# Court document reveals Microsoft crawler project for OpenAI

_Published Friday, October 16, 2026 at 10:18 PM EDT · AI · Latest · Tier 2 — Notable_

![Microsoft and OpenAI Collaborate on Secret AI Data Collection Project | KuCoin — Primary](https://assets.staticimg.com/@kudos/runtime/0.6.18/assets/og-ea52b6f9440e857c.jpg)

A court document unsealed on October 16 revealed that OpenAI paid Microsoft to develop and operate a web crawler for AI training data, KuCoin reported, citing CoinDesk. Microsoft instructed employees to keep the work confidential.

The project, codenamed Project Mango, copied web content that was subsequently used to train models including GPT-4o. The disclosed arrangement put Microsoft in charge of developing and operating the collection tool on OpenAI's behalf.

## Sources

- [kucoin](https://www.kucoin.com/news/flash/microsoft-and-openai-collaborate-on-secret-ai-data-collection-project)

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Canonical: https://techandbusiness.org/newswire/disXbLw1jYTYBzq_a0PloO
Published: 2026-10-17T02:18:11.037Z
Story chronology: 2026-10-16T00:00:00.000Z
Retrieved: 2026-10-17T05:15:19.737Z
Publisher: Tech & Business (techandbusiness.org)