2026-09-18 06:01:43
Executives working on AI at Microsoft and OpenAI admitted what its critics have been saying all along: Large language models are predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.” An internal Microsoft document said generative AI products have created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.”
Those statements and a series of other mask-off moments feature heavily in an unredacted court filing that was unsealed Thursday in the behemoth New York Times vs OpenAI copyright lawsuit that has been winding its way through the court system for years. In a filing asking for summary judgment (basically, a filing with the court asking it to rule), lawyers for the New York Times laid out a series of admissions made by Microsoft and OpenAI executives in documents and depositions that until now had remained either sealed or redacted at the request of Microsoft and OpenAI.
It’s easy to see why the AI companies wanted to hide this from the public. The statements, taken together, are some of the most damning indictments of the ways LLMs were trained, how they worked, and the immediate threat they pose to human labor. It is a reminder that even as AI becomes more powerful and companies try to shift the narrative to the supposed existential risk of “superintelligent” AI, the tools they have already built were created by stealing from human creativity and labor and are by definition existential threats to the human labor market.
“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” an internal Microsoft document cited in the case read, adding “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.”
The filing was written by lawyers for the New York Times but is largely comprised of statements and interviews with big tech executives that admit both that LLMs are largely trained on stolen content, that they represent an existential risk for the human writers, artists, and media companies that they stole from, and that their products have started a “doom loop” that is eating the web and destroying the businesses that these companies stole from.
The unredacted filing was found by Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, a trade organization that represents digital media companies. Kint has been closely following and posting about massive AI copyright lawsuits.
The court filing cites an internal Microsoft document that found that AI products steal from human content creators, then cannibalize clicks from the people and websites they’ve stolen from, thereby destroying their business models.
“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, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain,’” the document said.
Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, testified under oath that after ripping content from the New York Times and other news sites, clicks to those news sites fully cratered, falling by more than 90 percent on Bing.
Documents obtained during the court proceedings found that OpenAI created “a hack to get around nytimes paywall,” to which OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman said “ah, nice.” Microsoft executive Brent Hecht wrote that LLMs steal content “without ways of distributing economic value down the supply chain, [which] necessarily threatens the economic stability of those who create the content.”
OpenAI’s policy director Jack Clark wrote that the company was “creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society” and Microsoft, in a policy document, wrote that generative AI could “significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained […] LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain.” OpenAI called itself an “existential threat” to news publishers, and an OpenAI software engineer testified that “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.”
None of this is at all surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to the development of generative artificial intelligence, but the document, taken in whole, is a real they-admit-it situation. OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s lawyers have been trying to argue that their model training is fair use and transformative under copyright law and that they are building something that is fundamentally different from the human labor that it was trained on. But internally, these executives know that what they have built has been built on stolen content and that the products they’ve made are cannibalizing the sources they’ve stolen from and destroying the internet as we know it.
2026-09-18 02:07:20
Flock created a fake police department called “Flock City PD” that it used to search a series of live automated license plate readers in several U.S. cities during demonstrations of its surveillance system’s capabilities, public records show. The records show that Flock City PD searched real cameras for people holding signs, “crowds,” people wearing masks, and more, according to audit logs shared with 404 Media.
Flock City PD also searched extremely sensitive queries, which Flock told 404 Media were done to prove that the system would not actually perform these searches and that its moderation tools worked. These searches included “coexist bumper sticker,” “vehicle a pretty girl would drive,” “white truck with a trump sticker,” “religious cars,” “Star of David,” and “don’t tread on me flag.”
Flock employees accessing live cameras for sales purposes, and showing police specifically how to do dubious searches, have become political flashpoints in the backlash against the company. In April, we reported that Flock employees regularly accessed live cameras in Dunwoody, Georgia, at a children’s gymnastics room, at a playground, in a school, at a pool, and in a Jewish community center in the city while demoing the company’s tech to cops. Audit logs obtained by Jason Hunyar, the Dunwoody resident who originally discovered this access, show that an entity called “Flock City PD” also searched live Dunwoody cameras for all sorts of politically contentious topics during sales demos with police. This included searches for behavior that is expressly protected by the First Amendment.
Flock accounts called “Flock City PD - Law Enforcement Demo,” “Flock Intelligence,” and “Flock Safety - Commercial Sales Demo” ran searches in Dunwoody and Bryan, Texas, as well as a handful of other unknown jurisdictions, for “coexist bumper sticker,” “Star of David,” “person wearing a mask,” “crowd,” “vehicle with a political sticker,” “man holding rifle,” “person in scrubs,” “don’t tread on me flag,” “car that a pretty girl would drive,” and “vehicle with trump bumper sticker,” among other searches. All of these were “FreeForm” searches, meaning Flock’s AI image recognition algorithm would determine what would be returned. The audit logs show that not all of these searches were allowed by Flock’s system, and that its moderation tools either blocked some of the searches or displayed a warning prompt before doing the search.
404 Media has previously reported that Flock explicitly taught police how to surveil the No Kings protests, and some of these FreeForm searches are similar to others we reported that real police departments performed themselves.
A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media that some of the searches were done specifically to show the types of searches cops shouldn’t do, and to show some of the guardrails Flock had put in place to prevent these searches. For example, the searches for “vehicle a pretty girl would drive,” is listed as having a moderation “block.” A search for a person with “Star of David” was also listed as having a moderation block, but a search for “Star of David” on a vehicle raised a warning box about the nature of the search before allowing it to proceed.
The searches highlight how Flock employees regularly performed real, invasive searches on real cameras to demonstrate how its technology works; residents of Dunwoody have repeatedly told their city council that they feel like their privacy is being violated as an experiment and sales demonstration for a private company. After Hunyar and 404 Media reported on Flock cameras being accessed in sensitive locations by Flock employees, the company and the city said Dunwoody’s cameras would no longer be used for sales demonstration purposes. The Flock spokesperson said that these demonstrations were done to show police officers what not to do, and said that the “Flock City PD” account no longer searches on any real cameras. They added, “the Flock City PD demo environment is now isolated, and law enforcement agencies cannot form a sharing relationship with it.”
A recent Flock training webinar seen by 404 Media shows a Flock employee logged into the Flock City PD account having access to cameras that seem to be explicitly for training purposes, with names like “Flock Warehouse - LPR Demo Cameras,” “Circle K - Demo,” “Tennessee Demo Cameras,” “Scottsdale AZ Demo Video Cameras,” and “ALPR Demo.”
“Flock City PD is a demo and testing organization name used for law enforcement demonstrations and for our development engineers to conduct testing. Those searches were part of testing and validating FreeForm search moderation and related safeguards. These were not investigative searches conducted by a customer agency,” the Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. “That is also the context for prompts such as ‘Star of David’ or ‘large group with signs.’ These types of prompts are testing the safeguards of the system — that it appropriately blocks offensive or sensitive searches, or flags searches that may implicate First Amendment protections. Our policy is designed so that offensive or slur-based searches do not yield results, and prompts that may implicate First Amendment concerns trigger notice and audit review. As you can see in your screenshot — the safeguards we built are working.”
The audit logs show, however, that many of the sensitive searches were not blocked. Searches for “crowd,” “a person wearing scrubs,” “large group with signs” were all explicitly allowed. More sensitive searches, such as for “vehicle with trump bumper sticker,” “don’t treat on me flag,” “coexist number sticker,” “religious cars,” and “Star of David” had a warning box pop up, but Flock says in a blog post published in April that police can bypass this: “Searches for specific content that could potentially implicate First Amendment rights will trigger a pop-up warning the user and advising that this search will be sent to a superior for auditing if the user chooses to proceed.”
In a blog post explaining how it tests Flock, the company wrote, “some vehicle bumper stickers contain words and symbols indicating religious affiliations or nationalities, and the moderation policy needs to recognize, flag, and block these searches. Just like vehicle identification, these algorithms need to be trained in the real world using real-life examples. Those might be training and demo searches for things like ‘Cross bumper sticker,’ ‘Star of David,’ or ‘Japanese flag.’ These searches, if performed, should not return results.”
Dunwoody residents have made clear that they understand that Flock needs to test its systems, but they did not sign up to be guinea pigs for a surveillance company.
“Flock's claims that they impose restrictions on what users can search for in their database provides the opposite assurance of what they seem to purport. In doing so, they admit that their dynamic surveillance network does in fact capture this sensitive information, and that the gate to that information is controlled solely by the policies of a for-profit corporation,” Hunyar told 404 Media. “As shown in previous demos, their willingness to continuously monitor and catalogue the actions of law abiding citizens exercising their constitutionally protected rights should worry anyone who plans to exercise them now or in the future."
2026-09-17 23:30:38
Georgia State University has rescinded a job offer given to a high profile activist who is currently fighting a case in which he allegedly wiped a security-focused Android phone before Customs and Border Protection (CBP) could search it. The case, which 404 Media first covered and has now received widespread and national attention, has important ramifications for privacy and when someone can still be charged with an offense even if authorities don’t have suspicion of any specific crime.
Earlier this month, activist Samuel Tunick and a group of supporters delivered a “demand letter” to the university. That letter, which Tunick shared with 404 Media, says he explained to the university he was facing a pending charge, which he describes as “an instance of textbook political repression, and a high profile civil liberties case.”
While delivering the letter, supporters held signs saying, “GSU sides with Trump,” and “Digital Privacy Under Attack!”
Tunick told 404 Media he was supposed to start his Teaching Assistant job on August 25. Then six hours before his first lab, Tunick received an automated email saying he had not passed the required background check. The letter says Tunick’s head of department asked the university for more information about the relevant hiring policy, “and she was told that there actually aren’t any.” Instead, in Tunick’s telling, “this was a subjective, and essentially arbitrary decision made for reasons that have not been made clear to me or other faculty.”
Tunick was also planning to pursue a M.S. of Geosciences at Georgia State, and was going to receive a tuition waiver and wages for his work as a Teaching Assistant. “Now I have had both my tuition waiver and source of income pulled out from under me at the drop of a hat, my economic security and academic career threatened due to a single absurd charge, to which I have pleaded ‘not guilty,’” the letter continues.
Tunick shared screenshots of emails between him and various faculty. One sent by the department head said, “I was told that the ‘Background Check Committee’ denied the approval for your hire, the Dean of Students denied the approval, and the legal department denied your approval.” That email reiterated there is no policy to be pointed to, and that each hire “undergoes a risk assessment on a case-by-case basis.” In another email, Tunick notes he had a misdemeanor in Fulton County, but these charges were dismissed.
Georgia State University did not respond to a request for comment.
404 Media first broke news of Tunick’s case in December and published an interview with Tunick and one of his lawyers, Matthew Dodge, in July. The airport encounter that led to the charge happened in January 2025, when Tunick was returning to the U.S. after a vacation in the Dominican Republic. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials called the airport ahead of time and asked agents there to stop Tunick, Dodge said.
The officers asked to search Tunick’s bags and pat him down, both of which he refused. Agents searched him and found nothing improper, Dodge said. Then, the agents said they wanted to search Tunick’s phone. Tunick provided them a code, which an officer then typed into the device. Rather than unlocking the phone, the device “went to a blank screen” and displayed the logo of GrapheneOS. In other words, the code wiped the device.
GrapheneOS is a security- and privacy-focused operating system, which includes all sorts of additional features. One of those is the duress password feature that “will irreversibly wipe the device,” according to GrapheneOS’s website.
Tunick participated in the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, and in a previous interview with 404 Media, Tunick put his prosecution for wiping his phone squarely in the context of other cases against the movement. Before the airport encounter, Tunick found out from his lawyer a tracker had been placed on his car. He also learned authorities subpoenaed his cellphone records and Gmail data. Tunick previously failed a background check for a job on a Christmas tree lot which involved going onto the property of a school, he previously said. When he asked the Atlanta Public Schools office about it, he was directed to the FBI.
The authorities “really just tried to dig up anything they could on me and they didn’t find anything,” Tunick previously told 404 Media. “At this point, it almost seems like it’s just intended to make my life miserable and discourage participation in any sort of advocacy or activism.”
The letter demands that Georgia State reinstate Tunick’s employment and/or the tuition waiver; provide more information about the hiring and background review process; and apply an “innocent until proven guilty” principle on hiring decisions.
2026-09-17 23:01:31
After Ed Sheeran dropped Macklemore from his tour over the singer’s support for Palestine, people flooded an online contest to open for Sheeran’s Mexico City show with fart videos, bouncing WWE butts, and troll posts from usernames like “EdSheeranSupportsAndFundsGenocide.” The posts appeared live on the contest page, where people can vote for submissions they want to see win, and went up seemingly without any moderation.
Guitar Center started promoting the “Open for Legends” contest on September 14, the same day Macklemore announced he had been removed from the last 10 shows of the U.S. leg of Sheeran’s tour. Macklemore had called for a “free Palestine” on stage at his previous shows and made statements in support of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Rolling Stone reported. “YOU COULD OPEN FOR ED SHEERAN,” a poster for the contest says.
The contest by Guitar Center was clearly planned before Sheeran’s tour started falling apart. Still, the timing is unfortunate. For most of Wednesday, the submissions went unmoderated and appeared on the site as they were sent.
Archived screenshots of the “Open for Legends” site from Wednesday show people posting things like a video of a Charles Manson interview and a meme of Gir from Invader Zim dancing with the caption “Welcome to the Cum Zone.” Screenshots posted on Bluesky and X show more memes with captions like “I”m in love with the gape of you” (a reference to one of Sheeran’s most popular songs) and “I dedicate this song to annoying starving children that block me from my luxury casino being build.”
Screenshots from the Open for Legends contest page before they were removed
Entertainment Weekly documented more of the posts, reporting that one upload featured “a video of a man farting on his roommate’s doorknob titled ‘Me when im not complicit,’” and another from a user named EDSHRANCOMPLICIT was just “a video of a man demonstrating a multitude of ways to give the camera the middle finger” with the caption “FREE PALESTINE RELEASE THE FILES IT’S ALL GOTTA BURN.” Some of the submissions included links to relief efforts for Palestinians, including Gaza Soup Kitchen, UNRWA, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, and Doctors Without Borders.
As of Thursday morning, troll posts and political protest posts were all removed and the site is only sincere entries, mostly people singing in Sheeran’s soft-pop style about failed situationships or feelings about their siblings.
Guitar Center did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.
Macklemore wrote in a statement on Instagram that he was pressured to remove Macklemore by billionaire Gillette Stadium owner Rober Kraft. “Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues,” Macklemore wrote.
All four of Sheeran’s supporting acts and his backing band for this tour have dropped out of the tour this week in support of Macklemore.
Sheeran publicly addressed the fallout of Macklemore’s removal on Tuesday in an Instagram post. “I am appalled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The suffering and pain caused on both sides is a human tragedy. There are too many wars across the world causing immeasurable pain, none of which should be tolerated,” Sheeran wrote as part of a series of bullet points. “I am not complicit. I have my personal views on this devastating conflict. Just because I choose not to speak publicly, it doesn't mean I don't have them, and it doesn't mean I don't care. Nor does it mean I don't support causes in my own, personal way,” Sheeran wrote.
2026-09-17 21:33:52
On September 10, the Brooklyn-based punk band Lathe of Heaven released a new single on its verified Spotify page called Riding High. Any fan of Lathe of Heaven would have immediately noticed that the song sounded nothing like the band’s previous work, that the vocals were not from lead singer Gage Allison, and that the album cover was widely different from the style and logo the band used previously.
That’s because Lathe of Heaven didn’t write, perform, or willingly release Riding High. I created the song with a simple prompt given to the AI music generator Udio, and I was able to release the track on Lathe of Heaven’s official Spotify page, as well as on its Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music pages, without the band’s knowledge, by exploiting a glaring loophole in the way music is digitally distributed to streaming platforms.
The loophole has existed for years, but people who make AI slop music are now widely abusing it. Today, anyone can easily hijack a real artist’s Spotify page and flood it with AI-generated music. When someone clicks one of those tracks expecting to hear music from their favorite artists, the scammer will collect whatever royalties those streams generate, essentially piggybacking on their popularity, and the listener will hear low quality slop instead of their favorite artist. Various instances of this scam have been documented in the past, but 404 Media was able to identify and replicate the exact loophole scammers are exploiting. It was trivial to do, and neither music streaming platforms nor digital music distributors are taking responsibility for the problem.
2026-09-16 22:19:51
We start this week with Joseph’s story about the people who are reading real ChatGPT users’ prompts and conversations. He got a bunch of documents all about these contractors and saw real prompts himself. After the break, Sam tells us all about the Automattic CEO getting kicked out. Then coming back again. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel tells us why a16z thinks enshittification is not real.
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