Brief
Unredacted NYT filings quote a Microsoft exec calling AI scraping theft
TechCrunch reports newly unsealed material in the Times v. OpenAI case, a week after the US Justice Department backed OpenAI’s fair-use argument.
Why it matters. The docket now holds both a national-security fair-use brief and internal language that sounds like the opposite. Authors in the Anthropic class should watch this case, not spend a projected cheque.
On 17 September TechCrunch reported newly unredacted information in The New York Times’ copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The Times’ brief, as relayed there, quotes a Microsoft executive describing AI scraping as “the largest theft of labor in human history,” and says mid-training datasets held more than 91,000 copies of Times, Daily News, and Center for Investigative Reporting works. Much of the underlying exhibits remain sealed; treat the quotes as the Times’ filing, not as a verdict.
That drop landed two weeks after the Justice Department told the same Manhattan court, on 2 September, that training on Times articles was fair use and a national-security interest. Dale Roberts also noted the DOJ brief in his 17 September roundup. No court has ruled. If you believed the Anthropic settlement was the last word on training-data liability, it is not.