Internal communications from Microsoft and OpenAI reveal that top staff viewed the scraping of copyrighted content as an existential threat to the news industry. Brent Hecht, Microsoft's director of applied science, wrote in a memo unsealed Thursday that scraping news for AI training was an "astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" and a "complete mockery" of fair use. The filings in a New York Times lawsuit also describe deceptive methods used to bypass paywalls, including a message from OpenAI's Greg Brockman responding "ah nice" to an employee's description of a paywall hack.

Microsoft internal data showed the Copilot AI reduced click-through traffic to some news sites by as much as 93% compared to Bing, a cycle employees termed the "doom loop." Other unsealed documents show staff weighed the cost of purchasing books to train early versions of ChatGPT. Microsoft described Hecht's comments as an individual perspective, while OpenAI's head of ChatGPT characterized AI chatbots as "largely substitutive" and an existential threat to publishers.