Microsoft Exec: AI Scraping Is History's Biggest Labor Theft

The phrase came from inside the house. Newly unsealed court filings reveal that a senior Microsoft executive privately described OpenAI's data scraping practices as "the largest theft of labor in human history" — a characterisation made even as Microsoft was simultaneously participating in the same conduct, according to TechCrunch.

The unredacted documents, filed as part of ongoing litigation involving The New York Times, show that both companies scraped paywalled content, built training datasets from it, and generated internal warnings that the practice would expose them to significant legal liability. The public partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI has always been presented as a clean story of investment and innovation. The internal record is considerably less flattering.

What the filings expose is not merely copyright infringement at scale — it is a documented case of one party privately condemning behaviour it was simultaneously engaged in. That is not a legal defense. It is the opposite of one.

Geoffrey Hinton, the figure the industry calls the Godfather of AI, told Congress this week it may have roughly one year to implement meaningful regulation before oversight becomes structurally impossible. The timing of these filings adds weight to that warning: the gap between what AI companies say publicly and what they document privately is now a matter of court record.

The next move belongs to publishers, regulators, and any jurisdiction — including Malta's — with content licensing frameworks currently being drafted.

One move tomorrow: If your business produces original content, document its creation date and metadata now. That record becomes your claim when licensing negotiations arrive.