Court documents show that Microsoft employees questioned whether the AI scraping system constitutes "the largest labor theft in history."

According to Decrypt, court documents unsealed in the lawsuit between The New York Times and OpenAI and Microsoft show that Microsoft employees discussed whether OpenAI's use of news articles to train its models constituted "the largest labor theft in human history," and could potentially trigger a "doom loop" that leads to a decline in model quality. A 2023 internal Microsoft memo warned that millions of people worldwide would soon view the large model's "consumption" of their works as "an unprecedented and astonishing theft," and stated that large AI models are "products that destroy their own supply chains."

Microsoft stated in the documents that these memos were written by Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht and do not represent the company's views, as his role is to provide "different and asymmetric perspectives." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that "any content behind a paywall should be authorized by those who wish to use it," and stated that if he had known in advance that OpenAI was using paid content for training, he would have exercised Microsoft's rights to demand that the model be retrained.

Additionally, an OpenAI employee had mentioned to President Greg Brockman the construction of "hacker methods" to bypass The New York Times paywall, to which Brockman replied, "Nice." Both OpenAI and Microsoft argue that the relevant training falls under fair use. The case was initiated by The New York Times at the end of 2023, and 11 publishers have since joined the lawsuit.