Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal
New unredacted information in the copyright lawsuit The New York Times brought against OpenAI and Microsoft three years ago reveals an admission that AI scraping was tantamount to theft, and that AI products pose a major threat to publications. Per the lawsuit, a top Microsoft executive privately described the companies’ AI training practices as “theft,” and OpenAI’s own leadership said its AI models posed an “existential threat” to the publishers and journalists whose work trained them. The unsealed material also details how the companies allegedly obtained and used that content by bypassing paywalls undetected, building training datasets via mass scraping, and deliberately stripping copyright notices from training data.
- ▪New unredacted information in the copyright lawsuit The New York Times brought against OpenAI and Microsoft three years ago reveals an admission that AI scraping was tantamount to theft, and that AI products pose a major threat to publicati
- ▪Per the lawsuit, a top Microsoft executive privately described the companies’ AI training practices as “theft,” and OpenAI’s own leadership said its AI models posed an “existential threat” to the publishers and journalists whose work traine
- ▪The unsealed material also details how the companies allegedly obtained and used that content by bypassing paywalls undetected, building training datasets via mass scraping, and deliberately stripping copyright notices from training data.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-scraping-the-largest-theft-of-labor-in-human-history-new-unredacted-filings-reveal/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:46:08 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-17T19:48:44.286Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-17T19:48:44.286Z |
| 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 | Ag8MMk3SRHGz · 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
New unredacted information in the copyright lawsuit The New York Times brought against OpenAI and Microsoft three years ago reveals an admission that AI scraping was tantamount to theft, and that AI products pose a major threat to publications. Per the lawsuit, a top Microsoft executive privately described the companies’ AI training practices as “theft,” and OpenAI’s own leadership said its AI models posed an “existential threat” to the publishers and journalists whose work trained them. The unsealed material also details how the companies allegedly obtained and used that content by bypassing paywalls undetected, building training datasets via mass scraping, and deliberately stripping copyright notices from training data.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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