{
  "id": 8495454,
  "title": "'The largest theft of labor in human history:' Court docs reveal Microsoft exec predicted AI 'doom loops' could hollow out the internet",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/19/the-largest-theft-of-labor-in-human-history-court-docs-reveal",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-19T15:59:49.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "PC Gamer",
    "slug": "pc-gamer",
    "url": "https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/the-largest-theft-of-labor-in-human-history-court-docs-reveal-microsoft-exec-predicted-ai-doom-loops-could-hollow-out-the-internet/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "In December 2023, The New York Times filed one of the most significant copyright lawsuits in recent history against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the latter two had stolen massive amounts of journalistic work for their AI models. Recently, a court filing (as analyzed by Ars Technica) was unsealed, containing shocking revelations from high-ups at Microsoft and OpenAI. Brent Hecht, Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, stated in an internal presentation that Copilot's answer engine would \"hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.\" Internal data indicated that the engine caused click-through rates for The New York Times search results to plummet by 87-93% compared to standard Bing searches. Similarly, for Ziff Davis domains like Eurogamer and IGN, click-through rates dropped between 51% and 94%. Hecht referred to this \"doom loop\" - where AI scrapes written content for economic value and then repackages it into easily accessible AI answers, threatening the economic foundations of its suppliers. Notably, when OpenAI researcher Nick Ryder suggested a way to bypass The New York Times paywall to scrape its content, OpenAI president Greg Brockman responded with a casual \"ah nice.\" OpenAI's internal documents portray Brockman as stating that LLMs are \"very good at any news task.\" In a January 2023 memo, Hecht called this situation \"the largest theft of labor in human history.\" The defense for this behavior often cited falls under fair use. However, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified under oath in a deposition earlier this year that he would have required OpenAI to retrain its models if he had known about their use of paywalled information.",
  "summary": "Copilot's answer engine allegedly caused the New York Times' click-through rate to plummet by figures up to 93%.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}