Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, speaks with CNBC on May sixteenth, 2023.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Twitter is accusing Microsoft of using the social media company’s data in ways in which were unauthorized and never disclosed.
Alex Spiro, a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and attorney for Twitter owner Elon Musk, sent a letter to Microsoft on Thursday laying out the claims, including that the software company “can have been in violation of multiple provisions” of its agreement with Twitter over data use.
It’s the most recent rift amongst tech corporations within the growing debate over who owns data that will be used to coach artificial intelligence and machine learning software. The Latest York Times first reported on the letter, a duplicate of which was obtained by CNBC.
After Musk led a buyout of Twitter in October and appointed himself CEO, the corporate began charging to be used of its application programming interface (API), which enables developers to embed tweets into their software and services and access Twitter data.
The API was previously free to make use of for some researchers, partners and developers who agreed to Twitter’s terms. Twitter API-driven apps include Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Sprinklr.
In response to the letter from Spiro to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the corporate’s board, last month Microsoft “declined to pay even a reduced rate for continued access to Twitter’s APIs and content.”
As of April, Microsoft had a minimum of five products that used the Twitter API, including the Azure cloud, Bing search engine and Power Platform low-code application-development tools, Spiro wrote.
The agreement restricts excessive use of Twitter’s programming interfaces. Nevertheless, for one in every of the Microsoft services using Twitter data, “account information outright states that it intends to permit its customers to ‘go around throttling limits,'” Spiro wrote.
A Microsoft spokesperson acknowledged receipt of the letter and told CNBC the corporate will review it and “respond appropriately.”
“Today we heard from a law firm representing Twitter with some questions on our previous use of the free Twitter API,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We sit up for continuing our long-term partnership with the corporate.”
Musk has been openly critical of Microsoft’s tight relationship with OpenAI, the creator of the chatbot ChatGPT. Musk was an early backer of OpenAI, but the corporate has since raised billions of dollars from Microsoft, which is embedding its AI technology into many core products.
“Microsoft has a really strong say, if indirectly controls, OpenAI at this point,” Musk told CNBC in an interview this week. Nadella recently challenged Musk’s claim in an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, saying Microsoft has “a non-controlling interest” within the startup.
Spiro didn’t name OpenAI or mention its ChatGPT and DALL-E applications or large language models within the letter. He did press Microsoft for any details about, “an outline of any token pooling implemented in any of the Microsoft Apps, including the time period(s) when any such token pooling occurred and the variety of tokens that were pooled.”
Musk and Nadella have had other interactions of late.
Last yr, Musk approached Nadella as he was raising money for his Twitter buyout, in keeping with text messages that became public via court filings. Nadella wrote in a single text to Musk, “will needless to say follow-up on Teams feedback!” Teams is Microsoft’s chat app.
