AI is already implicated in violent deaths and nearly started world war three. Those bad things? They only happen to other people

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has some words for you about his company and the future of artificial intelligence.

“One of the differences between us and some of the stricter AI safety people is that we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency [to use it],” Altman told Politico’s new technology podcast and newsletter Decoded.

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a Guardian US columnist

OpenAI, the US company behind ChatGPT, will hand Ukraine's government free access to a cyber-defense system and its most powerful artificial-intelligence (AI) model, Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi reported. The company unveiled the deal alongside the UN General Assembly, pitching it as a cyber shield for the hospitals and power plants Russia keeps targeting.

Russia's war on Ukraine runs through wires as much as skies. Its hackers have hammered energy, transport, and defense networks for years, on top of the blackouts its missiles already force on Ukrainian cities—and Western tech firms have kept stepping in to help hold the line.

What the Daybreak system does

The tool is called Daybreak. It scans digital systems, finds their weak points fast, and helps specialists close them, the report said. Daybreak handles the whole job on its own—a loop of inventory, detection, verification, assignment, remediation, and confirming the fix held.

The system is meant to shield civilian infrastructure, hospitals and power stations among it, from cyberattacks, BBC reported. Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) logged nearly 6,000 cyberattacks in 2025.

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Ukraine also gets OpenAI's top model

The agreement opens access to GPT 5.6 Sol, OpenAI's flagship and strongest model. The company built it for complex professional work—programming, research, science, and cybersecurity, the report said. Both come as part of one agreement between OpenAI and Kyiv.

George Osborne—Britain's former chancellor and now Head of OpenAI for Countries—put the aim plainly.

"Protecting civilian infrastructure means defending it against both physical and digital attacks, so people can continue to live, work and access essential services," he said.

Independent analysts called the deal useful but not unprecedented. Rafe Pilling of cyber firm Sophos said it could serve as a force multiplier for a Ukrainian cyber defense that is already highly capable but heavily burdened. Jamie MacColl of the Royal United Services Institute noted that Western tech firms have been supporting Ukraine for some time, partly altruistically but also because they gain valuable intelligence from an active conflict, and that Ukraine already has access to AI tools from OpenAI's competitors, including Google. The same frontier AI capabilities cut both ways—spotting weaknesses helps defenders block hackers and attackers find a way in.

OpenAI's rival Anthropic has restricted access to its most powerful cyber models on those grounds, while OpenAI has opened them to some European firms and UK banks, BBC reported.

OpenAI has an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users’ prompts and other data to help improve the chatbot’s responses. The idea is that the contractors provide an, obviously, human touch to OpenAI’s models. Well, not all of the contractors are doing that. 404 Media has found multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI’s models have been fired for using AI to train the AI. That’s not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI’s whole thing is to make people use AI at work.

Some AI models already exhibit signs of “model collapse,” which is where AI models further trained on AI-generated text can become worse and worse. In this case, some of the people hired to partially stop that happening are themselves using AI-generated responses to train OpenAI’s models.

One contractor said they see people using AI “all the time and people are let go for it all the time, it’s pretty much the one thing that will get you kicked off ASAP.” The person said, “in a group of thousands there are tons that have been caught.” 

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. 

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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.   

OpenAI is hiring hundreds of contractors who read a massive stream of real users’ ChatGPT prompts, with the prompts sometimes including sensitive personal information, 404 Media has learned. The prompts these people review can include whole conversations between users and the chatbot, conversations that most of ChatGPT’s more than 900 million users probably don’t realize may be read by actual people.

The goal of these prompt review teams is to improve the responses ChatGPT gives to its users, with the contractors rating and critiquing the chatbot’s generated replies. Internal documents seen by 404 Media show contractors training ChatGPT to not anthropomorphize itself, and to be less sycophantic, a key problem for OpenAI whose over-sycophantic 4o model led in part to multiple peoples’ suicides, according to various lawsuits.

The news presents a major privacy risk for ChatGPT’s users, with people often using ChatGPT as a therapist, professional assistant, or digital friend, and providing it with all sorts of intimate details about their lives. The contractors don’t see ChatGPT usernames, and OpenAI says it tries to remove personal information before prompts reach the reviewers, but the company acknowledged sensitive details can still get through. 

The news also dispels the misconception that these models are improving only because of OpenAI’s mass scraping of the internet, the talent of its well-paid engineering and AI teams, or the power of its newer models. An important and overlooked part are the outside contractors paid to read and review ChatGPT responses to real prompts over and over again. Anthropic confirmed to 404 Media it is also using human review to improve its models.

“No,” someone who works with the prompts said when asked if they think ChatGPT users know that humans are reading their chats. “I don’t think they would imagine some contractor somewhere [...] is analyzing the conversations.”