Microsoft director called AI scraping 'largest theft of labor in history' in NYT copyright case filings

What the filings show

The New York Times has asked the court handling its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for summary judgment, filing a legal brief built on the defendants' own statements and documents. According to Tom's Hardware, the material includes testimony from a Microsoft director who described AI scraping as "the largest theft of labor in human history."

The same report points to another remark attributed to OpenAI's head: that ChatGPT represents an "existential threat" to publishers. Tom's Hardware characterizes both statements as potentially damaging admissions from senior figures at the two companies — remarks that are public only because the Times quoted them in its filing.

A case approaching its third year

The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement in late 2023, and the dispute remains unresolved almost three years on. The new brief marks an escalation: a summary judgment motion asks the court to resolve the case on the existing record rather than send it to a full trial. Motions of this kind generally argue that the material facts are not in dispute and that the law alone should decide the outcome, which makes the stakes high for whichever side the court favors.

Sealed records, public quotations

According to 404 Media, whose reporting Tom's Hardware draws on, the statements and documents behind the Times' brief remain sealed or redacted at the request of both OpenAI and Microsoft. That creates an unusual situation: the accusations and the quotations are now part of the public record through the newspaper's filing, while the fuller context — who said what, in what setting, and with what surrounding discussion — stays hidden unless the court orders the material unsealed.

Neither the identity of the Microsoft director nor the precise circumstances of the "existential threat" comment are clear from the public reporting, since the underlying documents remain restricted.

Why it matters

The Times' suit is one of the most consequential copyright fights of the AI era, and a ruling on summary judgment could end it without a trial. A grant of the motion would hand publishers a landmark win over how AI companies obtain and use their content; a denial would push the case toward a courtroom showdown whose outcome could reshape scraping and training practices across the industry.

The reported statements matter beyond their rhetorical force. The AI industry's legal defense in copyright cases rests heavily on the argument that harvesting content from the web to build and operate models is transformative and lawful. Descriptions of that harvesting as a historic theft of labor — or of the resulting product as an existential threat to the publishers supplying the data — come from the defendants' own leadership and cut against that narrative, giving the Times potent material for its brief.

The sealing dispute raises a transparency question of its own: documents described as central to a case with industry-wide consequences are being litigated largely out of public view, at the request of the companies whose conduct is under scrutiny.