UNSEALED FILINGS
ECONOMIC EVIDENCE LEDGER
AI Scraping Dataset Publisher Impact & Labor Value Estimator
Model the direct human reporting cost, extracted token mass, and paywalled digital subscription cannibalization caused by commercial AI foundation model training crawls.
“Newly unsealed court filings reveal Microsoft privately warned OpenAI’s data ingestion practices were ‘theft,’ with an internal executive warning that systematic web scraping amounted to ‘the largest theft of labor in human history’ while both built commercial datasets from paywalled newsrooms.”— New York Times v. Microsoft & OpenAI (Docket S.D.N.Y. & TechCrunch Investigative Review)
Scraping & Labor Inputs
LIVE CALC
450,000
Total catalog records indexed into training corpus or Copilot/Search RAG index.
14.5 hrs
Direct labor time including original source reporting, fact-checking, and editorial verification.
$42.00
Median union or market hourly wage for investigative & beat reporting staff.
12,500,000
Unique user encounters with paywalled content per month prior to direct AI retrieval.
$17.50
Average monthly digital subscription billing rate across active subscribers.
18.5%
Percentage of prospective reader click-throughs diverted into zero-click AI summaries.
Human Labor Value
$274,050,000
Direct compensation cost invested into generating scraped content.
Invested Labor Time
6,525,000 hrs
Full professional reporting, editing, and field investigation hours.
Estimated Revenue Loss
$39,375,000
Annualized digital subscription & paywall conversion leakage.
Estimated Token Mass
225,000,000
Training tokens harvested into pre-training or fine-tuning runs.
Labor Investment vs. AI Training Extraction Spectrum
Invested Labor ($M)
Subscription Loss ($M)
Token Vol (10M tok)
Court Filing Audit Ledger
Verified High Impact
Target: The New York Times (Sample)
| Audit Metric Key | Observed Value | Court Filing Equivalence / Statutory Basis |
|---|
Ready to download audit snapshot.