Newly unredacted documents in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, made public on Sept. 17, show that Microsoft’s director of applied science, Brent Hecht, called the scraping of news to train language models “the largest theft of labor in human history” in a January 2023 internal memo and said the practice made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use’”, according to TechCrunch and Ars Technica.

Microsoft said the comments reflected his individual views, not the company’s position. In the same filings, then ChatGPT head Nick Turley described news publishers as facing an “existential threat”, and a Microsoft document warned of a “doom loop” that would hurt both its models and the wider web.