Previously redacted portions of a filing made public Thursday quote Microsoft Applied Science Director Brent Hecht describing AI companies “hoovering up” creative work as “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and, in a January 2023 memo, “the largest theft of labor in human history,” according to Reuters and TechCrunch.
OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, wrote that publishers face an “existential threat” from products that are “largely substitutive” and “will get more and more substitutive as they get better,” the outlets reported. OpenAI president Greg Brockman described large language models as “excellent at news,” and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella agreed under oath that chatbot conversations have substituted for sending users to the underlying news site, Reuters reported.
The New York Times and other publishers argue those quotes undercut OpenAI and Microsoft’s fair-use defense in the Manhattan federal case, which alleges the companies trained ChatGPT on millions of articles without permission. TechCrunch reported that an internal Microsoft presentation by Hecht described a “doom loop” after Copilot answer-engine click-through for The Times’ domain fell as much as 93% versus traditional Bing search. Filings also allege paywall circumvention — including Brockman replying “ah nice” when told of a “hack” around The Times’ paywall — and large-scale scraping via Bing-index and Common Crawl-derived datasets, TechCrunch reported.
A Microsoft spokesperson said Hecht’s comments reflect one employee’s perspective and do not represent the company’s views, and that Nadella’s testimony is consistent with Microsoft’s legal position. OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment, Reuters reported. The case remains before U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein; the Trump administration has separately told the court that AI training is “extraordinarily” transformative.
This brief covers newly unsealed civil discovery quotes and publisher allegations as reported by Reuters and TechCrunch. It is separate from DOJ fair-use briefing coverage and does not adjudicate the copyright claims.