Microsoft AI boss claims open web content is freeware

If you publish an article, an essay, or a piece of art on the open web, does a multi-trillion-dollar tech giant have the right to scrape it all for AI training?

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman thinks so, and he is surprisingly blunt about it. In a recent interview on CNBC, Suleyman argued that anything published openly online essentially becomes free real estate for anyone to copy and repurpose.

The ‘freeware’ argument

The remark came during a sit-down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, who asked directly whether AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s intellectual property.

Suleyman pushed back. He claimed that for open web content, the social contract since the 1990s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, and reproduce with it. Suleyman even used the term freeware to describe what he believes has been the collective understanding.

He then went a step further into philosophical territory, questioning what humanity collectively is, if not a knowledge and intellectual production engine.

Legally, that stance is on very shaky ground. Under US copyright law, creative works receive automatic protection the moment they are fixed in a tangible medium. Putting an essay on a public blog does not forfeit your rights, nor does it convert your work into public domain freeware.

Fair use is also not an informal social contract. It is a specific legal defense determined by courts, which evaluate the purpose of the copy, the amount used, and the commercial harm to the creator.

Robots.txt in the crosshairs

Things got stranger when Suleyman addressed robots.txt, the plain-text standard websites use to tell web crawlers what they can and cannot scrape.

Suleyman acknowledged that when a publisher explicitly says not to scrape their site for anything beyond search indexing, that falls into a separate category. However, rather than respecting it outright, he labeled it a grey area that will have to work its way through the courts.

It is an ironic reversal. Suleyman took fair use, which is an established legal doctrine, and framed it as a casual social norm. Meanwhile, robots.txt, which actually is an informal convention dating back to the 1990s, was cast aside as a legally unresolved question.

Reports have already surfaced showing that several AI developers, including Microsoft partner OpenAI, have bypassed or ignored robots.txt directives altogether.

Why it matters

For independent creators, publishers, and developers, Suleyman’s comments make Big Tech’s playbook crystal clear. If your work is accessible without a paywall, the tech giants view it as free fuel for their models. The immediate takeaway is that simply publishing online now requires defensive technical measures if you want to protect your intellectual property.

For the AI industry, this bold stance arrives at an extraordinarily risky moment. Both Microsoft and OpenAI are fighting multiple high-stakes copyright lawsuits from authors, media outlets, and artists. An executive openly declaring that the entire open web is fair-game freeware will almost certainly be quoted back to Microsoft in court by plaintiffs’ attorneys.

We think Suleyman’s framing reveals a glaring double standard. The largest tech firms aggressively protect their own proprietary code, patents, and APIs. Yet, when it comes to the collective knowledge of independent creators, they treat it as an unpaid intellectual quarry. Pushing this narrative so boldly will likely alienate the creative community further and accelerate regulatory crackdowns on AI training practices.