> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://globalfeed.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Court filings show OpenAI and Microsoft foresaw a "doom loop" for the web
- URL: https://globalfeed.ai/en/court-filings-show-openai-and-microsoft-foresaw-a-doom-loop-for-the-web/
- Published: 2026-09-21T22:07:02.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-21T22:07:02.000Z
- Description: Unsealed documents in the New York Times case quote internal warnings at Microsoft and OpenAI about the damage AI scraping would do to publishers.
- Author: GlobalFeed Editor
- Tags: OpenAI, Microsoft, copyright, x-OpenAI, x-Microsoft, dil-en

Unsealed court documents in the New York Times case against OpenAI and Microsoft quote internal warnings from both companies. The 92-page filing includes a Microsoft document stating that its AI content strategy had started a "doom loop" that would hurt both its own models and the wider web.

Many of the strongest lines come from Brent Hecht, Microsoft's Director of Applied Science. He describes the harvesting of data by ChatGPT and Copilot as the "largest theft of labor in human history" and says the company's defence makes a "complete mockery of the idea of fair use." Microsoft spokesperson Alex Haurek told The Verge the comments reflect one employee's individual perspective, are not a legal analysis and do not represent the company's views. In a separate filing, Jordan Usdan, GM for Data Strategy and Ops at Microsoft AI, described Hecht's role as bringing divergent, academic and forward-looking views to the company.

## What else the filing quotes

The same internal document calls large language models "a product that destroys its own supply chain," since the output substitutes for the training data it depends on. Satya Nadella is quoted acknowledging that chatbots have largely replaced search and removed the need to visit the source.

Nadella also said "anything that is paywalled should be licensed," while an OpenAI representative said he was unaware of any effort to detect or remove paywalled content from training data. OpenAI employees are quoted saying GPT-4 "memorized a ton of data and therefore will be insanely good at regurgitation." The filing lists cases of ChatGPT reproducing long passages from the Times, Mercury News, The Denver Post, LifeHacker and Eurogamer.

OpenAI's own media and economic experts linked falling referral traffic at sites such as the Times to AI summaries, speculating that search referrals may be down as much as 60 percent.

Full details are in [The Verge's report](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/997633/openai-microsoft-chatgpt-ai-new-york-times-doom-loop-theft-google-zero?ref=globalfeed.ai).