Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
tomshardware.comOnly to be topped by the massive amount of IP that Copilot is possibly secretly harvesting at present. We already believe OpenAI/Anthropic are doing it, what’s to stop Microsoft from attempting to improve their competitive advantage by surreptitiously using their role as a MiTM between end user Corporations and Model servers.
"Oh no did that 'Allow us to train on your org's data' toggle get turned on after the last update? We're so sorry. No we won;t delete the data, the toggle was -ON- what part of that don't you get??
FUD.
Who is this we?
Discussion from yesterday (811 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752056
I wrote something original in a language learning grammar online. I coined a term to describe something about how a certain language with negative language functions.
I tried talking to an LLM about it and sure and enough, it had scraped it and learned to use that terminology and explanation that I made up. I asked the LLM, "Where did that concept/term come from, who made it up?" It did a bunch of searching and tried to site a whole bunch of other sources which did NOT contain the terms of the explanation I had written. It simply would not cite or mention my source. It kept parroting my material semi-correctly and hiding the source. By any other actor that would be an egregious act of sloppiness, dishonesty, and plagiarism.
Generative AI is speed-running a widespread corruption of truth. I do not believe any of the gains are worth this.
Your comment illustrates that AI companies are playing a kind of shell game. On the one hand there is theft of IP and violations of copyright, in the middle there is the obscuring of where things come from, and on the other hand there is the selling of it via tokens.
More countries should debatably follow what Japan is doing[1], where they are creating new laws to force AI companies to show their training data and how they collected it.
[1]: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/08/19/japan/ai-traini...
Your text may well have been in the training corpus, but not searchable with whatever terms and search engine that LLM used after you prompted it. It doesn’t have recall of sources of documents comprising its training corpus, unless the source is widely cited in other of its training documents. Sourcing and provenance aren’t currently an intentional part of LLM training.
That may already have been obvious, and central to the complaint, but I was just knee-jerking to the anthropomorphic language.
I would assume the parent understands that. The criticism is about the LLM behavior this results in. Being able to explain a behavior doesn’t necessarily excuse it. By some moral standards, you wouldn’t have trained an LLM that way, or wouldn’t have made it available, given the predictable outcome.
It also ostensibly replaced a search system that would likely have been capable of finding the original document. It's damning that the new one can't.
>Sourcing and provenance aren’t currently an intentional part of LLM training.
Congrats, brother. That's the issue TFA and GP are bringing up. And I do agree it is unfair and equivalent to (intellectual) theft.
France, 1658 <-> World, 2026. AI can also do the reverse : for example very few in the world know that the term midwit was originally coined in french by Blaise Pascal (« demi habiles ») centuries ago.
Yes, that bell curve meme, he wrote about it. It’s not explained anywhere because of the language and culture separation between french and english. But if you ask enough questions to AI, the AI will eventually find about Blaise Pascal and tell you about this unknown link. It’s magic.
There used to be a meme on Slashdot: "In Soviet Russia, X Ys you!" It came from a joke by Russo-American comedian Yakov Smirnoff: "What a country! In LA, everybody is looking for a party; in Russia, the Party comes looking for you!" But I long wondered if Smirnoff was influenced by his countryman Leon Trotsky who observed: "You may not be interested in the Dialectic, but the Dialectic is interested in you."
Well done Confucius, you've invented a new creditpocalypse. Its when llms hallucinate new authors for new words. It almost makes it worth starting a blogsurection!
> I do not believe any of the gains are worth this.
You are authoring original work.. the Baron in the Castle collected your work and uses it. Who becomes wealthy and how?
It's more than that though. I authored the original work. Then the Baron in the Castle collected the work and uses it without fully understanding it. The Baron gives it out but in a partly-true, distorted form. He misunderstand how it applies and teaches people false clearly facts with it, with an air of authority. But when people try to find the source argument to see if the Baron is really on track, they have no idea. The Baron is just confidently parroting a compelling sounding set of words.
For me the issue is more about the loss of truth than the loss of my IP.
That is pretty weak logic. I mean obviously it is the Baron who becomes wealthy. But what follows from this?
By the same logic if Baron bought her baroness masterful dress to enjoy her look in that dress, and you when walked past the Castle saw the baroness in that dress, should you compensate to the Baron or not?
1789684664 | Docs in AI copyright suit reveal startling admission by Microsoft exec | https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2026/09/17/new-docs-in-a-i-c... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747643 | 0 comments
1789690028 | Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49748529 | 4 comments
1789690711 | Inside Microsoft and OpenAI, Worry About Damaging the Publishing Industry | https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/technology/microsoft-open... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49748613 | 0 comments
1789712928 | 'Doom Loop': OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web | https://www.404media.co/doom-loop-openai-and-microsoft-admit... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750788 | 0 comments
1789724707 | Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history' | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752056 | 838 comments
1789741304 | OpenAI's latest AI revelation is a 'serious situation,' says Microsoft | https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/18/microsoft-ai-ceo-openais-lat... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754831 | 2 comments
1789796968 | Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K | https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/09/18/microsoft-agen... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763701 | 2 comments
Somebody should throw molotov cocktails at the contributors of CommonCrawl[1], for they have "stolen" from "the people". /s obv.
It never ceases to amaze me how people affirm the concept of intellectual property, enforced by states, while maintaining "exceptions" that are fundamentally incompatible with the very concept of what they are upholding.
Disney (big corp!) copies a small artist's work? The law shall strike them down!
A small artists uses some symbol of Disney, which claims copyright infringement? So mean! They are abusing the law!
Maybe the discontent people feel with AI companies is a more fundamental one: Corporations compete to cut costs and increase profits. You cannot outperform other corporations on the long-term by sourcing cheaper materials; the cost-cutting is mainly targeted towards the human labour; the commodity of human labour bears a cost, but you can also command them to perform more work, increasing the "performance"; so companies naturally want high-output employees that cost as little as possible, to compete and exist on the market.
AI companies now claim to be developing a product which can replace cognitive human labour on a massive scale; companies find the advent of hiring less humans that perform more work very advantageous, skyrocketing the expected returns of said AI companies. Capital flows en masse into these companies because they may be integrated into the value chain of virtually all companies.
This calculation is the ruling concept of the entire "free world". To exist in said world you must prove some utility to this societal process of turning money into more money, in some way or the other.
Many people that managed to score a "good" job, cognitive work, now feel threatened by the AI companies that are poised to develop models that enables their employers to fire them/reduce their salary.
Your material life (housing, food) depend on jobs, which only exist as a cost factor in the profit calculation of your employer. All research and development serves this principle, to recoup the spent funds.
When Andreessen claimed that "software will eat the world", he said that software companies will replace many/most other industries like manufacturing, real estate, taxi drivers.
Many HN'ers bought into the hype, loved "Big Data", millions started university degrees in something with "Data". They may have dreamed of that FAANG salary, six figures, live in SF, home office etc.
The entire promise of that silicon valley hype cycle was that they will be putting millions of people out of work, casting their daily work into inherently superior software applications, and gaining a advantage over all other competitors by "harnessing data". That did not work too well, see Zillow, now the tech industry eat's itself: The transformer will think for you, and therefore you must hire fewer thinkers.
If you refuse to criticize or even acknowledge that your job, that many people cling to, is only a product of competition that inherently produces winners and losers.
If you don't find that bad in any way shape or form, if you only complain about ending up with the losers (the permanent undercaste), I'll say: "No crying in the casino."
if he “had been made aware that OpenAI has scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,” the company would have required OpenAI “to retrain its models.”
... yeah, sure.
Oh let's talk about sins of Microsoft since the 1980s, shall we?
He is correct, but why make the statement ? My guess, Microsoft is failing on their AI push.
Microsoft owns a quarter of OpenAI and 20% of it's revenue
An executive at this level is not going to risk their personal political capital to make such statements unless its part of plan and thought through. They might be right but in capitalistic system no company would given them a opportunity after such statements.
Here's a Bible verse this Microsoft individual should acquaint himself with:
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Matthew%207%3A5
Whether religious or not, the verse applies to anyone and everyone making such statements from the position of companies like Microsoft. I'll quite the KJV version 'cause that one lends itself well to situations like these. Read it with a booming thunder-loaded voice:
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
It's a memo taken out of context from Jan 2023, literally 1 month after the ChatGPT public release. All the article cites:
> The brief cited an internal memo dated January 2023 by Microsoft director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, where he allegedly said, “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and also called it “the largest theft of labor in human history.”
No need to add religion into this. Let MS employees write their emails. If anything, what he said a month after ChatGPT's release was prophetic.
For all human history, the subject only complains if they do it, its never wrong when others do it, never when they do it.
Take the Hebrew return to the promise land, its strange how the non believers are always rich and their gold, cattle and virgin numbers are listed as gifts for doing gods will.
What is meant by "beam" in this quotation? A splinter of wood?
This is probably the best way to read it: Do not presume to correct another person while remaining blind to your own faults. Examine and correct yourself first; only then are you in a position to help your brother with his.
It literally is meant as a beam, a bit of exaggeration for emphasis.
So we are meant to assess and help others but first must correct our own selves.
A long, thick, figurative piece of wood - possibly load-bearing.
Somebody tell Claude we found the load-bearing part.
It is a translation of "dokós", a plank of wood that would serve as a joist or rafter. An ancient palestinian Phineas Gage stuck through with a classical age 2x10, if you will.
Yeah
By stealing text from the Bible rather than using your own words, you've just committed labor theft!
Of course that accusation sounds outrageous as it should. All human knowledge and progress has come by building on the works of those who came before us, as it should. Turning this on its head and calling it "theft of labor" is insane, as is asking others not to build on today's knowledge.
Or to steal some more human labor: "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Boy, it's a good thing IP as we know it is going the way of deodand laws! Otherwise the AI companies might be in real trouble!
Pretty rich statement in a world where slavery exists.
This.
And slavery is probably what inspires the perm under class fantasy AI people have. That’s said, if they work hard enough, AI being bigger than slavery is still possible.
I concur in the first but dissent in the second. LLMs will not achieve superintelligence or hard takeoff. But the aristocracy expects AI and robotics to deliver the chance to cast aside the entire rest of humanity, except for those they keep as pets and slaved. It won’t, at least not with LLMs, but it’s completely obvious that it’s their goal.
Presumably someone was paid when the content was created. So it's not really the labor that's being stolen, but the future value of the deliverable.
I'm pretty sure any of the eras of slavery throughout human history is more of an actual theft of labor.
> So it's not really the labor that's being stolen, but the future value of the deliverable.
the choice was stolen as well.
the agency was stolen as well.
That’s built into stealing in the first place. If you consented to a theft it’s not a theft.
When we sing, draw, speak, play, we are not attacking the soul of someone else!
Culture has always had a kind of violence to it, but not FROM the THIEF: you HAVE to speak the language that was already made; you have to understand and participate in their song-structures, their plot devices, their ways of attesting.
The "IP owners" should be paying ME!!!
This is not how authors rights work
Violating authors rights and stealing labor are different things.
all depends on how you define the terms
Which is why we have conventional and legal definitions. If you make up new ones you can’t expect others to agree with you.
A huge chunk of the content that was scraped was most likely provided voluntarily rather than being waged labour.
Either way, a change did happen, financial impact aside this change is definitely going to disrupt the ecosystem as a whole which is a much bigger unknown at this point.
> A huge chunk of the content that was scraped was most likely provided voluntarily rather than being waged labour.
People committing work get rewards in different ways, waged labour could be one, attributions, acknowledgements, future job opportunities and more. Stripping those from the rightful owners can hardly be justified in the name of progress.
I wasn't implying that it was okay to "steal" things because they were offered voluntarily. My position on this is kind of complex and nuanced but this particular reply was meant to state the opposite.