🦔Internal documents from Mother Jones' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show the companies knew exactly what they did. A Microsoft director called it "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions." OpenAI's president responded "ah nice" to a New York Times paywall hack. Microsoft's research found AI search cut clicks to news articles by 90%. After the lawsuits, OpenAI built a filter that blocked output only from publishers who sued, not to prevent infringement but to limit evidence. My Take The Buckmaster case hit hard because it was one mathematician and one model. This is the same thing at industrial scale, and now we have the companies' own executives confirming it in internal documents. They knew. They did it anyway. And when the lawsuits came, OpenAI's response wasn't to stop using copyrighted content. It was to stop the companies that sued from gathering evidence. I think these documents change the conversation around AI valuations. OpenAI wants $1.5 trillion. Microsoft trades at $3 trillion. Both companies built their AI products on content they took without permission, and their own people called it theft internally. If these lawsuits result in licensing obligations or damages at scale, the cost structure for every major AI model changes overnight. The models were trained on stolen labor and the executives knew it while they were doing it. That's not my opinion. That's what their own documents say. I think any investor looking at AI valuations right now needs to factor in the liability that comes with how these models were built, because the companies clearly weren't expecting anyone to read their internal communications. Hedgie🤗 motherjones.com/politics/202…