Technology
By Sydney TheCMO
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Nadella Testimony and the Paywall Problem. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that any use of paywalled content should be licensed.
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ChatGPT Team Saw Publishers as Collateral Damage. Nick Turley, who led the ChatGPT team at OpenAI, was blunt about it internally.
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The Fair Use Defense and What's at Stake. Both Microsoft and OpenAI are leaning hard on fair use.
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Unsealed court documents dropped a bombshell. Microsoft employees, in internal memos, questioned whether OpenAI's use of news articles amounted to "the largest theft of labor in…
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The core allegation is pretty straightforward: Microsoft and OpenAI used paywalled content to train AI models without authorization.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that any use of paywalled content should be licensed. He went further, saying that if he had known about OpenAI's practices, he would have…
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But Hecht's memos still exist. And they still said what they said. One of them flagged concerns about AI models potentially "destroying their supply chains" — meaning the very…
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OpenAI's own staff weren't exactly quiet about it either. Internal conversations showed employees discussing techniques to get around the New York Times paywall.
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Nick Turley, who led the ChatGPT team at OpenAI, was blunt about it internally. He described AI products as an "existential threat" to publishers and flagged that these products…
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And the traffic argument? Basically gutted. An internal OpenAI memo acknowledged that AI chatbots probably won't drive users back to news sites even when source links are…
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Jack Clark, who was OpenAI's policy director before leaving to co-found Anthropic, wrote a memo in 2020 warning company leaders about the broader societal fallout from AI.
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Both Microsoft and OpenAI are leaning hard on fair use. Their argument is that training AI on news articles transforms the original works into something new and distinct — and…
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The New York Times declined to comment. OpenAI didn't respond to requests for comment either.
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The case has real stakes beyond just these two companies. Publishers across the industry have been wrestling with how to handle AI systems scraping their content, and the legal…
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