New York: Newly unsealed documents in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit reveal that Microsoft scientist Brent Hecht warned that large scale AI data collection was perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history”.

The January 2023 internal warning came from a director of applied science. It was an employee’s assessment, rather than a court finding or Microsoft’s admission that its practices were illegal.

The newspaper sued Microsoft and OpenAI in December 2023, alleging that their systems used its journalism without permission and could produce competing versions of that work. The companies have defended their use of material under US fair use principles.

Microsoft says Hecht’s views did not represent company policy. The filings nevertheless expose an internal concern with wider consequences: AI products depend on work created by people and institutions whose income those same products may undermine.

The dispute therefore reaches beyond whether a chatbot copies particular passages. It also concerns the economic arrangements that will sustain original reporting and other creative work as AI systems become substitutes for visiting their sources.