Microsoft and OpenAI workers privately shared concerns that their use of millions of news articles to develop AI bots could represent the “largest theft of labor in human history,” according to newly unsealed court docs.

One internal Microsoft document from 2023 warned that millions of people would consider LLMs  “hoovering up” their work to be “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” according to legal filings revealed as part of the New York Times’ case against the two firms.

OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, meanwhile, acknowledged that the company’s products pose an “existential threat” to publishers, according to another internal document.

But publicly, Microsoft and OpenAI have defended their scraping of news stories off the internet, saying they did not violate copyright rules because the articles were turned into completely new content by their AI models.