Lawyers for the New York Times have released unredacted court filings in which Microsoft and OpenAI executives admit that large language models (LLMs) are built on stolen content, representing a massive theft of labor. These statements揭露了人工智能公司在训练大型语言模型时侵犯版权和剥削创作者的行为，同时承认这些技术正在通过所谓的“毁灭循环”破坏整个互联网生态系统和相关产业的商业模式。文档中提到，“AI内容策略已经开始了一个‘毁灭循环’”，这个循环不仅损害了其自身产品的性能，也对整个网络造成了伤害。
Written locally by qwen2.5:14b on 2026-09-18,
using this article's own text rather than the other coverage of the
same event (that is the story summary below).
Story summary
Microsoft and OpenAI executives admitted in unsealed court filings that large language models (LLMs) are predatory and built on the theft of content from human creators. An internal Microsoft document cited a "doom loop" where AI products steal content, cannibalize clicks from original sources, harming their business models. The New York Times vs OpenAI lawsuit revealed executives stating LLMs threaten to hoover up all work without compensation, leading critics to call it the largest theft of labor in history. This admission undermines Microsoft and OpenAI’s defense that AI training is fair use as it transforms copyrighted material into new content without competing with journalism. Quotes from Greg Brockman, Satya Nadella, and others indicate LLMs are substitutive for journalism, posing an existential threat to publishers.
Written for “LLMs and Copyright Issues” on 2026-09-18,
grounded in this article and the 1 other(s) covering the same event.
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Leaning score -0.65 for article 17274 (high confidence, 1 verified quote) · logged 2026-09-18
Executives working on AI at Microsoft and OpenAI admitted what its critics have been saying all along: Large language models are predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.”
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executive → work → history
An internal Microsoft document said generative AI products have created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.”
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that → say → web
Those statements and a series of other mask-off moments feature heavily in an unredacted court filing that was unsealed Thursday in the behemoth New York Times vs OpenAI copyright lawsuit that has been winding its way through the court system for years.
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that → mask → years
In a filing asking for summary judgment (basically, a filing with the court asking it to rule), lawyers for the New York Times laid out a series of admissions made by Microsoft and OpenAI executives in documents and depositions that until now had remained either sealed or redacted at the request of Microsoft and OpenAI.
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that → ask → Microsoft
It’s easy to see why the AI companies wanted to hide this from the public.
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companies → ’ → public
The statements, taken together, are some of the most damning indictments of the ways LLMs were trained, how they worked, and the immediate threat they pose to human labor.
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they → take → labor
It is a reminder that even as AI becomes more powerful and companies try to shift the narrative to the supposed existential risk of “superintelligent” AI, the tools they have already built were created by stealing from human creativity and labor and are by definition existential threats to the human labor market.
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they → become → market
“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” an internal Microsoft document cited in the case read, adding “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.”
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they → consider → use
The filing was written by lawyers for the New York Times but is largely comprised of statements and interviews with big tech executives that admit both that LLMs are largely trained on stolen content, that they represent an existential risk for the human writers, artists, and media companies that they stole from, and that their products have started a “doom loop” that is eating the web and destroying the businesses that these companies stole from.
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companies → write → that
The unredacted filing was found by Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, a trade organization that represents digital media companies.
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that → find → companies
Kint has been closely following and posting about massive AI copyright lawsuits.
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Kint → follow → lawsuits
The court filing cites an internal Microsoft document that found that AI products steal from human content creators, then cannibalize clicks from the people and websites they’ve stolen from, thereby destroying their business models.
“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time: It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain,’” the document said.
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document → cite → chain
Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, testified under oath that after ripping content from the New York Times and other news sites, clicks to those news sites fully cratered, falling by more than 90 percent on Bing.
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clicks → include → Bing
Documents obtained during the court proceedings found that OpenAI created “a hack to get around nytimes paywall,” to which OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman said “ah, nice.”
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Brockman → obtain → which
Microsoft executive Brent Hecht wrote that LLMs steal content “without ways of distributing economic value down the supply chain, [which] necessarily threatens the economic stability of those who create the content.”
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who → write → content
OpenAI’s policy director Jack Clark wrote that the company was “creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society” and Microsoft, in a policy document, wrote that generative AI could “significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained […] LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain.”
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that → write → chain
OpenAI called itself an “existential threat” to news publishers, and an OpenAI software engineer testified that “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.”
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users → call → links
None of this is at all surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to the development of generative artificial intelligence, but the document, taken in whole, is a real they-admit-it situation.
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they → pay → it
OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s lawyers have been trying to argue that their model training is fair use and transformative under copyright law and that they are building something that is fundamentally different from the human labor that it was trained on.
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it → try → that
But internally, these executives know that what they have built has been built on stolen content and that the products they’ve made are cannibalizing the sources they’ve stolen from and destroying the internet as we know it.
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we → know → it
The Aporia
