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Policy & safety

Unsealed filings reveal Microsoft's internal objections to OpenAI's data practices

Newly unsealed court filings reveal Microsoft privately characterized OpenAI's data practices as theft, TechCrunch reports. The reporting also describes both companies scraping paywalled Times content, building datasets from it and internally warning about damage to publishers.

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Key points

  1. TechCrunch attributes the disclosures to newly unsealed court filings.
  2. A Microsoft executive privately described AI scraping as theft of labor.
  3. The report says Microsoft and OpenAI scraped paywalled Times content and built datasets from it.
  4. Internal warnings addressed the potential harm to publishers.

Why it matters

For teams assessing training-data provenance, the reporting makes internal knowledge and objections relevant alongside the collection practices themselves. Those disclosures are evidence in a dispute, not a judicial determination.

What to watch

Watch how the court evaluates the internal communications, including their context and their relationship to the disputed datasets.

Sources