Newly unredacted filings in The New York Times' three-year copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show a top Microsoft executive privately described the companies' AI training practices as theft. Microsoft's director of applied science, Brent Hecht, called it "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" and "the largest theft of labor in human history," according to the filings.

OpenAI's own leadership allegedly said its models posed an "existential threat" to publishers and journalists whose work trained them. ChatGPT head Nick Turley wrote that publishers face a threat from products that are "largely substitutive" and "will get more and more substitutive as they get better."

The unsealed material also details how the companies allegedly obtained content by bypassing paywalls undetected and stripping copyright notices from training data. Microsoft's own data reportedly shows its Copilot caused click-through rates for the Times' domain to drop as much as 93% versus traditional Bing search.

Much of the new information comes from the Times' own brief, not underlying exhibits, which remain sealed. OpenAI and Microsoft did not return requests for comment.

Source: TechCrunch