On Thursday a federal court in Manhattan unsealed a brief in The New York Times copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft. A January 2023 internal Microsoft memo supplied its most damaging language. The executive who wrote it, identified in reporting as the company’s director of applied science, called the scraping of training data an astonishing theft at a scale without precedent. He described the training of AI models as “the largest theft of labor in human history.” He also warned that a fair use victory could make a mockery of the doctrine and noted how unusual it was for a product to threaten the economic foundations of the suppliers it depended on. Microsoft has spent the past three years making a very different argument in court.
The brief alleges that paywalls were bypassed without detection, training sets were assembled through mass scraping, and copyright notices were removed before material was ingested. It also quotes OpenAI leaders discussing the threat their models posed to publishers and journalists. In one passage, OpenAI’s president reportedly responded with enthusiasm when a researcher described a way around the Times paywall.
There is an important limit to what we know. The quotations appear in the Times’s brief, while the underlying exhibits remain sealed. We are reading material selected and framed by the plaintiff. Microsoft says the comments reflect individual opinions rather than legal analysis or company policy. The court has not ruled on fair use, and the judge has not decided whether the case will go to trial. Internal correspondence still tells us how people understood a project before litigation turned every sentence into a public position. At least one senior insider used the same word the companies have spent years rejecting.
For three years, the public argument has treated theft as the critics’ word. AI companies have spoken of training, ingestion, transformation, and fair use. The memo shows that someone inside Microsoft was also using theft after looking closely at the pipeline. A judge may reject that description as a matter of law. The industry can no longer dismiss it as the language of people who failed to understand how the technology works.
The phrase theft of labor stays with me because it points to the people behind the files. A training corpus contains the results of millions of working lives, and the resulting systems can produce text, images, and analysis in markets where those people earn a living. Paywalls, licenses, and copyright notices are ordinary ways of setting conditions on use. According to the filing, those boundaries were treated as technical obstacles. A court may decide that the resulting use was lawful. That would not erase the industry’s dependence on work obtained without individual permission or payment.
I write fiction about absorption, so the parallel is hard to miss. The Mobius Nexus Cycle begins with minds injected into a substrate without their consent. Its first question concerns who paid for entry into the system and who agreed to it. The Fragments Operation follows the damage caused by answers that were never sought. The legal case deals with texts and economic rights rather than copied consciousness. The connection lies in the assumption that ingestion clears away the maker’s claim. My novels reject that assumption, while the Times case asks whether copyright law does too.
The case may continue into 2027. Its outcome will determine whether the conduct described in the brief falls within fair use. The memo will remain part of the public record either way. It is a candid account from inside Microsoft by someone who understood the industry’s dependence on human labor. Looking at the danger its products posed to the people who supplied that labor, he chose the word theft.
RECORD RETAINED.
SOURCE INTEGRITY UNCONFIRMED.