According to reports from The Wall Street Journal, the tension surrounding the future direction of the much-anticipated AI collaboration between OpenAI and Microsoft has escalated rapidly. AIbase reported that OpenAI is seeking to weaken Microsoft's control over its AI products and computational resources, while also attempting to gain Microsoft's approval for its transformation into a profit-making company, which is crucial for subsequent financing and achieving the goal of going public.
Insiders revealed that the negotiations have been extraordinarily difficult. In recent weeks, senior figures at OpenAI have even discussed taking drastic measures: accusing Microsoft of anti-competitive behavior during their cooperation, considering seeking federal regulatory review of whether the terms of their contract violate antitrust laws, and launching public publicity campaigns. If this were to happen, it could severely damage the six-year partnership between these two tech giants, which has long been regarded as one of the most successful partnerships in the history of technology.
For many years, Microsoft has provided substantial financial support to OpenAI in exchange for priority access to its technology. However, now the two parties have become competitors in multiple fields, making their cooperative foundation increasingly fragile. Despite this, representatives from both companies stated in a joint statement: "Our long-term stable partnership has provided outstanding AI tools for a wide range of users. Ongoing negotiations are still underway, and we remain confident in our ability to continue working together in the future."
According to insiders, the key sticking point in this deadlock lies in the terms of OpenAI’s acquisition deal for the AI programming startup Windsurf for $3 billion. Under existing agreements, Microsoft has access rights to all of OpenAI’s intellectual property, but Microsoft itself also owns AI programming tools like GitHub Copilot, which competes with OpenAI. Therefore, OpenAI explicitly opposes Microsoft gaining access to Windsurf’s intellectual property. Additionally, OpenAI has reached a content licensing agreement with News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal.
Another focal point of their disagreement concerns Microsoft’s shareholding ratio if OpenAI transforms into a public benefit company. Sources said that Microsoft currently demands a higher percentage than what OpenAI is willing to offer. If OpenAI fails to complete its transformation by the end of this year, it risks losing out on $20 billion in funding.
It is worth noting that under the leadership of the Biden administration, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched a comprehensive antitrust investigation into Microsoft last year, covering Microsoft’s previous investments in OpenAI, as well as other tech giants' investments in the AI field.
Microsoft first invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019. According to existing contracts, Microsoft has exclusive rights to sell OpenAI software tools on its Azure cloud platform and has priority usage rights to OpenAI technologies. Although Microsoft is supposed to be the sole provider of computational resources for OpenAI, last year Microsoft allowed OpenAI to launch a self-built data center project called Stargate.
Currently, the two parties are competing in multiple areas, including consumer-facing chatbots and enterprise AI tools. There are even rumors that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hired a competitor of Altman last year to secretly develop a plan for building an AI model independently for Microsoft.
OpenAI is currently attempting to renegotiate some clauses in the cooperation agreement while pushing forward with its transformation plan. It hopes to collaborate with more cloud service providers to sell its technology to a wider range of customers and obtain more computational resources. Meanwhile, Microsoft wants to continue accessing OpenAI's technology even after OpenAI claims that its models reach "human-level intelligence" (i.e., artificial general intelligence, AGI), as per their agreement, once OpenAI achieves AGI, the current partnership will terminate.
The possibility of "artificial general intelligence" has always been controversial among tech industry executives, with some believing it is imminent, while others argue it remains far off, with AI development still progressing through incremental improvements.