The Verge: OpenAI and Microsoft Internally Anticipated a 'Doom Loop' for the Web
The Verge·medium signal
Court documents surfaced in the New York Times litigation show OpenAI and Microsoft discussed internally that AI answers would starve the publishers whose content trains and grounds those answers, a dynamic they described as a 'doom loop.' The reporting connects the Google-zero traffic collapse publishers have been measuring to explicit internal awareness at the two companies driving it. Whatever the legal outcome, the discovery record is now the strongest public evidence that the traffic consequence was foreseen rather than emergent.