Publicly, billionaire artificial intelligence executives have denied that their product will ultimately replace people in jobs they've spent decades working at, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declaring that "AI won't replace humans, but humans who use AI will replace those who don't," in one effort to convince the public to embrace the…
Page F2From§Eachthe milkman edition — 22 September 2026
AI companies call their own product an 'astonishing theft,' then quietly agree to slow it together.
As it ran on the front
Brent Hecht is Microsoft's director of applied science, and on September 21 an unsealed court filing let the rest of us read his mail. His own words, on the record: the public would see AI training data as an 'astonishing theft.' All together now — line by line, that is the company's applied-science director, describing the company's own product, in writing, before anyone asked him to spin it.
He had already tried to say something like this once. Three days earlier, on September 18, a separate batch of unsealed documents from OpenAI and Microsoft surfaced the same worry under a different label — Common Dreams read the batch and called it the 'largest theft of labor' in history; the Washington Examiner read the same documents and quoted Hecht again, this time warning that the technology risks a 'doom loop' that guts the news business, his own company's business included. Two headlines, one director, one week — theft going in, doom loop coming out the other end.…
…(cont) Then the calendar turned to the UN General Assembly, and the register changed entirely. On Monday, a UN-backed science panel warned that AI safeguards are 'unraveling' and asked world leaders to fix that. Bill Gates told CBS it may take a catastrophe before anyone acts. Twenty nations, led by Norway and Finland, signed a declaration calling for a global oversight body on frontier AI. All together now — the industry that wrote 'astonishing theft' into a filing spent the same week asking governments to please install guardrails.
The same week, a different courtroom got a different filing: a new lawsuit alleges the leading AI companies didn't wait for the UN to slow anything down — they agreed to do it themselves, privately, together, which is the part antitrust law has a specific problem with. Georgetown's Renée DiResta is on record analyzing the case for CBS; what the suit alleges is coordination, not caution.
So the guardrails were never missing. The industry had already built them, quietly, for itself, in a private agreement now sitting in a docket. The word it uses for the guardrails in public is oversight. The word it used for the product in writing, before it knew we'd read it, was theft.
“They put it in writing — their own guy called it theft — and then flew to the UN to ask for a guardrail against theft, which is the burglar volunteering to run the neighborhood watch. Same week, a lawsuit says they'd already agreed privately on how slow to go, so the 'oversight' everybody's cheering was written by the people it's supposed to watch. The newsroom whose work got scraped isn't in that room, and the renewal bill for what's left of it still lands in your mailbox next month.”
“That 'astonishing theft' line is one filing, one internal memo, taken out of context — did I say taken out of context, that's not what I — look, the industry is literally asking the UN for guardrails, that's leadership. The lawsuit about the companies privately agreeing to slow down together, that's a separate antitrust matter, it has nothing to do with the guardrails they asked for, why would it.”
The receipts
The United Nations-backed Independent International Scientific Panel on AI on Monday urged world leaders and tech companies to implement new safeguards on artificial intelligence, with the concern that existing safeguards are "unraveling." U.N. Secretary General António Gueterres welcomed the report and encouraged "external experts…
Top executives at OpenAI and Microsoft admitted they knew artificial intelligence poses an “existential threat” to news publications as the New York Times sues the technology companies over copyright infringement. Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science, warned about the damaging effects that AI models will have on the…
A push to have an international institution monitor artificial intelligence gained momentum as the U.N. General Assembly opened this week in New York City after several major technology leaders issued existential warnings about AI. Norway and Finland this week led the declaration for “a call for control of frontier AI models,”
‘largely substitutive, period’
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is in New York City this week for the UN General Assembly, hoping to prepare world leaders for the huge potential and huge threats AI poses. He spoke with Tony Dokoupil about his concerns.
A new lawsuit alleges that several leading artificial intelligence companies violated antitrust laws by agreeing to a coordinated slowdown. Renée DiResta, associate research professor at Georgetown University's Massive Data Institute, joins with analysis.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.