A newly unsealed, fully unredacted motion in the ongoing case between The New York Times, OpenAI and Microsoft quotes two of the defendants' own executives making the plaintiff's argument for it. Brent Hecht, Microsoft's director of applied research, is quoted describing the development of AI as "the largest theft of labor in human history." Greg Brockman, OpenAI's co-founder and president, is quoted calling generative AI an "existential threat" to publishers. The Times' lawyers assembled a section of their filing out of those statements — the claim being that the foundation of the AI industry was built on an enormous volume of intellectual property used without permission.
The filing's own formulation is that training the models required, in the executives' words, "a staggering theft of unprecedented scale." It sits alongside the Times' central accusation: that both labs copied "millions of the plaintiffs' copyrighted articles" wholesale and without permission, in order to build commercial products capable of replacing the original publications.
Brockman's contribution is the assessment that such systems already produce substitute products to a significant degree, and that the capability will strengthen as the models improve.
The Times' lawyers argue that these admissions dismantle any claim of fair use. According to the documents, Hecht agrees with them. The motion states that the same Microsoft executive acknowledged that if the defendants win on that defense, it would effectively turn the idea of fair use into a mockery.
The case began in 2023, when the Times accused the two labs not only of harvesting its original news material but of using that material to train products that compete with traditional media. As Axios recently reported, it is nowhere near finished. The presiding judge still has to decide whether the dispute can go to a jury, a question expected to be settled by 2027.
Of the two quotes, Hecht's is the one that will travel and Brockman's is the one that does the legal work. "The largest theft of labor in human history" is a judgement about an industry, delivered by someone whose job is research rather than law. Brockman's remark is a claim about a market: that the systems already substitute for what publishers produce, and will do so better. That is the terrain on which a fair-use defense either holds or collapses, and it is being described by the president of one of the defendants.
Two things should temper how this gets read. These are not confessions; they are statements pulled into an adversarial filing by the side that benefits from them, and what has been reported gives no setting for either remark — no indication of whether they were made in an email, a talk, or a deposition. Microsoft will argue about that context, and it is entitled to. But the context argument is precisely why the jury question is the real news here. A judge weighing fair use considers factors. A jury hears a defendant's own director of applied research call the business the largest theft of labor in human history, and the factors recede.
Which leaves the calendar as the least discussed fact in the story. A complaint filed in 2023 may not reach a decision on whether it can be heard by a jury until 2027. By then the training at issue will concern models several generations obsolete, and the substitution Brockman described will have finished happening. What is being litigated is no longer whether publishers get replaced. It is what the replacement costs, billed in arrears.