The Verge · September 19, 2026 · On the brief until October 3, 2026

OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web

Intellectual Property LawJournalismMedia Studies

THE AI ANGLE

Regurgitating copyrighted journalism and cannibalizing web referral traffic

Unsealed court filings in The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal that internal staff warned their AI scraping practices threatened publishers' economic survival and made a 'complete mockery of the idea of fair use.' The documents show both companies understood their models would regurgitate copyrighted text verbatim and trigger a 'doom loop' by severely eroding referral traffic to the news organizations supplying their training data. These disclosures demonstrate the critical legal and economic clash between AI commercialization and the sustainability of digital journalism.

Summary written by AI Business Lens with an AI model from the article at theverge.com. It is not the article, and the publisher has not reviewed it. For publishers.

THE TEACHING ANGLE

Instructors can explore whether fair use defenses remain viable when internal company admissions acknowledge that generative AI memorizes protected text and functions as a direct economic substitute for human journalistic labor.

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OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web

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