The unsealed filings in Authors Guild v. OpenAI and Microsoft detail how executives knowingly trained large‑language models on copyrighted books obtained from a illicit Russian repository, despite internal warnings that the practice constituted illegal mass piracy. Plaintiffs’ memorandum of law (Docket 1982) and accompanying statement of undisputed facts (Docket 1987) allege that OpenAI and Microsoft employees repeatedly chose to scrape entire works rather than license them, fully aware that the resulting GPT‑based products would undermine authors’ livelihoods and flood the market with AI‑generated text. The brief cites internal communications indicating that leadership viewed the data‑acquisition scheme as a necessary shortcut to win the AI arms race, acknowledging that it would degrade American cultural output and threaten thousands of writers with unemployment. The case, styled Alter v. OpenAI and Microsoft, is part of a multidistrict litigation pending in Manhattan, with lead counsel Justin A. Nelson of Susman Godfrey representing a class that includes over 18,000 Authors Guild members and prominent novelists such as George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, and Jonathan Franzen. The filings mark a procedural turning point, centering the defendants’ alleged culpable knowledge and reckless conduct in the ongoing dispute over unauthorized training data.