OpenAI and Microsoft’s own testimony complicates their AI copyright defence

OpenAI and Microsoft executives made private and courtroom statements about AI systems replacing journalism, according to newly public filings reported by Reuters. The remarks give publishers a sharper argument in a case that could help decide whether training AI on millions of news articles counts as fair use.

OpenAI Watch analysis

What happened

Reuters reports that OpenAI president Greg Brockman described large language models as particularly strong at predicting news articles and performing news tasks. Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, was quoted as saying publishers faced an “existential threat” because the products were “largely substitutive” and would become more so as they improved.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella acknowledged under oath that people using chatbots for information could substitute that experience for visiting the underlying website. A Microsoft spokesperson said the comment was consistent with the company’s legal position and concerned broader changes in how people find and consume information, not a concession on copyright liability.

The filing also quotes Microsoft applied-science director Brent Hecht describing the mass collection of people’s work as “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions”. Microsoft said that was an individual perspective, not legal analysis or company policy. OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment, while The New York Times declined to comment.

Why it matters

The dispute is not simply whether AI training is transformative in the abstract. The court will also be weighing evidence about what the companies’ own people believed these systems did to publishers, including whether chatbot answers compete with journalism by reducing visits to original sources.

That does not make the quoted remarks a judicial finding, and it does not prove copyright infringement. It does make the companies’ fair-use argument more awkward: a system can be technologically transformative while still having an economically substitutive effect. Legal neatness, meet the internet.

Our read

This is a meaningful development because the evidence comes from court filings and testimony rather than another round of industry positioning. The strongest point is not that one executive used an incendiary phrase. It is that senior figures appear to describe the same systems both as new tools and as replacements for parts of the publishing business.

The court still has to decide the legal question on the evidence and arguments before it. But publishers will reasonably argue that the companies understood the commercial consequences of their products while asking the court to treat training as sufficiently transformative. That tension deserves more attention than the usual binary of “AI innovation” versus “copyright protection”.

What to watch

• Whether the court treats the executives’ comments as relevant to fair use or merely business commentary.
• How OpenAI and Microsoft respond to the newly public passages in later filings.
• Whether the case addresses chatbot substitution and declining publisher traffic directly.
• Whether the ruling influences other copyright claims against AI developers. Sources & Evidence: Reuters, 17 September 2026, reporting on newly public court filings in The New York Times’ copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft. The quoted statements are attributed to the filings and the parties’ responses; they are not findings of liability.

Discussion spark: Should a court treat a company’s own acknowledgement that AI can replace visits to news websites as evidence against fair use, or should the legal test focus only on how the training process works?

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