The New York Times has escalated its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement on a massive scale. According to court filings, OpenAI copied millions of copyrighted articles to build technology worth "gazillions," despite internal warnings about an "existential threat" to publishers. The Times alleges OpenAI used deceptive techniques to bypass paywalls, including a claimed incident where Greg Brockman responded "ah nice" upon learning of a hack to circumvent the NY Times paywall.

Lawyers argue the defendants knowingly trained AI models on paywalled content, aware the technology would become increasingly substitutive. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified he would have forced model retraining if aware of paywall scraping. The filing cites internal quotes from OpenAI's ChatGPT head warning publishers of threat and Microsoft's Brent Hecht calling training on copyrighted content "an astonishing theft." With discovery ongoing, the case hinges on whether using public content constitutes fair use or pirating materials to train competing AI products.