Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' in NYT case

September 18, 2026 at 03:20 AM2 min

This digest was compiled by AI from multiple sources — links to the originals are below.

Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht described AI scraping as an 'astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' in unredacted court filings from the New York Times copyright case against Microsoft and OpenAI. Hecht also called scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history' in a January 2023 memo. Microsoft's internal research reportedly found Copilot could reduce click-throughs to The New York Times by up to 93% compared with Bing.

Key Facts

Brent Hecht, Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, called AI scraping an 'astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' in unredacted court filings.
Hecht described scraping as 'the largest theft of labor in human history' in a January 2023 memo.
Microsoft's internal research reportedly found Copilot could reduce click-throughs to The New York Times by up to 93% compared with Bing.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admitted that had he known OpenAI was scraping paywalled data, he would have required OpenAI to retrain its models excluding that data.
OpenAI allegedly removed copyright notices from material before it entered training datasets so models would not regenerate those notices.

Hecht's Statements

In court documents unredacted Thursday, lawyers for The New York Times cited Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht saying that 'millions of people around the world will soon consider large models hoovering up all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.' Hecht added that 'almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.' In an earlier January 2023 memo, Hecht went further, describing scraping as 'the largest theft of labor in human history.' Microsoft's filing framed Hecht as 'someone on the payroll to play a contrarian,' according to The Orlando Sentinel.

Internal Research and Admissions

Microsoft's internal research reportedly found that Copilot could reduce click-throughs to The New York Times by as much as 93% compared with its own conventional search engine, Bing. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admitted that had he known OpenAI was scraping data found behind paywalls, he would have exercised Microsoft's rights to require OpenAI to retrain its models, excluding this protected data. OpenAI allegedly removed copyright notices from material before it entered the large datasets so that the models wouldn't re-generate those copyright notices for users.