Unsealed publishers' brief in consolidated NYT copyright MDL details internal Microsoft and OpenAI documents on five stages of copying

What happened: After all three sides moved for summary judgment on 2026-09-04 in the consolidated AI copyright litigation (MDL 25-md-3143, S.D.N.Y., Judge Sidney H. Stein), the news-publisher plaintiffs (The New York Times, Daily News titles, Ziff Davis, the Center for Investigative Reporting and The Intercept) filed the public, less-redacted version of their 92-page combined summary judgment brief on 2026-09-17. The brief asks the court to rule that OpenAI and Microsoft infringed copyright at five stages — acquisition, training, grounding, outputs and inter-company 'horse trading' (Project Taxi/Project Mango data exchanges) — and that fair use excuses none of them. It quotes internal documents extensively: a Microsoft director of applied science called AI ingestion of creators' work 'an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' and possibly 'the largest theft of labor in human history'; OpenAI's head of ChatGPT called the company's products 'largely substitutive, period'; Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that paywalled content should be licensed by anyone using it for training or grounding. The brief cites internal Microsoft data showing Copilot cut publisher click-through rates by up to 94% versus Bing search, alleges OpenAI sidestepped robots.txt and paywalls, and says OpenAI abandoned its promised Media Manager opt-out tool in 2024.

Why it matters to creators: This is the fullest public accounting yet of what news publishers say AI companies knew about their own copying — including private admissions that outputs substitute for the original journalism. If the court accepts the five-stage infringement theory with per-article statutory damages, licensing publisher content becomes the industry norm rather than the exception; if fair use prevails, text creators will likely need legislation, not litigation, for compensation.

Not yet known: Everything quoted comes from the plaintiffs' brief, not a judge's findings — OpenAI and Microsoft argue fair use and contest the framing. No ruling on the summary judgment motions has issued. Grounding/output claims are pressed against Microsoft only, with the corresponding claims against OpenAI deferred pending a sanctions motion.