ArmInfo. Microsoft Corp. is considering filing a lawsuit against Amazon.com Inc. and OpenAI over their $50 billion deal, The Financial Times reports, citing informed sources. According to the publication's sources, Microsoft believes the deal could violate the terms of its exclusive cloud partnership agreement with OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.
OpenAI and Amazon announced an expanded collaboration in February of this year. The companies announced they would develop a specialized computing environment based on OpenAI models, which would be available to Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers for building generative AI applications and AI agents. As part of this partnership, AWS is expected to become the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI's Frontier platform.
Microsoft's claims center on the fact that by offering Frontier, AWS would violate the agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI, which requires all access to the startup's AI models to be through the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
Amazon and OpenAI claim that the system they are developing will not violate the terms of existing contracts, but Microsoft executives disagree, arguing that such an approach would violate at least the spirit, if not the letter, of the agreement.
The companies continue to negotiate, attempting to resolve their differences without litigation.
One of the FT's sources noted that Microsoft is not interested in litigation, as it is already embroiled in a series of lawsuits in the US, UK, and EU related to allegations of violating fair competition principles in its Azure licensing.
The lawsuit is also extremely disadvantageous for OpenAI, as it could derail its plans to go public. Last month, the company raised $110 billion in a funding round, but needs additional funds to pay for the computing resources used to train and run its language models.
OpenAI's plans for an initial public offering are already complicated by a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk against CEO Sam Altman. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and now accuses Altman of abandoning the startup's non-profit status for his own personal gain. The trial is scheduled to begin next month. (FINMARKET)
