Microsoft Told Staff to Keep OpenAI Scraping Project ‘Secret’

Microsoft Corp. ordered its employees to keep “secret” its website-scraping project that harvested AI training data for OpenAI Inc., according to a court document unsealed Friday.

In the effort code-named “Project Mango,” OpenAI paid Microsoft to develop and operate a crawler to copy webpage content, which was then used to train models including GPT-4o, news publishers’ partly unsealed motion for summary judgment said.

That data allegedly included copies of more than 160,000 of the publishers’ works, but how much OpenAI paid Microsoft and the number of webpages scraped remain under seal in the sprawling multi-district litigation.

The filing also …