NEW YORK (Sept. 17, 2026) — Newly unredacted material in the New York Times–led copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft quotes a Microsoft applied-science director describing mass news scraping for AI training as “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and possibly “the largest theft of labor in human history,” according to filings reported Thursday by TechCrunch and Ars Technica.

The quotes come from a plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment that was unsealed Thursday. Much of the underlying exhibits remain sealed; the characterizations below track what news outlets reported from the unredacted brief.

‘Doom loop’ and substitution

Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, in a January 2024 internal presentation cited in the filing, described Copilot-driven traffic collapse for news domains as a “doom loop” that would “hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.” Microsoft’s own data, plaintiffs say, showed click-through rates for The Times’ domain falling as much as 93% versus traditional Bing search.

OpenAI ChatGPT head Nick Turley wrote internally that publishers face an “existential threat” from products that are “largely substitutive” and “will get more and more substitutive as they get better,” the motion alleges. OpenAI President Greg Brockman described models as “excellent at news,” and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella agreed under oath that chatbots can substitute for visiting the underlying site.

Paywalls, scale, and fair use

Plaintiffs say OpenAI’s mid-training datasets alone contain more than 91,692 copies of works from The Times, the Daily News, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, and that a Common Crawl–derived set included more than 2 million nytimes.com documents. The filing also alleges a “hack to get around nytimes paywall” that Brockman acknowledged with “ah nice,” and efforts to strip copyright notices from training data.

Nadella testified that paywalled material “should be licensed” for training or grounding and that he would have required OpenAI to retrain models if told they had scraped behind a paywall. A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars that Hecht’s comments reflect “one employee’s individual perspective” and “do not represent the company’s views,” and that Nadella’s testimony should not be confused with Microsoft’s legal conclusions on fair use. OpenAI did not comment to TechCrunch; Ars said OpenAI did not immediately respond.

Counsel for the New York Daily News, Steven Lieberman, said the newly visible evidence shows “OpenAI and Microsoft knew that what they were doing was wrong.” The case remains pending; Thursday’s unsealing is not a ruling.

Sources: TechCrunch (Rebecca Bellan, Sept. 17, 2026); Ars Technica (Ashley Belanger, Sept. 17, 2026); plaintiffs’ unsealed summary-judgment motion characterizations as reported therein.