Unsealed court docs show OpenAI and Microsoft leaders privately warned AI threatened publishers

Recently unsealed documents in the legal case brought by news organizations against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal executives were fully aware of the ethical concerns surrounding scraping news for AI training. Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, warned repeatedly that this practice constituted "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions," even going so far as to call it "the largest theft of labor in human history."

Hecht's statements contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI's claim that training AI on news content falls under fair use, suggesting that such a plan would "make a complete mockery of the idea of 'fair use.'" At OpenAI, ChatGPT head Nick Turley wrote in an internal message that publishers would face an "existential threat" from commercial products trained on news content that can substitute for news providers.

One Microsoft document even described a "doom loop," warning that news organizations would suffer from the performance of AI models and the overall integrity of the web. This evidence strongly indicates that executives at these companies were fully cognizant of the ethical implications of their actions, aligning with the "move-fast-and-break-things" mentality prevalent in the tech industry.