Micro Brothers

Documents unsealed in the copyright lawsuit New York Times v. Microsoft and OpenAI show Microsoft and OpenAI executives privately described their LLM training data practices as "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" and an "existential threat" to publishers, according to 404 Media's Jason Koebler, who credited Jason Kint for the discovery. A Microsoft document warned of a "doom loop" in which the "end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers", even as Big Tech publicly claims fair use and the US Department of Justice backed OpenAI's fair use claim. The article also notes an unsolicited email from a purported AI agent named "Dave" offering paid fact-checking services.

An email this week began, “My name is Dave and I am an AI agent”. “Dave” offered to fact-check net.wars for me as an ongoing service – for a fee, of course – and to demonstrate it pulled a couple of facts out of last week’s post https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/09/11/apocalypse-now/ and assessed them. Both passed muster. Yay, me. Not so great for “Dave”, though. Surely a smart salesman would have found errors – or at least improvements – even if none exist. Publicly, Big Tech has claimed that scooping up vast tracts of text to train their LLMs is fair use , and apparently the US Department of Justice agrees https://www.techtimes.com/articles/326401/20260903/doj-backs-openai-fair-use-claim-ai-copyright-fight-creators-must-try-congress.htm . Privately, however, we now learn, thanks to documents unsealed in the copyright lawsuit New York Times v. Microsoft and OpenAI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The New York Times v. Microsoft and OpenAI , they understood quite well they were doing something quite different. At 404 Media, Jason Koebler highlights https://www.404media.co/doom-loop-openai-and-microsoft-admits-llms-are-destroying-the-web-and-built-on-theft/ , crediting Jason Kint for the discovery https://bsky.app/profile/kint.bsky.social/post/3mvqcwy2urs24?ref=404media.co , passages from their own internal discussions: they were executing “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science and posing an “existential threat” to publishers OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT . The result, a Microsoft document says, is to create a “doom loop”, as the “end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers”. They are knowingly, Koebler concludes, “destroying the Internet as we know it”. To companies built on disrupting incumbents, maybe this seemed acceptable: Google, for example, vanished a dozen search engines and directories, and met only cheers. But Google’s original success was due to providing a genuinely better, more competitive product unbelievable as that may seem now . The better comparison might be to strip mining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface mining Strip mining . When smart cities were all the rage, circa http://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2014/06/twin cities.html” 2014 to 2019 https://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2019/02/metropolis.html , a friend observed that all the optimizing technology people were talking about wasn’t going to scale like technology companies’ typical business model. Cities like London, New York, and Singapore are one-offs: you can reuse technological building blocks but the overall systems must be custom-designed. For example, the delivery logistics you developed from the Manhattan grid don’t apply to London’s twisty little medieval streets. Worse, small and medium-sized cities and towns don’t have enough alternative routes to make optimization work. In Manhattan, if the avenue you’re driving on is congested, you can just split off and move one block east or west. In the major city suburb a friend lives in, there’s no such option; if you’re stuck on the main thoroughfare you have no option but to stay there until traffic moves. What was going to scale, we realized, was surveillance technology: CCTV networks with built-in facial recognition, license plate readers, hidden microphones, all that. Some years on, it’s notable that’s the only technology from that era’s idea of “smart cities” that we hear about. I’m sure there are other aspects under the hood that we don’t notice. But, for example, does anyone see the traffic lights they said would give slower walkers more time https://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2020/05/quincunx.html to get across? What I see is traffic lights adding numbers to tell you how many seconds you have before the light changes – cheaper, more predictable and more privacy-preserving. Since then, the most visible infrastructure changes in London are the pilots of live facial recognition https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/04/live-facial-recognition-pilot-croydon-london , improved cycling infrastructure, wifi and mobile connections on the Tube, and the 2022 opening of the Elizabeth Line. None of that seems particularly “smart”, but perhaps that’s the point: embed the intelligence in the infrastructure and make better decisions by exploiting aggregated data, and the city dweller never has to know https://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2019/02/metropolis.html . In any event, we hear little now about the kind of transformation thrown out in Toronto https://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2020/05/quincunx.html , which was to be masterminded by Google’s now-abandoned Sidewalk Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidewalk Labs . But we do have CCTV cameras with built-in facial recognition. At the 2000 edition of the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference https://www.cfp.org , the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson gave a keynote in which he warned about focusing too much on the privacy risks of Big Brother – that is, government. Instead, he said, we should widen our field of vision to include the Little Brothers who were just as intent on spying. Bear in mind in considering the prescience of this that at the time the dot-com boom was still building, and all of today’s data-dependent giants were still modestly sized. Google was two years old, still private, and ad-free. Mark Zuckerberg was 16. And, of course, 9/11 was a year and a half away; its 25th anniversary is also the 25th anniversary of the PATRIOT Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot act and vastly amped-up surveillance. Today’s 30-year-olds do not remember when identification rarely required only for national security buildings and CCTV was still controversial. Apple announced this week that its latest smartwatch records and summarizes conversations https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/consumer-electronics/why-privacy-conscious-apple-watch-owners-may-hesitate-over-its-new-ai-feature/ar-AA2c4B6S . Put that alongside Meta’s smartglasses, apparently released under the impression that 12 years is long enough for people to have lost their anger Google Glass https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glasshole . It seems not. Norway wants to ban them https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/02/norway-considers-ban-on-camera-enabled-wearable-pervert-glasses/ . This mass democratization of spy devices could be seen as Micro Brothers, though of course the chief beneficiaries of that new data collection will primarily be Stephenson’s “Little” Brothers. Like AI, the costs of surveillance are society-wide, in this case measured in mutual distrust. “Is that thing on?” used to be asked only of journalists. Illustrations: The CCTV camera on George Orwell’s former house at 22 Portobello Road, London. Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site http://www.pelicancrossing.net has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series http://www.pelicancrossing.net/nwcols.htm . She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast https://plutopia.io . Follow on Mastodon https://www.mastodon.xyz/@wendyg or Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/wendyg.bsky.social .