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# Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

529 points · 434 comments

[Full discussion](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752056>)

[Read original](<https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-scraping-the-largest-theft-of-labor-in-human-history-new-unredacted-filings-reveal/>)

Category: [Industry & Society](<https://hacksnap.live/?category=industry-society>)

## Skept-o-meter & Hotness

Skept\-o\-meter: Pending\. Skepticism will appear after analysis\.

53 comments for the summary\.

Peak rank: \#15

Time in Top 10: 0\.0 hours

Hacksnap ranks recent stories first, then orders each group by points\. Peak rank uses all retained observations\. Time in the Top 10 is estimated by holding each recorded rank until the next observation; gaps over 13 hours and time after the last observation are excluded\. Movement between observations is unknown\.

246 recorded rank observations from 2026\-09\-19T18:34:59\.226976\+00:00 to 2026\-10\-10T23:01:00\.95027\+00:00\.

Hotness — latest 168 recorded Hacksnap ranks:

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The filing supplies internal admissions that could complicate a fair use defense, but the comment sample shows the core dispute is less about one quote than about whether large\-scale machine learning is copying, market substitution, or a new form of cultural enclosure—and what remedy should follow\.

## The brief

TechCrunch reports on newly unredacted filings in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft\. The filing quotes Microsoft's Brent Hecht calling AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history' and OpenAI's Nick Turley describing models as an 'existential threat' to publishers\. It alleges paywall circumvention, copyright\-notice stripping, mass scraping, and internal data showing Microsoft's Copilot answer engine cut NYT click\-through rates by as much as 93%\. The article cautions that much of the new material comes from the NYT's brief rather than sealed exhibits, and that fair use remains legally unsettled\.

- A January 2023 internal memo by Microsoft's Brent Hecht called AI scraping 'an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' and 'the largest theft of labor in human history\.'
- OpenAI's Nick Turley described publishers as facing an 'existential threat' from largely substitutive chatbot products, while Greg Brockman called the models 'excellent at news' and Satya Nadella agreed chatbots substitute for visiting the original source\.
- The filing alleges OpenAI and Microsoft bypassed paywalls undetected, mass\-scraped content including from the Bing Index and Common Crawl, and stripped copyright notices from training data\.
- The alleged scale includes more than 91,692 copies of NYT, Daily News, and Center for Investigative Reporting works in OpenAI mid\-training datasets, more than 2 million nytimes\.com documents from a Common Crawl\-derived dataset, and at least 160,903 unique publisher works in a Project Mango dataset\.
- Microsoft data cited in the filing says Copilot's answer engine caused NYT click\-through rates to fall as much as 93% versus traditional Bing search, which Hecht described as a 'doom loop\.'
- The article notes that much of the information comes from the NYT's own brief, the underlying exhibits remain sealed, quotes are presented without context, and courts have generally been favorable to AI companies' fair use arguments\.

## Discussion themes

### The 'theft' label is contested

Some commenters argue scraping publicly accessible pages is copying, not theft, and that the original content remains available; others say scale and substitutive use make machine training different from a human reading a book\.

Sources: [Comment 49752375](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752375>) · [Comment 49752642](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752642>) · [Comment 49752859](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752859>) · [Comment 49753415](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753415>) · [Comment 49753497](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753497>) · [Comment 49752629](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752629>) · [Comment 49753540](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753540>) · [Comment 49752890](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752890>) · [Comment 49752827](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752827>)

### Historical and moral comparisons

Several commenters frame the conduct as historically extreme, comparing it to slavery, colonialism, gulags, or crimes against humanity; others reject that rhetoric as overheated or inapt\.

Sources: [Comment 49752405](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752405>) · [Comment 49752670](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752670>) · [Comment 49752574](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752574>) · [Comment 49752242](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752242>) · [Comment 49752515](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752515>) · [Comment 49752725](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752725>)

### Economic harm versus democratization

Commenters cite lost monetization, sites dying, reduced publishing and discussion, and devalued human skills or jobs; counterarguments say free or cheap models democratize knowledge and that redistribution, not criminalization, is the better remedy\.

Sources: [Comment 49752941](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752941>) · [Comment 49752395](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752395>) · [Comment 49753633](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753633>) · [Comment 49754032](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754032>) · [Comment 49752799](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752799>) · [Comment 49752848](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752848>) · [Comment 49753497](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753497>) · [Comment 49752983](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752983>) · [Comment 49753118](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753118>)

### Intellectual property consistency

A recurring dispute is whether copyright is real and AI training is infringement, or information should be free and model weights should also be free; commenters also note a double standard when platforms sue over their IP while scraping others' content\.

Sources: [Comment 49754448](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754448>) · [Comment 49752876](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752876>) · [Comment 49752684](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752684>) · [Comment 49752751](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752751>) · [Comment 49752603](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752603>) · [Comment 49752643](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752643>) · [Comment 49752617](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752617>)

### Open\-source and copyleft concerns

One thread asks whether LLMs mostly copy permissively licensed or copyleft code and whether commercial LLMs work around copyleft; a reply argues models synthesize solutions like humans rather than copy\-paste\.

Sources: [Comment 49752444](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752444>) · [Comment 49752531](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752531>)

### Regulation and compensation debate

Proposals include licensing marketplaces and royalties, but commenters worry regulation would entrench rich labs, that free local models are not yet broadly competitive, and that taxing or redistributing gains is politically unlikely\.

Sources: [Comment 49752313](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752313>) · [Comment 49753540](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753540>) · [Comment 49752837](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752837>) · [Comment 49752939](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752939>) · [Comment 49752888](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752888>) · [Comment 49752916](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752916>)

## Sources & coverage

AI-generated summary · 2026\-09\-19T08:00:47\.252813\+00:00

Based on 53 of 53 usable stored comments, selected by depth and branch activity. This is a sample of the discussion. Article text may also be shortened.

Generated using deepseek\-ai/DeepSeek\-V4\.1\-Flash. Check the linked sources for full context.