An unsealed court filing in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI revealed that a Microsoft director of applied science had internally described the companies’ AI training-data scraping as ‘an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.’ The filing alleges OpenAI scraped content from more than 10 million news articles, nearly a third of them from the Times. Microsoft and OpenAI maintain their use of the material is transformative fair use, and a ruling on the Times’ summary judgment motion is not expected until 2027.
