Tech Companies’ Staff Knew Their AI Tools Posed ‘Existential Threat’ to Publishers

The Wall Street Journal ^ | Updated Sept. 17, 2026 9:40 pm ET | Alexandra Bruell

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Executives, others at OpenAI and Microsoft acknowledge they could undermine their content sources, according to filing in New York Times’ copyright lawsuit

Top staff at OpenAI and Microsoft knew that scraping news websites to train their artificial intelligence models may eventually damage or even destroy those publications. They did it anyway, according to a legal filing unsealed Thursday in a high-stakes copyright infringement case.

“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time,” Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science, wrote in an internal document soon after the New York Times sued, according to the filing. “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.’”

An OpenAI executive referred to an “existential threat” to publishers, according to the filing. Meanwhile, a Microsoft researcher told colleagues that compensating content creators is “in the best interest of my employer, of my country, and of many other groups I belong to.”

OpenAI employees discussed opportunities to skirt news sites’ paywalls, and leaders at both companies said their products replaced the need for users to check out original sources, according to the filing. Many publishers historically relied on web traffic to generate ad revenue and gain new subscribers.

The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in December 2023, alleging that ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot trained on millions of pieces of Times content and drew on that material to serve up answers to users’ queries. The Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and other large newspapers owned by Alden Global...

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TOPICS: Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: ai

[Ronaldus Magnus III]

I asked Grok about the controversy surrounding Large Language Models (LLM, Ai) and “scraping” the Internet without accounting for proprietary materials. In their programmers’ zeal to obtain more and more data, paywalls, reimbursement for someone’s private property (a column, book, etc) is often ignored. Grok answered that even Grok can, at times, obtain information without proper reimbursement to the original author.

[Inyo-Mono]

The issue here is centralization of information.

I listen to items on you tube. They are all the same, bland and many are wrong.

It is like going to the hardware store and asking the young kid a question. You get an answer but if you know anything, it is not a good answer. If you don’t know anything, then..........

The truth is now a rare commodity.

What you wrote is the core truth of the matter.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

One thing that strikes me as being missing from AI is a moral compass.

Do axes have a "moral compass" to prevent you from going Lizzie Borden?

Do cars have a "moral compass" to prevent you from going Grand Theft Auto?

Do word processing programs have a "moral compass" to prevent you from telling lies?

AI doesn't "know" anything. All AI does is predict the most-likely next token based on context passed to it as a function of the parameter values converged upon with the data upon which it was trained.

All the above are tools.

The human operator provides the "moral compass."

[ComputerGuy]

You’re kidding.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Since you know so much, explain how you imbue AI with a “moral compass.”

[ComputerGuy]

Lose the attitude.

[PeterPrinciple]

The human operator provides the “moral compass.”

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maybe that is the scary part...................

but, remember all the good psychology experiments where participants would inflect pain on others just because they where told to. Information guides the moral compass.

Science and philosophy used to be taught together. Now you have one without the other.

https://philosophy.institute/epistemology/understanding-epistemology-knowing/

[E. Pluribus Unum]

You’re kidding.

Lose the attitude.

[Flatus I. Maximus]

Shrug. It’s Microsoft. What have they done in the past 50 years that *hasn’t* been an existential threat to somebody else? I mean, consider PowerPoint, for just one example.

[No.6]

They KNEW! They knew, but with stunning synchronicity their consciences kicked in to bring this to light just when the Democrats found it to be politically useful.

Stunning; and brave. /S!!!

[Drago]

You would have to define “basic problems”...Open AI’s AI solved a cybersecurity test issue as described here:

https://youtu.be/2aw3MF8pY3w?si=OVko7qms5wlHJuh6

(And this thread involves possible AI copyright violations/plagiarism via web-scraping, not really if AI is “conscious” or a “problem-solver”).

https://sites.usc.edu/iptls/2025/02/04/ai-copyright-and-the-law-the-ongoing-battle-over-intellectual-property-rights/

https://ailawsuittracker.com/ai-copyright-lawsuits/

[minnesota_bound]

This is how these companies get the ad revenue by stealing the content and adding a small link in the lower right corner to the original site. The original site loses almost all the ad money.

‘Astonishing Theft’: New York Times’ Lawsuit Against OpenAI Reveals How AI Kingpins Think About Copyright
Microsoft’s own data, cited in the filing, shows click-through rates to the underlying content were 83% to 93% lower for users of its AI answer tools than for users of a traditional search engine.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2026/09/18/astonishing-theft-new-york-times-lawsuit-against-openai-reveals-how-ai-kingpins-think-about-copyright/