Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal
techcrunch.comRebecca Bellan
Court filings reveal Microsoft executives privately characterized AI training data scraping as "the largest theft of labor in human history" while the company itself participated in scraping paywalled content from major publishers. The documents show internal warnings that such practices would harm news organizations.
Why it mattersThis exposes a contradiction between Microsoft's public positioning on AI ethics and its private data collection practices, directly affecting how AI tool builders and their audiences should evaluate claims about responsible AI development and data sourcing.
From the source: Newly unsealed court filings show Microsoft privately called OpenAI's data practices "theft" while both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from it, and warned internally it would gut publishers.Read at techcrunch.com