Newly unsealed court filings in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft say senior staff understood that scraping news websites to train large language models could damage or destroy publishers, yet the practice continued. Microsoft applied-science director Brent Hecht described a potential "doom loop" in which declining news revenues would weaken both AI models and the broader web. The filings also contain statements from OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella describing AI products as substitutes for publisher websites. Publishers argue that market substitution, copied excerpts, paywall circumvention and unlicensed datasets undermine the companies’ fair-use defense. The lawsuit, filed in 2023, is expected to proceed toward trial.