By Emma Whitford and Mike Swift ( September 17, 2026, 22:26 GMT | Comment) -- Newly unsealed filings quote OpenAI and Microsoft employees and executives acknowledging that the unlicensed use of millions of news articles published by the New York Times and other news organizations to train AI chatbots could represent the “largest theft of labor in human history," and could initiate a "doom loop" that threatens the AI companies' “content supply chain.” Microsoft said the internal documents reflect individual views, not legal conclusions, and it said its AI chatbot Copilot’s transformative uses do not substitute for journalism.OpenAI executive Nick Turley wrote that publishers face an “existential threat” from his company’s chatbots, which are “largely substitutive, period,” according to freshly unredacted quotes in closely-watched federal copyright litigation by news outlets arguing that ChatGPT is an illegal market substitute for their content. ...
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