New filings in The New York Times‘ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft allege that OpenAI’s president was told about a method for bypassing the newspaper’s paywall and responded with apparent approval. One Microsoft executive commented internally that OpenAI’s scraping of copyrighted material amounted to “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”
The Financial Times reports that the New York Times and other media outlets are seeking billions of dollars in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing the companies infringed copyright by training AI models on publishers’ content without permission. Lawyers for the Times filed new evidence Thursday in a case that turns on whether AI systems built on copyrighted journalism amount to theft or fair use.
The filing alleges that “defendants repeatedly copied millions of . . . copyrighted articles in their entirety without permission to produce substitutive commercial AI products.”
One new detail: OpenAI allegedly used techniques to get around the Times‘ paywall, and Greg Brockman, the company’s co-founder and now its president, knew about it. An employee told Brockman about “a hack to get around NY Times paywall,” the filing says. Brockman’s reported response was “ah nice.”
The filing also cites writing attributed to Brockman from around 2017, in which he described being “deeply motivated by the gazillions” as he considered commercializing OpenAI’s technology.
OpenAI says training its models on publicly available content is fair use, arguing that its large language models transform rather than replicate original material. But the filing quotes OpenAI’s own head of ChatGPT describing AI products as an “existential threat” to publishers, adding that such products “are largely substitutive, period [and] will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”
Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science, is quoted describing the training of large language models on copyrighted content as “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.” He’s also quoted warning that a win for OpenAI and Microsoft would “make a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’” Microsoft’s response: “these comments reflect one employee’s individual perspective, are not a legal analysis.”
Separately, Microsoft’s own data, cited in the filing, shows click-through rates to the underlying content were 83% to 93% lower for users of its AI answer tools than for users of a traditional search engine.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, testified in the case that he “had been made aware that OpenAI had scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall.” He also testified about an agreement letting Microsoft require OpenAI to retrain its models under certain conditions, saying he would have required OpenAI “to retrain its models” over the paywall issue. Microsoft said Nadella’s testimony “spoke to broad principles and changes under way in how people find and consume information” and was not a “conclusion about copyright questions.”
Evan Swarztrauber, principal of technology policy firm CorePoint Strategies, told Breitbart News: “Microsoft and OpenAI’s legal defense is that scraping copyrighted material for training data is “fair use” and not a competitive threat to content creators. In private, their executives admitted the exact opposite: that their conduct is theft that threatens the livelihoods of publishers and other copyright holders.”
AI continues to test every facet of the economy and America’s traditional legal framework for doing business. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the Financial Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.