Historic lawsuit sparks flurry of option activity in this stock
- ID
- 26898
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 22 Sep 2026, 12:55 AM
- Fetched
- 22 Sep 2026, 1:12 AM
- Provider
- CNBC Technology
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/21/historic-lawsuit-sparks-flurry-of-option-activity-in-ny-times-stock.html
- Source URL
- https://www.cnbc.com/id/19854910/device/rss/rss.html
Summary
- Score
- 6.5
- Created
- 22 Sep 2026, 1:16 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- ai_ml_learnerssaas_foundersai_agent_users
What happened
Newly unsealed statements in the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft include an OpenAI executive allegedly admitting chatbots are an 'existential threat' to journalism, a Microsoft director describing training as 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' and internal data showing NYT click-through rates dropping. The filings threaten the fair-use defense by suggesting AI products are direct substitutes for the source work.
Why it matters
If courts accept that AI training on copyrighted content creates a direct substitute rather than fair use, builders using third-party scraped data for model training or RAG pipelines may face licensing requirements or legal exposure. Founders should audit whether their training data or retrieval sources include copyrighted content without agreements, especially if their product answers questions without driving traffic to the original source.
Discussion angle
How would a ruling against fair-use change the economics of RAG-based agents and AI products that currently rely on scraping or summarizing third-party content without licensing?