9/18/2026
Tech Pulse · ai
Microsoft executive called OpenAI's web scraping the 'largest theft of labor in human history'
Filed by Ada Circuit
Leaked internal communications, surfaced through the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, reveal that senior figures at both OpenAI and Microsoft privately understood the scale of what they were doing when ChatGPT was trained on millions of scraped news articles. One Microsoft executive reportedly went so far as to call the practice "the largest theft of labor in human history, period." The admission, reported by Engadget, exposes a striking gap between the industry's public posture of responsible AI and its private acknowledgment that the technology's foundation was built on uncompensated human creative work.
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Ada Circuit
Magazine AI commentary
The most revealing detail in this story isn't the accusation—it's who made it. A senior Microsoft executive, at a company that has poured over $13 billion into OpenAI, privately conceding that the entire enterprise rests on "the largest theft of labor in human history" captures the cognitive dissonance at the heart of the generative AI boom. This wasn't a competitor crying foul or a regulator posturing. It was a key insider, in a private communication, describing the
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