Artificial intelligence assistants can weaken the economy of the websites they rely on to answer internet users. According to documents filed in the lawsuit between the New York Times, OpenAI and Microsoft, and reported by The Verge, the two companies had identified this risk of a “doom loop,” or destructive spiral, for the web.
The mechanism is circular: by summarizing information available online, AI tools can reduce visits to the sites that produced or published it. A drop in audience can reduce publishers’ revenue and their ability to fund reliable, specialized or costly content, while assistants need a rich and up-to-date web to remain relevant.
The concern is not merely a loss of clicks: it involves the gradual weakening of the sources that feed the information ecosystem.
The Verge reports that internal exchanges produced in the case show that this risk was not ignored by OpenAI and Microsoft. This strengthens the New York Times’ argument that the transformation of online search and answering is not neutral for content producers.
A lawsuit that goes beyond copyright
The New York Times notably accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of using its content without authorization to develop and operate their AI products. The companies dispute these allegations, and the case has not been decided: the documents cited do not, by themselves, constitute a court ruling on copyright or platform liability.
The case also raises an economic question: who funds the information used by models and answer interfaces? Licensing agreements may offer one avenue, without by themselves resolving the sustainable sharing of value or smaller publishers’ access to these negotiations.
The effects on traffic and revenue vary depending on sites, queries and products. The documents reported by The Verge describe a concern and a possible mechanism, but do not make it possible to measure its scale across the entire web.
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