Microsoft has been OpenAI's biggest financial backer since the company's inception. However, the facts appear to have changed and the Redmond-based company is now considering legal action against the AI company and Amazon.
Microsoft claims that the recent $50 billion cloud deal between Amazon and OpenAI violates exclusive agreements signed with Azure.
According to a report in the Financial Times (paywalled) , Microsoft is planning to take legal action against OpenAI, as well as its cloud competitor, Amazon. The dispute stems from a massive $50 billion partnership signed between Amazon and OpenAI last month, which Microsoft claims blatantly violates its exclusive cloud computing agreements with the ChatGPT maker.
In late 2025, when Microsoft restructured its partnership with OpenAI, it gave up some of its overall cloud exclusivity to allow OpenAI to diversify its product hosting.
However, Microsoft maintained one clause: all basic application programming interface (API) calls to OpenAI models must be routed exclusively through Microsoft Azure.
OpenAI is in a difficult position after Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster filed a joint lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company for copyright infringement. According to their complaint, OpenAI illegally retrieved more than 100.000 protected articles and dictionary definitions to train its ChatGPT models without permission.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
