Go deeper with TH Premium: AI and data centers (Image credit: Microsoft) The data center cooling state of play The custom AI ASIC state of play America’s AI chip rules keep changing — and the rest of the world is paying the price GTC 2026: Ian Buck press Q&A transcript — VP of Hyperscale and HPC speaks out on shelving CPX and shipping LPU decode this year Demand for data center CPUs has surged, and AI agents are responsible The brief cited an internal memo dated January 2023 by Microsoft director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, where he allegedly said, “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and also called it “the largest theft of labor in human history.” Another Microsoft document was cited saying, “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.” As ChatGPT surged in popularity throughout 2023, the software giant’s own data revealed that Copilot dropped click-through rates for The New York Times by as much as 93% compared to Bing search. Another memo by the Applied Science director called it a “doom loop” and said it would “hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.” The NYT brief quoted Hecht from the document, saying, “It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain.’” Latest Videos From Tom's Hardware Watch full video here: OpenAI Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley said in internal communications that the AI chatbot is an “existential threat” to publishers as they are “largely substitutive” and “will get more and more substitutive as they get better,” while another OpenAI engineer testified that “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.” Nick Ryder, another OpenAI researcher, told company president Greg Brockman about a “hack to get around nytimes paywall,” to which he replied, “ah nice.” AI companies argue that scraping the internet for data to feed to their models is “fair use,” with one court agreeing that Anthropic’s use of published material falls under this category . The law defines this as “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.” Some of the factors that determine whether a particular use falls under “fair use” include “(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.” You may like Apple is taking OpenAI to court over alleged theft of trade secrets Anthropic slapped with $1.5 billion settlement in copyright lawsuit, largest payout ever Apple sues OpenAI over alleged theft of trade secrets However, all these revelations in NYT’s brief could complicate OpenAI’s fair use defense, especially as it shows that the leadership of both companies are aware of the possible market repercussions of AI scraping. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a deposition from earlier this year that “anything that is paywalled should be licensed by anyone who wants to use it…for grounding or training” and that if he “had been made aware that OpenAI has scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,” the company would have required OpenAI “to retrain its models.” Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News , or add us as a preferred source , to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors TOPICS See all comments (2) Jowi Morales Contributing Writer Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics. 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I was just reading an article in a British newspaper (The Guardian), and then did a Google search with some of the key concepts discussed in that article. What Google's AI Overview gave me immediately was partly a word-by-word copy of parts of that article. Reply ttquantia said: This is still going on. I was just reading an article in a British newspaper (The Guardian), and then did a Google search with some of the key concepts discussed in that article. What Google's AI Overview gave me immediately was partly a word-by-word copy of parts of that article. Search AI should be putting the descriptions that come up into the context, not baking them into the model. If that's an infringement, so is Web search. Reply View All 2 Comments