Tesla CEO Elon Musk talks to CNBC on May 16, 2023.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Twitter accuses Microsoft using social media company data in a way that was unauthorized and never disclosed.
Alex Spiro, a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and an attorney for Twitter owner Elon Musk, sent a letter to Microsoft on Thursday outlining claims that the software company “could have breached multiple provisions” of its data-use agreement with Twitter.
This is the newest divergence amongst tech corporations within the growing debate over who owns the info that will be used to coach AI and machine learning software. The New York Times first reported on the list, a duplicate of which was gained by CNBC.
After Musk conducted the Twitter buyout in October and named himself CEO, the corporate began charging for the usage of an application programming interface (API) that permits developers to embed tweets into their software and services and access Twitter data.
The API was previously free for some researchers, partners, and developers who agreed to Twitter’s terms. Twitter API-based apps include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Sprinklr.
According to Spiro’s letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the corporate’s board of directors last month, Microsoft “refused to pay even a reduced rate for continued access to Twitter’s APIs and content.”
In April, Microsoft had a minimum of five products using the Twitter API, including the Azure cloud, Bing search engine and low-code Power Platform application development tools, Spiro wrote.
The agreement restricts excessive use of Twitter’s programming interfaces. However, for one Microsoft service that uses Twitter data, “account information explicitly states that it intends to permit its customers to ‘bypass throttling restrictions,'” Spiro wrote.
A Microsoft spokesperson acknowledged receipt of the letter and told CNBC that the corporate would review it and “respond accordingly.”
“Today we received several questions from a law firm representing Twitter regarding our prior use of Twitter’s free API,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We stay up for continuing our long-term partnership with the corporate.”
Musk openly criticized Microsoft’s close relationship with OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT chatbot. Musk was an early proponent 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 position if indirectly controlling OpenAI at this point,” Musk said in an interview with CNBC this week. Nadella recently challenged Musk’s claim in an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, saying that Microsoft has a “non-controlling stake” within the startup.
Spiro didn’t name OpenAI or mention its ChatGPT and DALL-E applications or large language models within the letter. He pressed Microsoft for details on “an outline of any token pools implemented in any Microsoft application, including the periods of time such token pooling has occurred and the variety of tokens which were pooled.”
Musk and Nadella have had other interactions recently.
Musk approached Nadella last yr when he was raising money for the buyout on Twitter, in keeping with text messages that were made public through court documents. Nadella wrote in certainly one of the texts to Musk: “will definitely follow Teams opinion!” Teams is a chat application from Microsoft.
