Publishing and “the Largest Theft of Labor in History”
Recently, a certain political leader argued that we should all change the term AI to SI, with the latter meaning “superintelligence.” SI might be fine, as long as the S stands for “stolen.”
“The way that these [AI] models were created is by stealing enormous amounts of intellectual property,” said New York Times journalist Binyamin Applebaum in a recent interview. “There has been this sense of carte blanche for [AI company] behaviors that are criminal in a very straightforward sense. . . . Part of what has gone wrong in this industry, quite frankly, is that it has a cultivated sense of immunity from normal social responsibilities and from legal obligations that we have allowed it to feel comfortable in. A big part of what needs to happen here is [for citizens] to say: You are part of this society, and we’re going to hold you accountable to the rules of this society. You’re not special in the sense that there will be different rules for you.”
Many AI company leaders, if not all, are aware that they are disregarding intellectual property rights. According to recently unsealed court documents, published in The New York Times on September 17, 2026, “As OpenAI was forging ahead with its work, Microsoft employees debated whether what OpenAI was doing represented the ‘largest theft of labor in human history,’” says the article.
One internal Microsoft document from 2023, according to the same article, says that “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”
The “hoovering up” of information includes not only books and newspaper articles, but also music, photographs, and scientific research. Often without payment or permission, the AI companies have been using intellectual property of human creators to develop and then sell their own products and services. Without all this human-created, real intelligence the companies would not have a viable product at all.
Many copyright holders of all this original intellectual property have teamed up to file class-action lawsuits (e.g., the Authors Guild). Recently a judge forced the AI company Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to the plaintiffs. Other AI companies are facing similar lawsuits. In fact, Georgetown University School of Law is tracking more than five hundred lawsuits involving AI companies, many of those lawsuits being related to the potential theft of intellectual property.
We all hope that the courts and Congress will defend and strengthen US laws pertaining to copyrights and intellectual property. Just as our laws make theft of all physical property a crime, the same needs to apply to intellectual property. In our democratic system, property rights are fundamental to a civil, free, and open society. And this foundation is essential for economic growth, business development, scientific discovery, the creative arts, and entrepreneurship.
This point cannot be overstated. The individual’s right to ownership is more than an academic consideration. History shows that property rights are essential to freedom, both for individuals and communities. An individual’s right to ownership extends to the communities that he or she forms. Private ownership—by individuals or communities—limits the power of the state.
Remember that two totalitarian systems in the twentieth century (Communism and Fascism), used various means to confiscate people’s work, businesses, homes, and other forms of property. Everyone—and eventually those entire economies—suffered. Today, it appears that the Big Tech companies are doing the same thing with intellectual property—the hard work of millions of writers, publishers, artists, researchers, and musicians. If this practice is allowed to continue unchecked, the outcomes for our society will be horrible.
The massive AI datacenters, which are sprouting up all over the US, are processing vast quantities of information. It’s more than information in an abstract sense. It’s the hard work of writers, publishers, musicians, artists, and researchers who own the copyrights.
Real superintelligence originates from humans. The AI companies’ powerful tools couldn’t function without human creators. Maybe write to your state’s lawmakers, asking them to hold AI companies to account and to defend our intellectual property laws.
