AI Firms Knew Chatbots Were an ‘Existential Threat’ to Journalists, Court Docs Show
The brief was initially filed earlier this month in a court proceeding that brings together several related copyright infringement cases against ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, including lawsuits brought by The New York Times and by Ziff Davis, which owns CNET. Microsoft’s director of applied science, Brent Hecht, called it “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and maybe the “largest theft of labor in human history,” according to the publishers’ filing. The full exhibits showing the context of the quotes in the filing remain under seal.
- ▪The brief was initially filed earlier this month in a court proceeding that brings together several related copyright infringement cases against ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, including lawsuits brought by The New York Time
- ▪Microsoft’s director of applied science, Brent Hecht, called it “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and maybe the “largest theft of labor in human history,” according to the publishers’ filing.
- ▪The full exhibits showing the context of the quotes in the filing remain under seal.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | CNET — News |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ai-firms-knew-chatbots-were-an-existential-threat-to-journalists-court-docs-show/ |
| Publication time | 2026-09-18T19:20:01Z |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-18T19:33:45.484Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-18T19:33:45.484Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YwmIf6XwtmbX · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Tech > Services & Software > AI AI Firms Knew Chatbots Were an ‘Existential Threat’ to Journalists, Court Docs Show A Microsoft executive called OpenAI’s use of publishers’ material “the largest theft of labor in human history.” Jon Reed Managing Editor Jon is a managing editor for CNET's news and AI coverage.… Read full bio Jon Reed Managing Editor Read full bio September 18, 2026, 3:20 pm ET 3 min read Cole Kan/CNET/Getty Images AI companies used vast troves of published text to train their large language models, and executives at those firms were aware that doing so constituted a theft of copyrighted materials, according to comments cited by news publishers in a court filing that was unredacted this week.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at CNET — News.
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