AI Executives Fret About Existential Threat AI Poses—to Publishers

It’s not just humanity that AI folks worry the new technology could wipe out—it’s publishers as well! (Publishers are, of course, people!) That’s what we learned from a court filing today by a group of news publishers including The New York Times Co. in a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The filing cited an OpenAI executive writing—presumably in an internal memo—that publishers face “an existential threat” from AI products.

We knew the publishers worried that AI threatened their existence—The New York Times Co. made that point when it sued OpenAI and Microsoft back in 2023 (the case has since been consolidated with similar lawsuits filed by other publishers). What’s striking is that OpenAI and Microsoft internally acknowledge the threat—and recognize the implications for them as well. “Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time. It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers,” according to a Microsoft document cited in the filing.