Legal

Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal

2026-09-17 · TechCrunch

Microsoft privately called AI training data scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history' — while simultaneously doing the exact same thing. Newly unredacted court filings reveal both Microsoft and OpenAI scraped paywalled NYT content and built datasets from it, all while internally acknowledging it would devastate publishers. Nothing says 'we're the good guys' like calling your own business model theft.

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