Executive Summary
- •Unsealed NYT lawsuit filings reveal Microsoft and OpenAI executives privately referred to their AI data scraping as theft and an existential threat to publishers.
- •Microsoft's internal data showed its Copilot engine caused click-through rates for The New York Times to drop as much as 93%.
- •The documented evidence of deliberate paywall circumvention and copyright stripping severely undermines the companies' fair-use legal defense.
Community Sentiment
Key Developments & Data
Unredacted filings in the copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times reveal Microsoft and OpenAI executives privately acknowledged their AI training practices as "theft."
Internal Microsoft data from January 2024 shows its Copilot engine caused NYT click-through rates to drop by up to 93% compared to traditional Bing search.
OpenAI’s mid-training datasets contain more than 91,692 copies of works from publishers like NYT, while a Common Crawl dataset included over 2 million documents strictly from nytimes-com.
The filings allege the companies built a training dataset called Project Mango containing copies of at least 160,903 unique works, with staff actively bypassing paywalls and deliberately stripping copyright notices before models processed the data.
"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.’" — Brent Hecht
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Zubiqo Strategic Assessment
Primary Impact
Digital publishers and legacy news media organizations facing terminal web traffic declines.
Strategic Shift
The legal transition from implicit 'fair use' scraping arguments to documented, deliberate substitution of the original data source.
The Ripple Effect
Publishers will use these unredacted metrics to force massive licensing settlements or injunctions before courts formally rule on the fair use doctrine.
This intelligence assessment is generated by Zubiqo's AI for informational purposes only.
