An unnamed Microsoft executive described data scraping for AI training as "the greatest theft of human work in human history," according to internal documents revealed through a lawsuit filed by the New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement.
The leaked files show that internally, the practice was treated as theft. Microsoft staff also viewed AI as a threat to websites and to the jobs of people responsible for producing the data used to train these models. The revelations underscore the tension between AI companies' data collection practices and the creators whose work powers large language models.