Microsoft ends exclusive OpenAI partnership, opening door to Amazon AWS and other cloud providers

No longer exclusive: Microsoft agrees to let OpenAI see other cloud providers

Since Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI back in 2019, the exclusive partnership between the two firms has been one of the strongest and most consequential in the AI industry. Today, though, OpenAI and Microsoft jointly announced an amended agreement that will allow the company to go beyond Microsoft's Azure and "serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider." The announcement clarifies that Microsoft will continue to have a license for OpenAI's IP and models through 2032 and that Azure will remain the "primary cloud partner" for OpenAI during that time (should Microsoft continue to be able to honor that). But Microsoft's license "will now be non-exclusive," the announcement reads, letting OpenAI make its models available through other major cloud providers going forward. While OpenAI will continue to make the same 20 percent revenue share payments to Microsoft under the amended deal, that total payment will now be limited to an unspecified cap and is only guaranteed to run through 2030. Importantly, that revenue share is now "independent of OpenAI's technology progress," an apparent reference to the infamous "AGI clause" in the original partnership that would have scrapped the exclusivity deal if and when OpenAI achieved the hard-to-gauge benchmark of artificial general intelligence. Microsoft and OpenAI's amended agreement comes two months after a $50 billion deal between Amazon and OpenAI that included plans for certain OpenAI models to run on AWS. The Financial Times reported that Microsoft threatened legal action over that deal, though today's amendment should moot that as a legal issue. In a memo sent to staffers earlier this month (and obtained by CNBC), OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser said the Microsoft partnership had "limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are -- for many that's [Amazon] Bedrock." Interest in running OpenAI's models through Amazon's cloud have "been frankly staggering," Dresser reportedly wrote. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on social media Monday afternoon that he was "excited to make OpenAI's models available directly to customers on Bedrock in the coming weeks, alongside the upcoming Stateful Runtime Environment. With this, builders will have even more choice to pick the right model for the right job."

Amazon is already offering new OpenAI products on AWS | TechCrunch

Almost as soon as OpenAI announced that its major investor and cloud partner, Microsoft, no longer has exclusive rights to any of its products, Amazon started gloating. After the revised OpenAI/Microsoft agreement was announced on Monday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy noted in a tweet that it was a "very interesting announcement." That agreement solved OpenAI's problem of allowing AWS to offer its products, an issue that crystalized after it signed an up-to-$50-billion deal with Amazon. Amazon announced on Tuesday that AWS's Bedrock service now has OpenAI's latest models, its code-writing service Codex, and a new product for creating OpenAI-powered AI agents. Bedrock is Amazon's AI app building and model-choosing service. Amazon is calling the new agent service Bedrock Managed Agents. It is specifically designed to use OpenAI's reasoning models, offering features like agent steering and security. Amazon promises in its blog post that "this is the beginning of a deeper collaboration between AWS and OpenAI." And it will certainly be interesting to watch. The Microsoft/OpenAI relationship has reportedly been deteriorating for some time, with each of them finding comfort in the arms of their partner's biggest rival. OpenAI has turned to AWS and Oracle. Microsoft to Anthropic; the Redmond-based software giant is also working on a new agent offering powered by Claude.

OpenAI ends Microsoft legal peril over its $50B Amazon deal | TechCrunch

On Monday, Microsoft and OpenAI announced that they have, once again, renegotiated the deal binding the two companies. Despite some opinions on X that frame it as a victory for the ChatGPT maker over the Windows giant, both sides are walking away winners. Most important, the new terms solve an issue that was hanging over OpenAI's head since it signed its up-to-$50 billion dollar deal with Amazon. With this new deal, instead of Microsoft having exclusive access to all of OpenAI's products and IP until the magical day when OpenAI produces AGI, it's partnership has a definitive timeline. This contract gives Microsoft a non-exclusive license to OpenAI IP for models and products through 2032. The two companies are still calling Microsoft OpenAI's "primary cloud partner," meaning that the bulk of OpenAI's cloud will likely be served by Azure for the six years this deal covers, even as OpenAI rushes to build its own data centers with other partners. In October, OpenAI agreed to buy an additional $250 billion worth of Microsoft's cloud. This line is a message to Microsoft shareholders that OpenAI will still be an enormous Azure customer. OpenAI products will ship "first on Azure, unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities," the companies say. But, critically, "OpenAI can now serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider." Again, "first" is not defined clearly in this announcement, whether that means exclusive on Azure only for some time period or just that Microsoft will also be among the vendors carrying OpenAI's latest products. But the most important part of this term: it solves the possibility that Microsoft could sue OpenAI over the AI lab's deal with Amazon. To recap that messiness: In February, OpenAI announced that Amazon was investing up to $50 billion in the model maker, comprised of a $15 billion initial investment and another $35 billion "in the coming months when certain conditions are met," the companies said, without specifying what those conditions were. In exchange, OpenAI agreed to co-develop a "stateful runtime technology" on AWS Bedrock (the AWS service that serves up various AI models and services). Stateful runtime is the tech that supports AI agents, allowing them to remember tasks and contexts for long periods of time. OpenAI also promised that AWS would have exclusive rights to serve up OpenAI's new agent-making tool Frontier. And there's the rub. OpenAI's initial agreement with Microsoft prevented OpenAI from selling Frontier exclusively on AWS, and possibly prevented AWS from selling it at all. While Microsoft had previously agreed to let OpenAI run certain select products, like consumer ChatGPT, on other cloud providers, it retained exclusive rights to any OpenAI product accessed through an API, such as Frontier. In fact, the same day that OpenAI announced its AWS deal, Microsoft publicly refuted the AWS exclusively terms, writing (emphasis Microsoft's): "Microsoft maintains its exclusive license and access to intellectual property across OpenAI models and products. ... Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider of stateless OpenAI APIs. ... Any stateless API calls to OpenAI models that result from a collaboration between OpenAI and any third party - including Amazon - would be hosted on Azure. ... OpenAI's first party products, including Frontier, will continue to be hosted on Azure." Microsoft also emphasized that its terms were in effect until OpenAI achieved AGI. The Financial Times reported that Microsoft even contemplated legal action if it had to enforce these contract terms. So, the new agreement eliminates Microsoft's exclusive rights and solves the AWS legal peril. While this deal is good for OpenAI, Microsoft walked with some wins, too. The new deal now allows Microsoft to stop paying a revenue share to OpenAI, while OpenAI will continue to pay revenue share to Microsoft through 2030, although this is now subject to a cap. Exactly how much cash will flow to Microsoft is hard to tell, but it's likely in the billions. Last quarter, Microsoft reported that it made $7.5 billion in a single quarter from its investment in OpenAI. The kicker is that Microsoft remains a major shareholder in OpenAI, owning about 27 percent of the for-profit entity, it said in October. It financially benefits from OpenAI's growth, even the sales it makes on AWS. The downside, of course, is that Microsoft loses out on any extra cloud services it would be able to sell as a result of an exclusive deal with OpenAI. That may not matter much. Just like OpenAI has been courting Microsoft's biggest competitors, Microsoft has a new, cozy relationship with OpenAI rival Anthropic for cloud giant to use its Claude AI to power agentic products. The biggest winners here are enterprises, who get to choose their models and their clouds while the giants compete with each other to serve them. Here's a timeline of the recent changes in Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI. In October, Microsoft and OpenAI announce a new agreement to help OpenAI fend off the lawsuit from Elon Musk about its corporate structure that gives OpenAI the ability to run non-API-accessed products on other clouds. In November, OpenAI and Amazon sign their first multi-year agreement, in which OpenAI contracts for $38 billion worth of AWS cloud. In February, Amazon announces an up to $50 billion investment in OpenAI, pending "certain conditions" including the exclusive tech development and hosting deal for Frontier and stateful tech. On the same day, Microsoft refutes that AWS will have that tech exclusively. In March, FT publishes that Microsoft is considering legal action. In April, OpenAI and Microsoft announce a new deal, that includes a calendar end date for their exclusive partnership and allowing OpenAI to run all of its products on other clouds. Microsoft no longer has to pay OpenAI revenue share. Microsoft remains a major shareholder in OpenAI.

Here's how the new Microsoft and OpenAI deal breaks down

Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI has always been complicated, so I expected the close partnership-turned-situationship to end in tears. After all, executive disagreements, rearranged contracts, and frustrations over AI infrastructure have all regularly been part of the partnership, creating plenty of tension along the way. But against all odds, Microsoft and OpenAI divorced this week in a way that looks strangely amicable. Microsoft announced the updates to its long-standing OpenAI deal on Monday, with the most important change allowing OpenAI to make its products and services available across all cloud providers. A day later, OpenAI announced it was bringing its latest AI models, Codex, and other tools to AWS -- Microsoft's biggest cloud rival. It's a move that seemed likely ever since Amazon announced its $50 billion deal with OpenAI earlier this year, which was originally framed as a deal to make AWS a third-party provider of OpenAI Frontier, together with some collaborative work on custom models for Alexa. Microsoft wasn't happy about OpenAI cutting a deal with its main rival, and it was weighing legal action ahead of this renegotiation. Amazon and OpenAI clearly wanted a closer partnership, especially as Amazon is playing catch-up in the AI market and trying to push agents to businesses through its Bedrock service. OpenAI told its employees earlier this month that its deal with Microsoft "has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are -- for many that's Bedrock." Ouch. As much as Microsoft will hate seeing OpenAI models being available to Amazon, it now stands to benefit from OpenAI cozying up to its rival. Sources tell me that as part of the amended agreement, Microsoft will continue to receive 20 percent of the revenue OpenAI earns for ChatGPT and the AI startup's API platform. This also includes a cut of any revenue OpenAI earns from putting its products and services on rival cloud platforms like AWS. There's a revenue cap, but this seems mutually beneficial for both Microsoft and OpenAI even if the Amazon deal originally angered Microsoft. Microsoft will remain "OpenAI's primary cloud partner" and ship OpenAI's latest products first on Azure, but the lack of exclusivity now means OpenAI's new models can ship minutes later to rival cloud platforms. I wouldn't be surprised to see OpenAI's models also appear on Google's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform service in the future. That gives Microsoft less of an advantage over its rivals, particularly for its Azure OpenAI service and its Foundry efforts. Microsoft's non-exclusive license for OpenAI models and products will now last through 2032, a two-year extension over the previous 2030 cutoff date. The revenue sharing is also one way now, so Microsoft no longer has to pay 20 percent of its Azure OpenAI revenue back to OpenAI. This new deal also means Microsoft won't be paying a revenue share to OpenAI if its search and news advertising revenue grows by 15 percent year over year. Microsoft still owns around 27 percent of OpenAI's for-profit arm, too, making it a major shareholder in OpenAI's future growth. This amicable split but not-a-split has only been made possible because Microsoft's access to OpenAI models is no longer tied to a clause about artificial general intelligence (AGI), something that has long dictated OpenAI and Microsoft's partnership. The removal of the AGI clause means Microsoft will no longer lose access to OpenAI's most advanced future models once AGI is theoretically reached. And on the flip side, OpenAI is no longer incentivized to declare AGI to get out of the deal. The pair had been arguing about the AGI clause for well over a year, and things got particularly heated when OpenAI was considering a $3 billion deal to buy AI coding tool Windsurf last year. OpenAI wanted Windsurf to be exempt from the deal with Microsoft, and even reportedly considered accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior. OpenAI eventually backed down on its Windsurf acquisition plans, but sources at Microsoft tell me it led to months of tense negotiations over OpenAI's controversial for-profit restructuring last year. I understand Microsoft first became wary of OpenAI as a partner when Sam Altman was ousted as CEO in 2023 by the nonprofit's board of directors. This wariness led to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recruiting DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman to lead its Microsoft AI business. Altman was reportedly "angered" that Suleyman had joined Microsoft, especially as Suleyman's team started dealing directly with OpenAI engineers. The tension between Suleyman's teams and OpenAI came to a boiling point when Microsoft's AI chief yelled at former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati during a meeting in 2024, reportedly demanding access to OpenAI code. While Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, CTO Kevin Scott, and Nadella had all delicately brought the OpenAI deal to life, Suleyman was hired to shake things up and create Microsoft's own AI models so that in the future it's less reliant on OpenAI. Parts of these deal changes also seem designed to distance Microsoft from the chaos of OpenAI and Sam Altman. OpenAI is increasingly juggling public controversies, strategy shifts, and a slew of executive reshufflings. It certainly feels like the vibes are off, and the contract update comes in the same week that Elon Musk and Altman are in court battling over the future of the AI company. Microsoft has already started getting dragged into this drama. Away from the courtroom antics of Musk and Altman, Microsoft is still quietly trying to build models good enough to replace OpenAI's. It's had some impressive results with models like MAI-Transcribe-1, a speech-to-text model that works across 25 different languages. But most of Microsoft's own AI models have been very task specific or smaller in size compared to OpenAI's large language models. To make up for this gap, Microsoft is increasingly turning its attention to options from Anthropic that are more powerful than OpenAI's models for certain tasks. Sources at Microsoft tell me the company has even considered using Google's Gemini models for certain products, just like how it rapidly started trialing Anthropic's Claude Code. Microsoft is willing to use the best AI model for the job, in an effort to keep businesses hooked to its enterprise software offerings and fend off competition from AI startups and even OpenAI itself. Some of the tension throughout Microsoft and OpenAI's partnership has been related to the collision course the pair have both been on, each trying to convince the same mutual customers to purchase their AI services. All this points toward Microsoft's AI future as a mix of models developed internally and by OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. It leaves Microsoft and OpenAI with a partnership that's a lot more about finances than close collaboration on the future of AI. They'll still be closely linked, but the partnership-turned-situationship is looking a lot less complicated than before. I'm always keen to hear from readers, so please drop a comment here, or you can reach me at [email protected] if you want to discuss anything else. If you've heard about any of Microsoft's secret projects, you can reach me via email at [email protected] or speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I'm tomwarren.01. I'm also tomwarren on Telegram, if you'd prefer to chat there. Thanks for subscribing to Notepad.

Amazon Set to Sell OpenAI Tech After Microsoft Cedes Exclusivity

For the first three years of the artificial intelligence boom, Amazon.com Inc. watched as cloud customers seeking the latest and greatest from OpenAI took their business to Microsoft Corp. But the day after Amazon's biggest cloud rival agreed to drop its exclusive rights to resell OpenAI products, Amazon says it will finally be able to make the ChatGPT maker's AI models available to its own customers. "It's something that our customers have asked for, for a really long time," Matt Garman, chief executive officer of the Amazon Web Services cloud unit, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Some of OpenAI's latest models will be available to preview on AWS starting Tuesday, with the most powerful GPT models arriving "in the next couple of weeks," Garman said. Microsoft got a jump on the large language model era thanks to a massive early investment in OpenAI. That gave Microsoft's Azure cloud unit exclusive rights to sell OpenAI's most powerful models. After the late 2022 launch of ChatGPT, Amazon scrambled to assemble a portfolio of the best of the rest on its Bedrock AI model marketplace, including products from OpenAI archrival Anthropic PBC and Meta Platforms Inc. Still, some longtime AWS customers, including Superhuman, formerly Grammarly, turned to Microsoft for AI services. Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI earlier this year, by far its biggest investment in any business, and OpenAI said it would spend an additional $100 billion on AWS computing power and chips. "We absolutely are expecting a lot of growth there," Garman said. The two companies have jointly developed a product based on OpenAI's models to help autonomous AI agents understand context and remember prior interactions with users. That tool, called Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, was introduced on Tuesday at an event in San Francisco where AWS also announced a bigger push into business applications. Amazon's tighter relationship with OpenAI coincides with growing worries that the richly valued startup won't expand its sales fast enough to meet commitments it's making to Amazon and other infrastructure providers, including Microsoft and Oracle Corp. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had fallen short of several internal targets. OpenAI on Tuesday pushed back, saying it was "firing on all cylinders." AWS's Garman said there was still more demand for AI services than supply of computing power to meet it. "The OpenAI team, I think, would gladly take more capacity from us this year and next year and the year after that as we add it," he said. "And so we're still working really hard to continue to add more capacity, whether it's power, whether it's chips, whether it's memory, all around the world."

OpenAI jumps out of Microsoft's bed, into Amazon's Bedrock

Altman's gaggle of GPTs now available in limited preview in an AWS region near you OpenAI's top models are officially available on Amazon Web Services' Bedrock managed inference and agent platform. The collaboration, announced at an AWS event in San Francisco on Tuesday, provides an alternative avenue for accessing Altman and company's growing library of GPTs without having to expose your data to OpenAI's APIs. Amazon contends that enterprises want to build agents and other AI-augmented tools using OpenAI's models, but have been stopped by security policy, data privacy, and sovereignty concerns. By opening its models up to a trusted third party, OpenAI can sidestep many of these concerns. Bringing its models to AWS also means that customers don't need to jump through nearly as many hoops to adopt its models, since Amazon has already put the effort into connecting its services to Bedrock. Alongside the managed inference service, OpenAI's models will also be made available on Amazon's Bedrock Managed Agents and AgentCore platforms, which provide tools and blueprints for building enterprise agents and connecting them to enterprise data and services. AWS also announced a whole host of new agentic AI tools for its own end-customers at the same time, including Quick, a personalized assistant akin to Microsoft Copilot but for apps from multiple vendors, and various new flavors of Connect, which was originally Amazon's hosted CRM product but is expanding to help customers automate tasks in HR, health care, and supply chain management. Finally, enterprises will be able to connect OpenAI's Codex code agent to models running in AWS datacenters, providing some level of assurance that their codebases won't end up in Altman's next model. For the moment, access to OpenAI's models on AWS remains in limited preview, with the LLM-maker's second-newest GPT-5.4 model available now; the later GPT-5.5 is coming within the next couple of weeks, according to AWS CEO Matt Garman's remarks at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday. Tuesday's announcement makes good on OpenAI's promise in February to make its models available on AWS in exchange for up to $35 billion in new financing. However, to claim all of it, OpenAI will have to spin up two gigawatts of Amazon's Trainium accelerators. It also seems that much of this was possible thanks to Microsoft's willingness to open its relationship with OpenAI in exchange for being freed from its revenue sharing commitments. Under the new terms, Microsoft remains OpenAI's primary cloud provider and retains access to the model dev's tech. OpenAI, meanwhile, is free to get in bed with anyone it likes, be it Amazon or someone else. As such, the new terms mean OpenAI's tie up with Amazon may not be a one off, but rather a blueprint for future infrastructure and services deals. ®

OpenAI's latest AI models, Codex now available on Amazon Bedrock

April 28 (Reuters) - OpenAI is now offering its latest AI models as well as its Codex coding agent on Amazon's (AMZN.O), opens new tab cloud services platform, the companies said on Tuesday, a day after the ChatGPT creator loosened its ties with long-time backer Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab. OpenAI said it is also rolling out a service for developers to build production-ready AI agents with its frontier models on Amazon Web Services. "This is what our customers have been asking for a really long ⁠time. Their production applications run in AWS. Their data is AWS," said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, at an event in San Francisco. He said customers will no longer have to leave AWS to find the AI models they want. OpenAI and Microsoft on Monday renegotiated a contract that had allowed the Windows maker to exclusively sell OpenAI's AI models on its Azure cloud platform, making room for OpenAI to forge new partnerships ⁠with the likes of Amazon and Google. Amazon and OpenAI have been deepening their ties in recent months. While Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI, the AI startup committed to spend $100 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next eight ⁠years. The companies have also reached an agreement for OpenAI to use two gigawatts of compute powered by Amazon's in-house Trainium AI chips. The deal comes at a ⁠time when OpenAI is racing to secure more computing capacity to beef up its enterprise business and better compete with rival Anthropic, whose ⁠Claude models have gained steady popularity among enterprises and made the startup a front-runner in the AI race. Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru and Greg Bensinger; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Shinjini Ganguli Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

OpenAI expands Amazon deal after Microsoft loosens exclusivity terms

OpenAI will expand its offering to Amazon's cloud customers, enabling the start-up to distribute its models and applications more widely after renegotiating exclusive terms with Microsoft. The ChatGPT maker announced on Tuesday that it would bring its most advanced AI models to AWS, through the Amazon cloud unit's Bedrock AI developer platform. OpenAI's Codex coding agent will also be made available. Amazon's expanded partnership with OpenAI comes after it agreed in February to invest up to $50bn in the start-up and the AI lab on Monday renegotiated the terms of its deal with Microsoft to loosen its exclusivity provisions. Denise Dresser, OpenAI's chief revenue officer, told an event in San Francisco that customers wanted to use the start-up's frontier models in a "trusted environment" as they moved to deploy agentic tools -- AI bots that can operate independently under human instructions -- in their businesses. "[Customers are] no longer in the mindset of experimentation and pilots," she said. OpenAI has been seeking to uncouple from Microsoft, its largest shareholder, and develop a series of partnerships with rival companies to sell its models and acquire data centre capacity. Amazon in February invested $15bn in OpenAI's latest funding round as part of a commitment that would see it invest a further $35bn either when the AI lab goes public or manages to build powerful AI dubbed "artificial general intelligence" or AGI. The start-up has in turn signed deals to procure $138bn in data centre capacity from the cloud giant. Following Tuesday's announcement, Amazon will roll out a service it has called "Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI". AWS customers will be able to use OpenAI's Frontier service to deploy fleets of AI agents to carry out tasks. The cloud giant's Bedrock service, which helps software developers access a host of AI models from providers, including Anthropic, Meta and Mistral, will include OpenAI's latest 5.5 model in the coming weeks. "From the very early days . . . customers have asked us how to get OpenAI models inside AWS," said AWS chief executive Matt Garman. "It's not just about bringing the AI models, but it's innovating together." The Amazon-OpenAI deal had until recently been under legal threat from Microsoft, which argued it might breach exclusivity terms in its own contract with the start-up, the FT previously reported. Microsoft on Monday concluded a deal that will permit OpenAI to make its models available on rival cloud platforms in exchange for Microsoft receiving better terms around revenue sharing and the removal of a contentious "AGI clause" that could have cut it off from OpenAI's technology. Amazon is also a shareholder in Anthropic. It has invested $8bn since 2023 and this month disclosed plans to invest up to $25bn in the group alongside a $100bn cloud contract.

OpenAI's subtle drift from Microsoft has become an aggressive move toward Amazon

OpenAI revenue chief Denise Dresser said the AI company's agreement on Tuesday to make its models available on Amazon had nothing to do with an announcement a day earlier that the startup had restructured its relationship with Microsoft for a second time in six months. "The two are not related in any way," Dresser told CNBC in an interview following OpenAI's announcement with Amazon. Analysts aren't so sure. A lot has happened since late October, when OpenAI completed its recapitalization, giving Microsoft a 27% stake in the for-profit side of the artificial intelligence company. As part of that arrangement, OpenAI agreed to purchase an incremental $250 billion of Azure services. And a revenue share agreement would remain until OpenAI was verified by an independent panel to have reached artificial general intelligence, or AGI. One major development since then is that OpenAI has been cozying up to Amazon, Microsoft's biggest rival in cloud infrastructure. In November, OpenAI disclosed a $38 billion commitment with Amazon Web Services. And in late February, Amazon said it would invest $50 billion in OpenAI, which would, in turn, use 2 gigawatts worth of AWS' custom Trainium chips for training AI models. Amazon and OpenAI also agreed at the time to jointly develop "customized models" for Amazon's engineering teams to power its consumer products, and OpenAI's spending commitment on AWS expanded by $100 billion. "That was the big thing that was happening," said RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria, who recommends buying Microsoft shares, in an interview. This week's one-two punch is the starkest sign yet that a dramatic shift is underway in the decade-long relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI. It started in 2016, when OpenAI began running its big experiments on Azure. Three years later, Microsoft invested its first $1 billion in OpenAI, a number that would grow to $13 billion over several follow-on rounds.

Amazon touts a 'major expansion' with OpenAI as Microsoft ties loosen

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Amazon announced what it called a "major expansion" of its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Tuesday, a day after the artificial intelligence company said it was loosening its ties to longtime backer Microsoft. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the collaboration with Amazon's cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, would involve co-developing a new platform for AI agents that can do computer-based work on people's behalf. Altman spoke via prerecorded video message to an Amazon event in San Francisco at the same time as he was appearing in federal court across San Francisco Bay in Oakland for a civil trial brought by rival OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk. Microsoft had said Monday it will no longer pay a share of its revenue to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the latest move to untether a close partnership that helped unleash an artificial intelligence boom. OpenAI relied exclusively on Microsoft's investments in cloud computing services to build the technology that helped make ChatGPT a household name. Microsoft, in turn, relied on OpenAI's technology to build its own AI assistant Copilot. But the partnership has evolved as San Francisco-based OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, has shifted to a capitalistic enterprise on a path toward an initial public offering on Wall Street and has balanced its reliance on Microsoft with other cloud partners like Amazon, Google and Oracle. OpenAI said Monday it will continue to pay Microsoft a share of its revenue through 2030, though the rate will be capped. OpenAI has been on a race to boost sales of its AI technology by focusing on big business customers. Its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, also spoke at the Amazon event. Microsoft remains the primary cloud computing partner for OpenAI, and products made by the AI company will ship first on Microsoft's cloud platform, called Azure, "unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities," both companies said. Altman suggested in his remarks Tuesday that Amazon had those capabilities. "These systems need to run reliably and robustly," Altman said. "They need to be secure, they need to scale, and they need to fit in the environments where companies already run their businesses. And they need infrastructure that customers already trust for their most important workloads. That's what makes this partnership with AWS so important."

OpenAI breaks out of exclusivity agreements in its partnership with Microsoft

OpenAI is opening up its partnership with Microsoft in the latest amendment to the major multi-year collaboration between the tech giants. The latest changes allow OpenAI to offer its latest AI models to other companies and through other cloud providers, stripping Microsoft of its exclusivity rights. In a joint announcement posted on OpenAI and Microsoft's websites, Microsoft will still be OpenAI's primary cloud partner with the latest products shipping first on Azure, but OpenAI is now allowed to use any cloud provider. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, posted on X that the company is "now able to make our products and services available across all clouds." On top of that, Microsoft will still have a license for OpenAI's models and products through to 2032, but the license will no longer be exclusive. On the business side, Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI, but OpenAI would still make revenue share payments to Microsoft until 2030, which will now be subject to a total cap. The two companies have worked closely together since announcing a multiyear partnership in 2019. Microsoft and OpenAI have gone through several phases for its collaboration, but the two put out a joint statement in February of this year that still mentioned the exclusivity agreements. However, the latest update confirms that OpenAI can break exclusivity, with the companies arguing these changes are for "flexibility, certainty, and a focus on delivering the benefits of AI broadly."

Microsoft and OpenAI Loosen Their Partnership

Cade Metz reported from San Francisco, and Karen Weise from Seattle. Microsoft and OpenAI have amended their partnership to reduce their dependence on each other amid an escalating global artificial intelligence race, the companies said on Monday. Microsoft, which is OpenAI's biggest financial partner, will continue to license OpenAI's A.I. technology through 2032. But the tech giant, whose stake in OpenAI is valued at more than $135 billion, will no longer be the exclusive licensee of the start-up's A.I. technologies. OpenAI will also no longer receive a share of revenue from Microsoft when the tech giant uses the start-up's technologies. OpenAI will continue to pay a share of revenue to Microsoft when the tech giant serves OpenAI's technologies to businesses and consumers via Microsoft's cloud computing services. But OpenAI has more flexibility to work with other cloud computing providers, the two companies said. OpenAI will release its technology on Microsoft's cloud services first, the companies said, unless "Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities." The start-up then has the right to release products on other cloud services. The new agreement also removes complex language that could have changed the two companies' partnership if OpenAI declared that it had reached artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. That level of technology would mean, in theory, that the technology is as capable as a human brain. The so-called A.G.I. clause added uncertainty for Microsoft. On Monday, jury selection is set to begin in a blockbuster trial that cuts to the heart of the relationship with OpenAI and Microsoft. Elon Musk, an early funder of OpenAI when it was a nonprofit, has sued the start-up and Microsoft in federal court, saying they breached the lab's founding agreement by putting commercial interests over the public good. Mr. Musk is asking for more than $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft. Microsoft is also scheduled to report its quarterly earnings on Wednesday. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.) This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Microsoft to Stop Sharing Revenue With Main AI Partner OpenAI

Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI have agreed to drop the software giant's exclusive right to sell the startup's AI models, opening the door for the ChatGPT maker to pursue deals with cloud-computing rivals like Amazon.com Inc. In exchange for ending that exclusivity -- which helped boost Microsoft's cloud sales in the early years of the AI boom -- the world's largest software maker will no longer pay a revenue share on OpenAI products it resells on its cloud. The two companies announced the revised deal in a joint statement on Monday. The new pact is meant to simplify a complicated relationship that has been foundational to OpenAI's rise and the broader artificial intelligence boom. OpenAI has since pursued deals with multiple cloud providers, including Amazon, to meet its growing computing needs to build and service AI software to a wider audience. "The greater predictability in the amended agreement strengthens our joint ability to build and operate AI platforms at scale while providing both companies the flexibility to pursue new opportunities," OpenAI and Microsoft said in their statement. Monday's agreement clears the way to OpenAI's models appearing on Amazon Web Services and other cloud-computing providers. As part of an investment announced earlier this year, the Amazon unit said it was jointly developing products with OpenAI that would be hosted on AWS. Microsoft weighed legal action, on the view that the effort would almost certainly breach its exclusive rights to OpenAI's intellectual property, the Financial Times reported last month. Microsoft remains OpenAI's "primary cloud provider," and new products from the startup will be made available first on Azure, Microsoft's cloud unit. Revenue share paid by OpenAI on sales of its products that it makes itself will be capped, the companies said. As part of OpenAI's restructuring last year as a for-profit business, Microsoft received a 27% ownership stake in the AI startup. Microsoft shares were down about 1% as the markets opened in New York on Monday. Amazon fell less than 1%.

OpenAI's models land on Amazon Bedrock, one day after Microsoft exclusivity ends

SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon moved quickly Tuesday to capitalize on OpenAI's new relationship status with Microsoft, launching a preview of OpenAI's models on its Bedrock platform less than 24 hours after the ChatGPT maker was freed from its previously exclusive cloud arrangement. The companies described the news as meeting years of customer demand. "Their production applications run in AWS. Their data is in AWS. They trust the security of AWS, and we've forced them for the last couple of years, to get great OpenAI models, to go to other places," AWS CEO Matt Garman said at an event in San Francisco. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared at the event via recorded video, noting that his "schedule got taken away" from him for the day, an apparent allusion to the opening of the trial in Elon Musk's lawsuit against him and OpenAI in nearby Oakland. "The opportunity ahead of us is enormous, and the most exciting part is that this is not something in the future -- it's starting right now," Altman said in the video. Altman also said OpenAI's Codex coding tool will be available to AWS customers, and the companies unveiled Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI -- the product name for the enterprise agent platform previously described as a "Stateful Runtime Environment" when the two companies announced their partnership in February. Denise Dresser, OpenAI's chief revenue officer, said the hundreds of enterprise customers she has met since joining the company four months ago are past the experimentation phase with AI. "They understand that to do that, they need to have powerful models. But even more importantly, they want those models in a trusted environment that they know and a trusted infrastructure. And so for me, that's what's so special about this partnership," Dresser said. It has been a whirlwind couple of months for both companies. Amazon and OpenAI struck a $50 billion investment and cloud deal in February, with OpenAI committing to run workloads on Amazon's custom Trainium chips and the two companies agreeing to co-build what they called a "Stateful Runtime Environment" on Amazon's Bedrock platform. The cloud agreement alone is worth more than $100 billion over eight years. An internal OpenAI memo that surfaced in April touted the Amazon partnership as a key enterprise growth driver. OpenAI chief revenue officer Denise Dresser wrote that the Microsoft partnership had "limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are," adding that inbound demand for the AWS offering had been "frankly staggering." Amazon has also doubled down on its original AI partner, Anthropic, investing up to $25 billion and striking a similar $100 billion-plus cloud commitment in a deal announced earlier this month. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have committed to running workloads on Amazon's custom Trainium processors, and Facebook parent Meta recently signed a multibillion-dollar deal to use Amazon's Graviton chips for agentic AI. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy disclosed in his annual shareholder letter that Amazon's custom silicon business is generating more than $20 billion a year in revenue. Things changed again for the AWS-OpenAI partnership just this week. On Monday, Microsoft and OpenAI revamped their partnership, making OpenAI free to serve all of its products -- including API-based services previously exclusive to Microsoft Azure -- on any cloud provider. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy immediately signaled the impact, posting on LinkedIn that OpenAI's models would be available soon on Amazon's Bedrock platform. Amazon reports first-quarter earnings Wednesday, with the company on pace to spend $200 billion this year on capital expenditures, most of it on AI infrastructure. Jassy has called AI "an extraordinarily unusual opportunity to forever change the size of AWS and Amazon as a whole.

AWS to sell OpenAI models after Microsoft drops exclusivity, as OpenAI misses revenue targets and faces $100B infrastructure commitments

Amazon Web Services will begin selling OpenAI's models to its cloud customers, the company announced on Tuesday, one day after Microsoft agreed to end the exclusive reselling arrangement that had given Azure sole access to OpenAI's technology for the first three years of the generative AI era. "It's something that our customers have asked for, for a really long time," Matt Garman, AWS's chief executive, told Bloomberg Television. Some of OpenAI's latest models will be available to preview on AWS starting Tuesday, with the most powerful GPT models arriving within weeks. The announcement completes a restructuring of the AI industry's most consequential partnership that began in February when Amazon committed up to $50 billion as part of OpenAI's $110 billion funding round, a deal that valued the ChatGPT maker at $852 billion and gave Amazon its largest-ever investment in any company. OpenAI simultaneously committed to spending $100 billion on AWS computing power and Trainium chips over eight years, consuming two gigawatts of capacity. The question the deal answers is not whether OpenAI's models are good enough to sell on rival clouds. The question is whether OpenAI can sell enough of them, anywhere, to justify what it has promised to spend. Microsoft and OpenAI amended their partnership agreement on Monday in a restructuring that dismantles the exclusive arrangement that defined the first phase of the AI boom. Microsoft's licence to OpenAI's intellectual property for models and products, previously exclusive, becomes non-exclusive but extends through 2032. Microsoft retains its 20 per cent share of OpenAI's revenue through 2030, now subject to a cap. OpenAI must still ship its models on Azure first unless Microsoft cannot or chooses not to support the required capabilities, a clause that preserves Azure's early-access advantage while removing the lock-in that kept AWS and Google Cloud customers from accessing OpenAI's technology through their existing cloud provider. The restructuring also removes the AGI clause, the legally unusual provision that would have terminated Microsoft's commercial rights if OpenAI's board determined the company had achieved artificial general intelligence. That clause had become a governance liability rather than a practical safeguard, and its removal signals that both companies have accepted the relationship is commercial, not existential. The practical significance is that OpenAI can now serve customers on any cloud. For AWS, which spent the first three years of the AI boom assembling the best of the rest on its Bedrock model marketplace, including Anthropic's Claude, Meta's Llama, and Mistral, the addition of OpenAI closes what had been Azure's single most powerful competitive advantage. Amazon's expanded investment of up to $25 billion in Anthropic, announced alongside the OpenAI deal, means AWS now has exclusive or preferred access to the two most commercially significant AI model families in the enterprise market. Superhuman, the productivity company formerly known as Grammarly, had turned to Microsoft for AI services specifically because Azure was the only cloud offering OpenAI's models. That dynamic is now over. AWS customers can access OpenAI on the infrastructure they already use, with the security configurations and compliance certifications they already have in place. The two companies have jointly developed a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI's models, available through Amazon Bedrock, which provides persistent orchestration and memory for AI agents running complex, multi-step workflows. Instead of stitching together disconnected API requests, the runtime maintains working context across steps, carrying forward memory, tool state, environment configuration, and identity boundaries. Amazon introduced the product as Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents at an event in San Francisco where AWS also announced a broader push into business applications. "Business customers of OpenAI want those models in a trusted environment that they know, and in a trusted infrastructure," said Denise Dresser, OpenAI's chief revenue officer. The Stateful Runtime Environment is trained to run on AWS infrastructure and integrated with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, meaning the agentic capabilities are not a standalone product bolted onto existing infrastructure but a jointly engineered layer designed to make OpenAI's models operationally native to AWS. The joint product reflects a broader shift in how AI models are sold. The first generation of the AI boom was defined by model access: which cloud had the best models. The second generation is being defined by model integration: which cloud makes those models most useful within existing enterprise workflows. Microsoft has already begun releasing its own in-house AI models through Mustafa Suleyman's superintelligence team, a parallel strategy that suggests Microsoft is preparing for a future in which OpenAI's models are one offering among many rather than Azure's defining advantage. Google Cloud responded with a $750 million partner fund for agentic AI deployments at Cloud Next 2026, investing through consulting partners to lock in enterprise customers building AI agents on Vertex AI. The three hyperscalers are converging on the same strategy, multi-model marketplaces with agentic integration, from different starting positions. AWS starts with the broadest infrastructure footprint and now the broadest model catalogue. Azure starts with the deepest Microsoft 365 integration and a seven-year head start on OpenAI deployment. Google starts with its own Gemini models and the closest relationship between AI research and cloud product development. The winner will be determined not by which cloud has the best models but by which cloud makes those models disappear into the workflow. The AWS deal arrives at the worst possible moment for OpenAI's growth narrative. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had fallen short of several internal targets for both revenue and user growth in 2026. An internal milestone of one billion weekly active ChatGPT users by year-end went unmet. Monthly revenue targets were missed multiple times as Anthropic gained ground in coding and enterprise and Google's Gemini claimed a larger share of the consumer market. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar has reportedly warned colleagues that if revenue growth does not accelerate, the company could face difficulty funding its compute commitments. OpenAI expects to burn through $25 billion in cash in 2026 against a revenue target of $30 billion. OpenAI pushed back, saying it was "firing on all cylinders," but the market responded to the WSJ report by selling the companies most exposed to OpenAI's spending commitments: Oracle dropped more than 4 per cent, and chipmakers Nvidia, Broadcom, and AMD declined between 3 and 4 per cent. The arithmetic of OpenAI's infrastructure commitments is the story underneath the AWS announcement. OpenAI has committed to spending $100 billion on AWS over eight years, on top of its existing Azure spending and a $300 billion, five-year partnership with Oracle for Stargate computing infrastructure. Those commitments assume revenue will grow from approximately $12 billion in annualised run rate to a scale that can sustain hundreds of billions in infrastructure spending. The AWS deal is designed to help close that gap by giving OpenAI access to the cloud's largest customer base, but it also raises the stakes: every dollar OpenAI earns on AWS is a dollar that might have been earned on Azure, and Microsoft's 20 per cent revenue share means it collects whether the models run on its cloud or a competitor's. Garman said there was still more demand for AI services than supply of computing power. "The OpenAI team, I think, would gladly take more capacity from us this year and next year and the year after that as we add it," he said. The supply constraint may be real, but the revenue constraint is what the market is watching. OpenAI's models are now available everywhere. The question is whether everywhere is enough.

Microsoft will no longer have exclusive access to OpenAI's technology

April 27 (Reuters) - Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab will no longer have exclusive access to OpenAI's artificial intelligence models and products, a significant change that would allow the startup to sell its technology across rival cloud ⁠platforms including Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab and Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab. Shares of Microsoft tumbled nearly 3% after the announcement on Monday, while Alphabet and Amazon gained slightly. Under the reworked partnership, Microsoft will remain OpenAI's primary cloud ⁠partner and have a license to OpenAI intellectual property through 2032. The Windows maker has emerged as ⁠a major player in the artificial intelligence race in recent years thanks ⁠to its early bet and access to technology from ⁠the ChatGPT creator. Reporting by Aditya Soni and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

OpenAI and Microsoft loosen ties in revised AI deal

Microsoft and OpenAI have loosened the terms of their landmark partnership, signalling growing distance in a relationship that has underpinned the AI boom. Under revised measures announced on Monday, OpenAI will be free to sell its technology more widely, while Microsoft will lose exclusive access to its models. The changes further unwind key elements of the alliance between the two companies, removing revenue-sharing obligations for Microsoft but giving OpenAI more flexibility to strike deals with other cloud computing providers. The new terms underscore the growing separation between the fast-growing start-up and its longstanding partner, clearing a path for OpenAI to increase revenues, justify its $852bn valuation and set its sights on a blockbuster IPO. Under the revised deal, Microsoft will keep its $135bn stake, making it the company's largest shareholder. OpenAI will continue to pay Microsoft a revenue share on its products and services until 2030, now subject to a cap. The company did not give specifics on the cap, but one person familiar said it was likely to be an annual arrangement. After 2032, the software giant will retain a non-exclusive licence to OpenAI's models, while OpenAI will no longer get a revenue share from its products being sold by Microsoft. A contentious measure between the companies called the "AGI Clause" has been scrapped. The clause would cut off Microsoft from OpenAI's technology if the start-up created a system that reached artificial general intelligence -- defined as a "highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work". "The rapid pace of innovation requires us to continue to evolve our partnership to benefit our customers and both companies," Microsoft said, adding the "amended agreement" would simplify the partnership. "The greater predictability in the amended agreement strengthens our joint ability to build and operate AI platforms at scale while providing both companies the flexibility to pursue new opportunities," it added. OpenAI said it had "established a wind-down process to no longer transfer frontier research IP other than what is necessary for Microsoft to commercialise". Since investing an initial $1bn in OpenAI in 2019, Microsoft has been the company's exclusive cloud provider and has sold its products through its Azure platform to enterprises. Under the new arrangement, OpenAI can deliver its products through any cloud provider, but they must be served on Azure first. This clarification is likely to allow OpenAI to proceed with its $50bn arrangement with Amazon and to offer its agentic product, Frontier, to be offered through Amazon Web Services. The FT previously reported that Microsoft was weighing legal action for a potential breach of contract related to OpenAI's deal with Amazon. "This keeps the partnership, but removes the bottlenecks," said OpenAI. "Microsoft remains deeply aligned as a major shareholder and infrastructure partner, while OpenAI now has the independence to build and scale globally on our own terms." The deal comes as a trial opens on Monday over Elon Musk's claims related to OpenAI's transition from a non-profit into a for-profit entity. OpenAI is accused of deceiving Musk into giving a charitable contribution, while Microsoft is accused of "aiding and abetting" the breach of trust. A legal defeat would jeopardise their multibillion-dollar partnership.

OpenAI brings its models to Amazon's cloud after ending exclusivity with Microsoft

AWS customers can experiment with OpenAI's models as well as its Codex agent for writing code, all through Amazon Bedrock, the companies announced on Tuesday. The services will become generally available in the next few weeks. "This is what our customers have been asking us for for a really long time," AWS CEO Matt Garman said at a launch event in San Francisco. Until now, developers could draw on so-called open-weight models from OpenAI that came to AWS in August. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sent a recorded message about the announcement, as he's currently in court across the Bay Bridge in Oakland for his case against Elon Musk. "I wish I could be there with you in person today, my schedule got taken away from me today," Altman said in the video. "I wanted to send a short message, though, because we're really excited about our partnership with AWS and what it means for our customers, and I wanted to say thank you to Matt and the whole AWS team." A new service called Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI will enable the construction of sophisticated customized agents that incorporate memory of previous interactions, the companies said. Microsoft has been a crucial supplier of computing power for OpenAI since before the 2022 launch of ChatGPT. Denise Dresser, OpenAI's revenue chief, told employees in a memo earlier this month that the longstanding Microsoft relationship has been critical but "has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are -- for many that's Bedrock." On Monday, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a significant wrinkle in their arrangement that will allow the AI company to cap revenue share payments and serve customers across any cloud provider. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called the announcement "very interesting" in a post on X, adding that more details would be shared on Tuesday. OpenAI and Amazon have been getting closer in other ways. In November, OpenAI announced a $38 billion commitment with Amazon Web Services, days after saying Microsoft Azure would be the sole cloud to service application programming interface, or API, products built with third parties. Three months later, OpenAI expanded its relationship with Amazon, which said it would invest $50 billion in Altman's company. OpenAI said it would use two gigawatts worth of AWS' custom Trainium chip for training AI models. The partnership was announced after The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI failed to meet internal goals on users and revenue. Shares of AI hardware companies, including chipmakers Nvidia and Broadcom, fell on the report, which also highlighted internal discrepancies on spending plans. "This is ridiculous," Sam Altman and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said in a statement about the story. "We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day."

Microsoft cuts OpenAI revenue share in a fresh step to loosen their AI alliance

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Microsoft said Monday it will no longer pay a share of its revenue to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the latest move to untether a close partnership that helped unleash an artificial intelligence boom. OpenAI relied exclusively on Microsoft's investments in cloud computing services to build the technology that helped make ChatGPT a household name. Microsoft, in turn, relied on OpenAI's technology to build its own AI assistant Copilot. But the partnership has evolved as San Francisco-based OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, has shifted to a capitalistic enterprise on a path toward an initial public offering on Wall Street and has balanced its reliance on Microsoft with other cloud partners like Amazon, Google and Oracle. OpenAI said Monday it will continue to pay Microsoft a share of its revenue through 2030. The two companies said Microsoft remains the primary cloud computing partner for OpenAI, and products made by the AI company will ship first on Microsoft's cloud platform, called Azure, "unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities." Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors Monday that the new agreement "puts OpenAI on a strong path forward to going public through IPO given its clearer opportunity in the cloud environment while reducing significant barriers from its original partnership with Microsoft." Ives said it's also important for Microsoft as it "looks to develop tech independence from OpenAI" in advancing Copilot's capabilities and partnering with other AI providers such as OpenAI rival Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude.

Microsoft drops its exclusive licence to OpenAI's technology

OpenAI can now sell to Amazon, Google, and any cloud and stops paying OpenAI a revenue share in return Both companies announced the revised agreement in a joint statement on Monday. Microsoft retains a non-exclusive licence to OpenAI's intellectual property through 2032, remains the primary cloud partner, and keeps its 27% equity stake. OpenAI will continue paying Microsoft a revenue share through 2030, capped at a total amount. Microsoft shares fell ~3% on the news; Amazon and Alphabet gained slightly. Microsoft and OpenAI announced on Monday that they have amended their partnership agreement in a restructuring that ends Microsoft's exclusive right to sell OpenAI's artificial intelligence models and products. Under the revised terms, Microsoft will retain a licence to OpenAI's intellectual property for models and products through 2032, but that licence will now be non-exclusive. OpenAI may now sell its products and serve customers across any cloud provider, not only Microsoft Azure. In exchange, Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI on the products it resells. Revenue share payments running in the other direction, from OpenAI to Microsoft, will continue through 2030, independent of OpenAI's technology progress, at the same percentage but subject to a total cap. Microsoft remains OpenAI's primary cloud partner, and OpenAI products will continue to ship first on Azure unless Microsoft cannot or chooses not to support the necessary capabilities. The market read the agreement as a net negative for Microsoft and a net positive for its cloud rivals. Microsoft shares fell approximately 3% on Monday following the announcement. Amazon and Alphabet each gained slightly. The logic is straightforward: Microsoft's exclusive distribution rights were a structural competitive advantage in the cloud market that is now being surrendered. Azure had, until today, been the only public cloud on which OpenAI's most capable models were natively available, giving Microsoft a differentiation that drove enterprise Azure adoption at the height of the AI arms race in 2023 and 2024. The removal of exclusivity means AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud can now offer OpenAI models directly to their customers, levelling the competitive landscape. For OpenAI, the logic runs in the opposite direction. The company's ability to strike deals with Microsoft's competitors has been constrained since its founding partnership was established. In February 2026, Amazon and OpenAI announced a major strategic partnership in which Amazon agreed to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI and AWS will serve as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI's enterprise platform Frontier. OpenAI separately expanded its existing $38 billion AWS agreement by $100 billion over eight years. That announcement, which came while the exclusive Microsoft agreement was still nominally in place, raised the question of how OpenAI would navigate the apparent tension. Monday's restructuring is the answer: by renegotiating the Microsoft exclusivity away, OpenAI has given itself the contractual freedom to honour the Amazon commitment and to pursue further cloud distribution partnerships without restriction. The restructuring also removes one of the most legally unusual provisions in the original partnership: the AGI clause. Under the prior agreement, Microsoft was required to determine whether OpenAI had reached artificial general intelligence, a term for an AI system that rivals or exceeds human intelligence across a wide range of tasks, as a trigger for a change in the terms of the relationship. That clause reflected the theoretical possibility, important to OpenAI's nonprofit mission, that the moment of AGI arrival would require a different governance arrangement. The amended agreement, removes this clause entirely, simplifying the legal relationship and removing an asymmetric interpretive power from Microsoft that OpenAI may have found uncomfortable as the company has grown in commercial scale and strategic independence. The background to Monday's announcement is a six-month negotiation. In October 2025, when OpenAI completed its recapitalization as a public benefit corporation and Microsoft converted its investment at a valuation of $135 billion (representing approximately 27% of the company on a diluted basis), the two companies also committed OpenAI to spending $250 billion on Microsoft Azure cloud services. That commitment, and the revenue share arrangements associated with it, were the financial architecture of the original partnership. The Monday restructuring simplifies that architecture: Microsoft retains its equity position, its primary cloud status, and OpenAI's revenue share through 2030, but gives up the exclusivity and the obligation to pay its own revenue share. The net financial effect for Microsoft will depend on the relative size of the revenue share it was paying versus the revenue share it will continue to receive, figures that neither company has disclosed. The trial context is directly relevant. The Musk v. Altman case, which began jury selection on the same day, centres partly on the question of whether Microsoft aided and abetted OpenAI's breach of its nonprofit charter by facilitating the for-profit conversion. Monday's restructuring, which further simplifies and commercialises the Microsoft-OpenAI relationship, is not directly at issue in the trial but provides contextual evidence of the direction in which the relationship has been evolving since Musk left the board. For investors and enterprise customers, the more immediate question is whether the removal of exclusivity will materially change the competitive position of Azure vs AWS and Google Cloud for AI workloads, and the ~3% Microsoft share price decline suggests the market has answered that in the affirmative, at least for now.

OpenAI to make its models available via Amazon's servers

Why it matters: The move comes a day after OpenAI and Microsoft announced a revised partnership that had required developers to use Microsoft Azure to access most OpenAI services. Driving the news: OpenAI and Amazon said customers will soon be able to access OpenAI models and its Codex tool via AWS and also that OpenAI will power a new Amazon system for server-based AI agents. * That's in addition to an existing deal, announced in February, that called for the two companies to collaborate on a new kind of server-based AI computer for businesses. Between the lines: OpenAI is betting that it can win more business customers if its models are available through whatever cloud provider they are already using, which for many companies is AWS. * OpenAI gave up some revenue to gain the flexibility. As part of the revised pact with Microsoft, it's no longer getting a share of Microsoft's revenue related to its models. * Google is studying how it might be able to work with OpenAI given the revised deal with Microsoft, per a source familiar with the situation. The big picture: Both OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting to maximize their business ahead of likely IPOs for both companies that could happen as soon as this year.

OpenAI and Microsoft make a huge change to their exclusive partnership - does this open the door for AWS to swoop in?

* OpenAI declares Microsoft a "primary cloud partner," but it's no longer an exclusive partner * The "greater predictability" will help the ChatGPT maker to "scale" * Recent shifts continue to point toward an IPO OpenAI has declared an end to Microsoft's exclusive cloud rights, noting it plans to use other cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud going forward. The ChatGPT maker noted Microsoft will remain its "primary cloud partner," whereby it will select Azure as its first choice wherever suitable, but the company now promises to "serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider." As part of the changes, Microsoft will retain access to OpenAI models via a license that lasts until 2032, but it's not unique to Microsoft as OpenAI looks to step away from this exclusivity. OpenAI and Microsoft are no longer exclusive "The greater predictability in the amended agreement strengthens our joint ability to build and operate AI platforms at scale while providing both companies the flexibility to pursue new opportunities," OpenAI wrote in its announcement. As for Microsoft, it's no longer set to pay a revenue share to OpenAI as it has done under the exclusivity deal, but it will remain a major shareholder in the company. OpenAI will continue to pay a revenue share to Microsoft until 2030 at the same percentage, with a cap in place. It marks around five years of Azure exclusivity, whereby all major products were trained on, and distributed via, Azure. With the contract effectively blocking OpenAI from using AWS, Google Cloud and others, changes started to become apparent in 2025-2026, driven by the Oracle-backed Stargate Project and, a year later, a strategic partnership with Amazon. Increasing independence could play into OpenAI's strategy to go public, rumors of which have been circulating for a number of months. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button! And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

Microsoft and OpenAI gut their exclusive deal, freeing OpenAI to sell on AWS and Google Cloud

Microsoft and OpenAI on Monday announced a sweeping overhaul of the partnership that has defined the commercial AI era, dismantling key pillars of exclusivity and revenue-sharing that bound the two companies together for years and replacing them with a looser, time-limited arrangement that gives both sides far more freedom to pursue rival relationships. The amended agreement, disclosed simultaneously in blog posts from both companies, marks the most significant restructuring since Microsoft first invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 -- and it transforms what was once the most consequential exclusive technology alliance in a generation into something that more closely resembles a strategic but arm's-length commercial relationship. Under the new terms, Microsoft will no longer pay any revenue share to OpenAI when customers access OpenAI models through Azure. OpenAI, meanwhile, will continue paying a revenue share to Microsoft through 2030 -- at the same 20 percent rate -- but that obligation is now subject to a total cap. Microsoft retains a license to OpenAI's intellectual property for models and products through 2032, but that license is now explicitly non-exclusive. And OpenAI, critically, can now serve all of its products to customers on any cloud provider -- including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud -- ending the exclusivity that had been a cornerstone of the original deal. "The rapid pace of innovation requires us to continue to evolve our partnership to benefit our customers and both companies," Microsoft wrote in its blog post Monday. OpenAI echoed the framing, calling the amended agreement a move "grounded in flexibility, certainty, and a focus on delivering the benefits of AI broadly." The diplomatic language belies the drama that led to this moment -- months of behind-the-scenes tension, competing deal announcements, public contradictions, and even the specter of litigation between two companies whose fates have been intertwined since the earliest days of the generative AI revolution. To understand why Monday's announcement matters so much, it helps to understand what came before it. When Microsoft poured its initial $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019, and then followed with a cumulative investment exceeding $13 billion, it secured something extraordinary: exclusive commercial access to OpenAI's models and intellectual property. Azure became the sole cloud provider for OpenAI's API products. Microsoft integrated OpenAI's GPT models into everything from Bing to Office to GitHub Copilot. The arrangement was, by any measure, one of the most lopsided technology licensing deals in modern history -- Microsoft got privileged access to the most capable AI models on the planet, and OpenAI got the capital and infrastructure it needed to scale. The deal even contained an unusual provision: Microsoft's exclusive rights would remain in force until OpenAI achieved artificial general intelligence, or AGI -- a loosely defined milestone referring to AI systems that rival or exceed human intelligence across a broad range of tasks. OpenAI's board retained the authority to declare when AGI had been reached, at which point certain commercial terms would change. It was, in effect, a philosophical tripwire embedded in a business contract. That structure worked well enough when OpenAI was a research lab with a modest commercial footprint. But as ChatGPT exploded into the mainstream in late 2022 and OpenAI's annualized revenue rocketed into the billions, the constraints began to chafe. OpenAI found itself locked into a single cloud ecosystem at precisely the moment when enterprises -- its fastest-growing customer segment -- were demanding multi-cloud flexibility. In an internal memo earlier this month, OpenAI's revenue chief Denise Dresser put it bluntly, telling staff that the Microsoft partnership had "limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are," according to a report from The Verge. The proximate cause of Monday's restructuring was not a philosophical disagreement about AI safety or corporate governance. It was a $50 billion check from Amazon. In February, OpenAI announced that Amazon would invest up to $50 billion in the company -- $15 billion upfront, with another $35 billion to follow when certain unspecified conditions were met. In exchange, OpenAI agreed to expand its existing cloud agreement with AWS by $100 billion over eight years and, most controversially, committed to making AWS the exclusive third-party distribution provider for Frontier, its new enterprise agent-building platform. OpenAI also agreed to co-develop "stateful runtime technology" on AWS Bedrock, the infrastructure layer that allows AI agents to maintain memory and context over extended tasks. The problem was that OpenAI's existing contract with Microsoft almost certainly prohibited these arrangements. Microsoft held exclusive rights to any OpenAI product accessed through an API -- a category that plainly included Frontier. On the very day OpenAI announced the Amazon deal, Microsoft issued a pointed public statement insisting that "Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider of stateless OpenAI APIs" and that "OpenAI's first party products, including Frontier, will continue to be hosted on Azure." The contradiction between the two announcements was stark, and it created immediate legal exposure. The Financial Times reported in March that Microsoft was actively considering legal action to enforce its contractual rights. The situation placed OpenAI in an impossible position: it had made promises to Amazon that it seemingly could not keep under the terms of its Microsoft agreement. Monday's deal resolves that impasse entirely. By converting Microsoft's license from exclusive to non-exclusive and explicitly granting OpenAI the right to serve products on any cloud, the new terms retroactively validate the Amazon arrangement and eliminate the legal overhang. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wasted no time celebrating. "We're excited to make OpenAI's models available directly to customers on Bedrock in the coming weeks, alongside the upcoming Stateful Runtime Environment," he wrote on X, adding that the company would share more details at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday. The financial mechanics of the new deal deserve careful parsing, because they reveal which side gave up what -- and who came out ahead. Under the old arrangement, money flowed in both directions. When customers bought ChatGPT subscriptions or accessed OpenAI models through their own applications, OpenAI paid Microsoft a cut -- reportedly 20 percent. Conversely, when enterprise customers accessed OpenAI models through Azure's API, Microsoft paid OpenAI a share of that revenue. This bilateral structure reflected the deep integration between the two companies: Microsoft was simultaneously OpenAI's investor, cloud provider, distribution partner, and largest customer. The new deal makes the cash flow one-directional. Microsoft stops paying OpenAI entirely. OpenAI continues paying Microsoft its 20 percent share, but only through 2030, and now subject to a total cap whose precise dollar figure has not been disclosed. Given that OpenAI's revenue is growing rapidly -- the company was reportedly on pace to generate tens of billions annually -- that cap could become material relatively quickly. For Microsoft, the trade-off is straightforward: it sacrifices the exclusivity that made Azure the only gateway to OpenAI's models, but it gains immediate financial relief by eliminating its outbound revenue-share payments while continuing to collect inbound payments for several more years. And it retains approximately 27 percent ownership of OpenAI's for-profit entity, meaning it participates in the company's growth regardless of which cloud serves the workloads. Last quarter alone, Microsoft reported $7.5 billion in revenue from its OpenAI investment in a single quarter, according to TechCrunch's reporting. For OpenAI, the calculus is different. It accepts a continued obligation to pay Microsoft through 2030, but it gains the commercial freedom to sell everywhere -- a freedom that is arguably worth far more than the revenue-share savings. Enterprise customers overwhelmingly operate in multi-cloud environments. Being locked into Azure was not just a technical constraint; it was a sales objection that OpenAI's competitors, particularly Anthropic and Google, exploited relentlessly. One of the more philosophically intriguing aspects of Monday's announcement is what it does to the AGI provision that once governed the partnership. Under the original agreement, Microsoft's exclusive commercial rights were tied to a trigger: if OpenAI's board determined that the company had achieved AGI, certain terms -- including Microsoft's access to the most advanced models -- would change. The provision was meant to ensure that a truly superintelligent system would remain under the nonprofit board's control rather than being commercially exploited. In practice, it created perverse incentives: OpenAI had a financial reason to never declare AGI, and Microsoft had a financial reason to argue that AGI had not been reached regardless of what the technology could actually do. The new deal sidesteps this entirely. Microsoft's license now runs through a fixed calendar date -- 2032 -- "independent of OpenAI's technology progress," as the companies put it. The AGI trigger, a concept that once sat at the philosophical heart of the partnership, has been replaced by a spreadsheet. Andrew Curran, a close observer of OpenAI's governance, noted on X that language defining AGI had been removed from OpenAI's website, sharing a screenshot showing the change. The move drew sharp reactions. One commenter observed that "removing the definition = removing the accountability. whoever controls when AGI is declared controls a lot of commercial terms." The shift reflects a broader maturation -- or perhaps disillusionment -- within the AI industry regarding AGI as a meaningful commercial or governance concept. When the original deal was struck, AGI felt like a distant, almost mythical threshold. Now, with models like GPT-5.5 demonstrating increasingly general capabilities, the term has become more of a marketing slogan than a technical benchmark. Replacing it with fixed dates and dollar caps is, in some sense, an admission that the industry has moved beyond the framework that once defined this partnership. The most immediate beneficiary of the new arrangement is the enterprise customer. For years, organizations that wanted access to OpenAI's models had essentially one option: Azure. That constraint is now gone. Within weeks, according to Jassy, OpenAI's models will be available on AWS Bedrock alongside the stateful runtime environment that powers long-running AI agents. Google Cloud is presumably not far behind. This multi-cloud availability arrives at a moment when the AI infrastructure market is undergoing rapid consolidation and expansion simultaneously. Meta recently committed $48 billion to cloud providers CoreWeave and Nebius. Amazon's investment in OpenAI, combined with its existing relationship with Anthropic -- in which Amazon has invested up to $4 billion -- positions AWS as a model-agnostic platform where enterprises can mix and match AI capabilities. Microsoft, meanwhile, has developed its own relationship with Anthropic, using Claude to power agentic products -- a hedge against the very OpenAI dependency it spent billions creating. The competitive dynamics are now genuinely complex. Microsoft competes with OpenAI in AI products (Copilot vs. ChatGPT), partners with OpenAI's rival Anthropic, and remains OpenAI's largest shareholder. OpenAI sells on Azure, AWS, and soon everywhere else, while building its own data centers. Amazon invests in both OpenAI and Anthropic. Google builds its own models while also hosting competitors on Vertex AI. Jehangeer Hasan, a technology commentator, captured the mood on X, calling the announcement a "notable shift in the cloud AI landscape" that signals "intensifying multi-cloud competition and a push toward giving developers more flexibility instead of locking them into a single ecosystem." Chris Alexander, an engineer, offered a more candid assessment: "honestly Azure's OpenAI endpoints are so unreliable, we mostly just hit you all directly," adding that "it would be nice to have options in AWS or GCP for sure." Several open questions remain. The precise dollar amount of the revenue-share cap has not been disclosed, and it will matter enormously as OpenAI's revenue scales. The meaning of "first on Azure" -- whether it implies a meaningful exclusivity window or merely simultaneous availability -- remains deliberately ambiguous. And OpenAI's own infrastructure ambitions, including plans to build proprietary data centers, could eventually reduce its dependence on any third-party cloud, including Azure. Microsoft's position, while less dominant than before, is not as diminished as some early commentary suggested. It remains OpenAI's primary cloud provider, its largest shareholder, and a licensee of its technology through the end of the decade. It has diversified its own AI strategy with investments in Anthropic, its own Phi and MAI model families, and deep integration of AI across its product portfolio. The company reported $7.5 billion in OpenAI-related revenue last quarter -- a figure that demonstrates the sheer financial scale of the relationship even in its loosened form. For OpenAI, the new agreement is a coming-of-age moment. The company that once depended on Microsoft for everything -- capital, compute, distribution, and credibility -- now operates as an independent force capable of striking multi-billion-dollar deals with Microsoft's biggest rivals. Sam Altman announced the changes on X with characteristic brevity: "We have updated our partnership with Microsoft." Seven years ago, when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Altman first shook hands on a deal to commercialize artificial intelligence, the arrangement rested on the assumption that OpenAI needed Microsoft more than Microsoft needed OpenAI. Every clause -- the exclusivity, the AGI trigger, the revenue share -- reflected that original imbalance. Monday's restructuring is proof that the assumption no longer holds. The partnership that launched the generative AI revolution has survived, but the power dynamics that created it have not. In the AI industry, it turns out, the only thing that moves faster than the technology is the leverage.

Microsoft and OpenAI Rework AI Deal, Cutting Exclusivity and AGI Provisions - Decrypt

The changes take effect immediately while Microsoft retains its stake valued at over $135 billion. Microsoft will continue licensing OpenAI's technology through 2032, but is ending its exclusive partnership with the AI company, according to announcements from both firms Monday. Under the restructured agreement, OpenAI can serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider, ending Microsoft's previous status as exclusive cloud partner. Revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft will continue through 2030, though other revenue-sharing arrangements are eliminated. The new agreement removes complex language that could have changed the partnership if OpenAI declared it had reached artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Microsoft's stake in OpenAI is valued at more than $135 billion, according to the New York Times. Microsoft retains its license to OpenAI intellectual property for models and products through 2032, preserving the tech giant's access to the underlying technology while OpenAI gains operational independence. The partnership restructuring follows Microsoft's earlier moves to diversify its AI relationships. In September, Microsoft said it would reduce reliance on OpenAI by purchasing models from rival Anthropic. Just recently, Microsoft launched an AI-powered tool called Copilot Researcher, which combines OpenAI's GPT and Anthropic's Claude with impressive results. When OpenAI raised $110 billion in fresh funding from Amazon, SoftBank, and Nvidia in February, the startup and Microsoft issued a joint statement saying that they continue to be close allies despite the AI giant's growing list of supporters. "Microsoft and OpenAI continue to work closely across research, engineering, and product development, building on years of deep collaboration and shared success," they said in February. "Microsoft maintains its exclusive license and access to intellectual property across OpenAI models and products. Collaborations like the partnership between OpenAI and Amazon were always contemplated under our agreements and Microsoft is excited to see what they build together." Microsoft's stock (MSFT) is down slightly since the opening bell on Monday, recently trading at $423 per share -- down about 0.3% on the day so far.

Amazon and OpenAI expand partnership amid enterprise push

The expansion gives OpenAI access to a vast new pool of potential users and to Amazon's dominant cloud-computing capabilities.Nathan Stirk / Getty Images file Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday afternoon announced a significant expansion of its partnership with OpenAI, which will allow its customers to access OpenAI's leading AI systems via Amazon's cloud-computing platforms. The expansion, announced at a high-profile event with AWS and OpenAI leadership called "What's Next for AWS," gives OpenAI access to a vast new pool of potential users and to Amazon's dominant cloud-computing capabilities, just as it redoubles its push toward enterprise clients. The move comes as many companies are increasingly looking to agents -- AI capable of taking on and executing relatively complex tasks -- as a way to boost employee productivity and automate rote chores. "Enterprises want to build with the most capable AI models and agents available," AWS said in a statement announcing the partnership. "They also need the security posture, operational maturity, and data governance that production workloads demand. Starting today, we are bringing those together." On Monday, OpenAI announced that it reached a deal with its longtime exclusive cloud-computing partner, Microsoft, to be able to sell its AI systems with different computing providers. Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI and receives 20% of the AI company's revenue as part of their relationship. "Today, we are announcing an amended agreement to simplify our partnership and the way we work together, grounded in flexibility, certainty, and a focus on delivering the benefits of AI broadly," OpenAI said in its Monday announcement. OpenAI will continue to pay the revenue share to Microsoft through 2030. Monday's agreement opened the door to Tuesday's announcement with AWS, which will now incorporate OpenAI's leading systems -- like its new GPT-5.5 and coding-oriented Codex models -- into its Amazon Bedrock cloud computing service. Many tech stocks slid southward on Tuesday after The Wall Street Journal published a report that an OpenAI leader had privately expressed worries about the company missing its revenue and user targets. Steve Sharpe, OpenAI's head of business and financial communications, told NBC News that the company is "on an extremely steep growth curve across consumer, enterprise and developers." AWS also announced a significant update to its Quick personal AI assistant, launching a stand-alone desktop app along with increased connectivity to many workplace software tools like Zoom and Salesforce. Both OpenAI and Anthropic launched their own desktop apps in recent months, which can give users extra flexibility to apply AI features or analysis to documents or tools on their local computers. Amazon's Quick, which was originally launched in October, is already used by companies like BMW, the NFL and Southwest Airlines. Tuesday's announcement emphasized Quick's personalized and agentic abilities, allowing the tool to learn which contacts are most relevant for a specific user. "Unlike AI of the past, these assistants have a deeper understanding of what I use as a tools in my laptop and what could work across various threads," said Swami Sivasubramanian, the vice president of agentic AI at AWS, noting that he and a team of six principal scientists created the personalized desktop assistant in three months. AWS CEO Matt Garman echoed the sentiment during Tuesday's event: "AI and agentic development has completely transformed what is possible in the software development world," Garman said. "It really is just incredible, both in creating software [and] in operating software." AWS, which is a subsidiary of the larger Amazon corporation, undergirds a huge swath of global internet infrastructure, providing key computing, storage and networking capabilities to millions of businesses around the world. AWS is an economic engine for Amazon, providing 18% of Amazon's overall sales and over half of Amazon's income in 2025. AWS has embraced AI in recent years, creating its own generative AI model called Nova and designing its own chips geared for AI cloud computing applications. With its immense computing capabilities and new generation of custom chips, Amazon has recently inked notable deals with some of the biggest names in America's AI industry. On Friday, AWS announced it would sell "tens of millions" of its latest chips to Meta as part of the Facebook-owner's renewed AI push. Last Monday, AWS also announced a $100 billion commitment from Anthropic over the next 10 years, securing access to Amazon's custom AI chips and related processors. And in February, Amazon announced it would invest $50 billion in OpenAI, building on their existing $38 billion agreement announced in November.

OpenAI breaks free of Microsoft's cloud

Why it matters: The shift ends OpenAI's effective cloud exclusivity, widening its reach to customers using AWS, Google Cloud or others -- and intensifying AI platform competition. Driving the news: A rewritten deal frees OpenAI to sell through any cloud, caps Microsoft's cut of OpenAI revenue and scraps a controversial provision that would have changed the companies' business relationship once artificial general intelligence (AGI) was achieved. Zoom in: Amazon and OpenAI are poised to quickly capitalize on the change. * "We're excited to make OpenAI's models available directly to customers on Bedrock in the coming weeks," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on X on Monday, promising more details at a San Francisco event AWS is hosting on Tuesday. * The companies had previously discussed working together, but earlier plans focused on building a new AI system outside OpenAI's then-exclusive Microsoft deal. Zoom out: The revised pact comes amid a fast-moving AI landscape that already looks significantly different than it did in October, when the prior round of changes to the Microsoft-Open AI relationship was announced. * OpenAI is increasingly focused on securing business revenue, a task that can be made significantly easier if it can offer its services via whichever cloud its potential customers are already using. Between the lines: Each company gets some things it wants out of the revamped pact. * The revised deal kills the AGI trigger -- a clause that hinged Microsoft's IP rights on OpenAI declaring it had achieved AGI, which both companies found too vague. * Microsoft now holds non-exclusive rights to OpenAI's IP (excluding research) through 2032, leaving OpenAI free to license to others. What Microsoft gets * Microsoft no longer has to share revenue with OpenAI that it gets from serving its models via Azure. * It continues to get 20% of OpenAI revenue until 2030, though that is now subject to a cap that the companies did not publicly disclose. * And OpenAI still has to ship its models first for Azure, per the revised terms. * Microsoft also gets intellectual property rights to OpenAI's products (but not its research) through 2032.

AWS brings OpenAI's AI models and Codex programming assistant to its cloud - SiliconANGLE

Amazon Web Services Inc. today made OpenAI Group PBC's large language models available in its cloud platform. The algorithms are accessible through Amazon Bedrock alongside Codex, the ChatGPT developer's programming assistant. In addition, AWS is rolling out a new offering called Bedrock Managed Agents. It's designed to ease the task of building OpenAI-powered AI agents. The introduction of the product integrations is not unexpected. On Monday, OpenAI revised its partnership agreement with Microsoft Corp., which was previously the only company that could offer the ChatGPT developer's models via its cloud. The updated contract enables competing cloud providers to distribute OpenAI models. That AWS is the first Microsoft rival to join the fray is not too surprising. This past February, Amazon.com Inc. invested $15 billion in OpenAI and announced plans to provide the company with another $35 billion within a few months. The online retail giant is also a major stakeholder in Anthropic PBC. OpenAI's latest AI models are available to Bedrock users in limited preview. The newest algorithm in the lineup, GPT-5.5, made its debut last week. OpenAI says that the LLM can perform tasks such as optimizing the performance of graphics card clusters and developing mathematical proofs. It outperforms Claude Opus 4.7, Anthropic's most advanced broadly available model, across several benchmarks. Bedrock also provides access to Codex via its application programming interface. Customers can use the Codex desktop app, an extension that embeds the AI into the popular Visual Studio Code programming tool and the Codex CLI. The latter offering is a coding agent that developers can access via the command line. Like OpenAI's LLMs, the Bedrock version of Codex is available in limited preview. Usage of both offerings counts towards AWS spending commitments, which will simplify procurement for the cloud giant's enterprise customers. Developers, meanwhile, can use their existing AWS credentials to access OpenAI's technologies. The LLM and Codex integrations are rolling out alongside Bedrock Managed Agents. It's an offering that speeds up the process of developing AWS-hosted AI agents powered by OpenAI models. The new service combines the LLMs with the OpenAI agent harness, a set of software modules that improve agents' ability to perform long-running tasks. AWS says that the toolkit also speeds up prompt response times and facilitates "sharper reasoning". Bedrock Managed Agents uses the OpenAI agent harness together with another collection of re-packaged software modules called Bedrock AgentCore. According to AWS, the latter toolkit that helps agents manage the information they use to complete tasks. That removes the need for developers to build data management scaffolding from scratch. AgentCore also eases several related tasks. It includes pre-packaged tools that enable agents to run the code they write, access the web and perform other actions. There's also a gateway that eases the process of giving agents access to external tools. Bedrock Managed Agents is available in limited preview.

OpenAI expands to AWS as Microsoft exclusivity ends

Microsoft and OpenAI announced a restructuring of their partnership, ending Microsoft's exclusive license to OpenAI's models and products. This change enables Amazon to distribute OpenAI's technology through its AWS cloud platform. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy described the announcement as "very interesting" and stated that the company is excited to offer OpenAI's models directly to customers on Bedrock in the coming weeks. This shift increases the competition in the enterprise AI landscape. The revised agreement reflects a shift that began in February when Amazon and OpenAI formed a multi-year strategic partnership that included a $50 billion investment from Amazon aimed at co-developing a Stateful Runtime Environment on Amazon Bedrock. Under that prior deal, AWS served as the exclusive third-party cloud provider for OpenAI Frontier, the company's platform for managing AI agents. With the new terms, Microsoft will remain OpenAI's primary cloud partner, holding a non-exclusive license through 2032. OpenAI is now free to serve its products across any cloud provider. Microsoft will end its revenue share payments to OpenAI but will continue capped payments through 2030. OpenAI's internal communications indicate a strong demand for the Amazon offering, suggesting that its previous relationship with Microsoft may have limited its growth potential. Amazon highlighted that its AI revenue within AWS has reached an annual run rate of $15 billion, with OpenAI's commitment of over $100 billion in cloud spending underpinning Amazon's $200 billion capital expenditure plan for 2026. In connection with the agreement, OpenAI pledged to utilize approximately 2 gigawatts of AWS Trainium capacity. Microsoft continues to participate as a significant shareholder in OpenAI, focusing on collaboration in areas such as datacenter capacity and next-generation silicon. Following the announcement, Microsoft's stock experienced a brief dip before recovering. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that the company is now equipped to provide its products and services across all cloud platforms.

Amazon touts a 'major expansion' with OpenAI as Microsoft ties loosen

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Amazon announced what it called a "major expansion" of its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Tuesday, a day after the artificial intelligence company said it was loosening its ties to longtime backer Microsoft. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the collaboration with Amazon's cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, would involve co-developing a new platform for AI agents that can do computer-based work on people's behalf. Altman spoke via prerecorded video message to an Amazon event in San Francisco at the same time as he was appearing in federal court across San Francisco Bay in Oakland for a civil trial brought by rival OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk. Microsoft had said Monday it will no longer pay a share of its revenue to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the latest move to untether a close partnership that helped unleash an artificial intelligence boom. OpenAI relied exclusively on Microsoft's investments in cloud computing services to build the technology that helped make ChatGPT a household name. Microsoft, in turn, relied on OpenAI's technology to build its own AI assistant Copilot. But the partnership has evolved as San Francisco-based OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, has shifted to a capitalistic enterprise on a path toward an initial public offering on Wall Street and has balanced its reliance on Microsoft with other cloud partners like Amazon, Google and Oracle. OpenAI said Monday it will continue to pay Microsoft a share of its revenue through 2030, though the rate will be capped. OpenAI has been on a race to boost sales of its AI technology by focusing on big business customers. Its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, also spoke at the Amazon event. Microsoft remains the primary cloud computing partner for OpenAI, and products made by the AI company will ship first on Microsoft's cloud platform, called Azure, "unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities," both companies said. Altman suggested in his remarks Tuesday that Amazon had those capabilities. "These systems need to run reliably and robustly," Altman said. "They need to be secure, they need to scale, and they need to fit in the environments where companies already run their businesses. And they need infrastructure that customers already trust for their most important workloads. That's what makes this partnership with AWS so important."

OpenAI and Microsoft are ending their exclusivity agreement

Well, it's official: Microsoft and OpenAI are no longer monogamous when it comes to AI, with both companies releasing statements confirming that their exclusivity agreement is over. Prior to the announcement, Microsoft and OpenAI's several-year-long partnership saw the former delivering the Azure cloud-based infrastructure and billions of dollars in funding for the company's breakout AI hit, ChatGPT. With the new agreement, "OpenAI can now serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider," however, Microsoft will remain OpenAI's primary cloud partner, with the AI firm's products to "ship first on Azure." This new open relationship makes sense in light of the recent news of Amazon investing $50 billion in OpenAI. A deal that includes silicon and gigawatts of compute. In fact, when news broke that OpenAI was in talks with Amazon, some reports suggested that Microsoft considered suing OpenAI. A rumor that makes it sound like the partnership between the two companies has soured in recent months. That said, the revised agreement sees Microsoft retain its license for OpenAI's models and various products through 2032; however, this is now non-exclusive. According to the statement, Microsoft is still a major shareholder in OpenAI, and "revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft" will continue through 2030, "independent of OpenAI's technology progress." Interestingly, as part of the restructuring, Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI. "While this amendment simplifies the partnership, the work we're doing together remains ambitious," the statement concludes. "From scaling gigawatts of new datacenter capacity, to collaborating on next- generation silicon, to applying AI to advance cybersecurity, and more, we're excited to keep partnering to advance and scale AI for people and organizations around the world."

OpenAI breaks free from exclusive AI pact with Microsoft

Microsoft and OpenAI have agreed to drop the software giant's exclusive right to sell the startup's AI models, opening the door for the ChatGPT maker to pursue deals with cloud-computing rivals like Amazon. In exchange for ending that exclusivity -- which helped boost Microsoft's cloud sales in the early years of the AI boom -- the world's largest software maker will no longer pay a revenue share on OpenAI products it resells on its cloud. The two companies announced the revised deal in a joint statement on Monday (Tuesday AEST).

OpenAI loosens Microsoft ties as Musk trial begins

Why it matters: OpenAI is rewriting the partnership that launched it while defending the legal premise on which it was built. Between the lines: Both OpenAI and Microsoft are trying to get ahead of potential obstacles in a fast changing AI world, while also having greater clarity on their financial terms and the flexibility to craft deals with others. Driving the news: Microsoft is giving up its exclusive right to sell access to OpenAI's models while remaining the AI giant's primary cloud provider. * That frees OpenAI to expand its efforts with Amazon, which CEO Andy Jassy indicated is imminent. * OpenAI could also sell its models through Google, assuming the two companies strike a deal. * Also, under the new agreement, Microsoft will no longer share revenue with OpenAI, but OpenAI will still pay Microsoft 20% of its revenue through 2030, though those payments will now be capped at an undisclosed level. Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly working on a deal with mobile chipmaker Qualcomm as OpenAI continues to plot its expansion into hardware. * And in California, jury selection began in Elon Musk's lawsuit over OpenAI's founding mission. What they're saying: "Microsoft has increasingly signaled interest in a broader multi-model strategy, while OpenAI has clear incentives to expand distribution more broadly across the market" analysts with Evercore ISI wrote in a note to clients on Monday reports Bloomberg. * A less exclusive OpenAI relationship still keeps Microsoft's Azure cloud busy (new models will still show up first on Azure) while avoiding over-dependence on one partner. Yes, but: Microsoft faces growing pressure to have a coherent AI strategy above and beyond its OpenAI relationship. Zoom out: OpenAI and rival AI lab Anthropic are locked in a race to define the enterprise AI market and to convince investors they deserve massive IPO valuations. * Both companies are reportedly eyeing major public listings in late 2026. * OpenAI's revised deal is widely viewed as IPO-friendly. It reduces perceived dependency risks on Microsoft, clarifies the financial relationship and frees the company to partner more broadly. The bottom line: OpenAI is trying to make itself less dependent on Microsoft just as Musk is challenging how the company was built in the first place.

Amazon Touts a 'Major Expansion' With OpenAI as Microsoft Ties Loosen

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Amazon announced what it called a "major expansion" of its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Tuesday, a day after the artificial intelligence company said it was loosening its ties to longtime backer Microsoft. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the collaboration with Amazon's cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, would involve co-developing a new platform for AI agents that can do computer-based work on people's behalf. Altman spoke via prerecorded video message to an Amazon event in San Francisco at the same time as he was appearing in federal court across San Francisco Bay in Oakland for a civil trial brought by rival OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk. Microsoft had said Monday it will no longer pay a share of its revenue to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the latest move to untether a close partnership that helped unleash an artificial intelligence boom. OpenAI relied exclusively on Microsoft's investments in cloud computing services to build the technology that helped make ChatGPT a household name. Microsoft, in turn, relied on OpenAI's technology to build its own AI assistant Copilot. But the partnership has evolved as San Francisco-based OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, has shifted to a capitalistic enterprise on a path toward an initial public offering on Wall Street and has balanced its reliance on Microsoft with other cloud partners like Amazon, Google and Oracle. OpenAI said Monday it will continue to pay Microsoft a share of its revenue through 2030, though the rate will be capped. OpenAI has been on a race to boost sales of its AI technology by focusing on big business customers. Its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, also spoke at the Amazon event. Microsoft remains the primary cloud computing partner for OpenAI, and products made by the AI company will ship first on Microsoft's cloud platform, called Azure, "unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities," both companies said. Altman suggested in his remarks Tuesday that Amazon had those capabilities. "These systems need to run reliably and robustly," Altman said. "They need to be secure, they need to scale, and they need to fit in the environments where companies already run their businesses. And they need infrastructure that customers already trust for their most important workloads. That's what makes this partnership with AWS so important."

OpenAI and Microsoft revise the terms of their AI partnership - SiliconANGLE

OpenAI and Microsoft revise the terms of their AI partnership OpenAI Group PBC and Microsoft Corp. have revised several sections of the contract that governs their technology partnership. The update, which was announced today, is at least the third that the companies have made since the start of 2025. The partnership began in June 2019 with a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. Four years later, it became OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider. The companies dropped the exclusivity clause last January, but kept many parts of the original agreement. One of the sections that remained unchanged relates to OpenAI's application programming interface. Developers use the API to integrate the company's AI models into their applications. Until today, Microsoft was the only cloud provider that could offer the API through its cloud platform. The revised agreement will enable OpenAI to "serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider." In a post on X published today, Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Andy Jassy stated that the ChatGPT developer's models will become available to Amazon Bedrock customers within a few weeks. The cloud giant's customers will also receive access to an offering called the Stateful Runtime Environment. According to OpenAI, it can help developers manage the data that AI agents use to automate works. The offering also promises to ease certain related tasks, such as ensuring that AI agents adhere to a company's cybersecurity policies. Microsoft will retain enhanced access to OpenAI products. In particular, the company stated that "OpenAI products will ship first on Azure," but only if certain conditions are fulfilled. The requirement won't apply if "Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities." The original partnership agreement gave Microsoft an exclusive license to intellectual property related to OpenAI's models and certain other offerings. Under the revised agreement, the tech giant has a non-exclusive license that will run through 2032. That creates an opportunity for OpenAI to ink technology sharing partnerships with other parties, which could translate into new revenue streams. The change marks the second time that Microsoft's access to OpenAI intellectual property has been narrowed. The last such change was made last October, when the AI provider restructured as a public benefit corporation. That revision excluded intellectual property related to OpenAI's upcoming consumer hardware lineup. Under the previous agreement, the companies paid a portion of their AI revenue revenue to one another. According to CNBC, Microsoft received a 20% cut from the sale of OpenAI products such as ChatGPT subscriptions. Those payments will continue "at the same percentage but subject to a total cap" through 2030. Microsoft, for its part, will stop giving OpenAI a share of its AI revenue.

OpenAI and Microsoft's Partnership No Longer Has the Vague AGI Clause

OpenAI is now free to serve its products to any cloud provider OpenAI and Microsoft's exclusive partnership is now officially over. On Monday, both companies announced several changes to their existing deal, including the removal of key exclusivity clauses. Additionally, the amended partnership has also ended the vaguely worded artificial general intelligence (AGI) clause, which dictated several "if-this-then-that" scenarios. The new agreement is now clearer and lets both companies better safeguard their interests. Interestingly, the second stage of contract negotiations between Microsoft and OpenAI has occurred just six months after the two entities agreed to let the ChatGPT maker create a for-profit entity. OpenAI, Microsoft Announce Restructured Deal In separate announcement posts, OpenAI and Microsoft revealed the key changes made to their existing deal. The companies cited "rapid pace of innovation" and the evolving landscape as the reason behind updating the terms of the partnership. "Today, we are announcing an amended agreement to simplify our partnership and the way we work together, grounded in flexibility, certainty, and a focus on delivering the benefits of AI broadly. The greater predictability in the amended agreement strengthens our joint ability to build and operate AI platforms at scale while providing both companies the flexibility to pursue new opportunities," OpenAI and Microsoft said, announcing the key changes. Perhaps the most important part of the newly structured deal is the removal of the AGI clause. Previously, the partnership had several scenarios listed in case OpenAI or Microsoft reached AGI first, and that determined the future of the partnership. The language was dense, and it tried to navigate through multiple hypothetical scenarios, making the partnership appear uncertain in the long-term. Now, that is gone. Now, while Microsoft remains OpenAI's primary cloud partner and its products will first ship on Azure, the Copilot maker now reserves the right not to support a specific capability. On the other hand, OpenAI can now serve all its products to any other cloud provider. This lets Microsoft pick and choose the products it wants to host, saving its resources. OpenAI can rack up its revenue by forging similar non-exclusive deals with other cloud providers. Just like before, Microsoft will continue to have a license to OpenAI's AI models and products till 2032, but this license is now non-exclusive. This means OpenAI can offer its models and tools to companies such as Amazon and Google. In return, Microsoft will not have to pay a revenue share to the ChatGPT maker. OpenAI, on the other hand, will continue to pay Microsoft shares from its revenue until the end of 2030. However, instead of paying in perpetuity, there will be a total cap on the amount the Windows maker receives. The revenue share is also determined independently of the AI giant's technology progress. Finally, Microsoft will continue as a major shareholder of the San Francisco-based AI firm.

Microsoft and OpenAI end exclusive cloud partnership

Microsoft and OpenAI announced a significant restructuring of their partnership, shifting from an exclusive agreement to a more flexible, time-limited arrangement. The new terms dissolve key exclusivity and revenue-sharing elements, allowing both companies greater freedom to pursue new partnerships. This modification is the most consequential change since Microsoft's initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019, which has since exceeded $13 billion. Under the new terms, Microsoft will not pay any revenue share to OpenAI when customers use its models via Azure. OpenAI is required to pay Microsoft a revenue share of 20% through 2030, now subject to an undisclosed cap. Microsoft retains a non-exclusive license to OpenAI's intellectual property related to models and products until 2032. Notably, OpenAI can now distribute its products on any cloud platform, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, ending the exclusivity that had previously bound it to Azure. The changes reflect a response to increasing demand for multi-cloud flexibility from enterprise customers. Tensions rose after OpenAI announced a $50 billion investment from Amazon in February, which raised legal concerns regarding conflicting agreements with Microsoft. This restructuring resolves those uncertainties, allowing OpenAI to adhere to its agreement with Amazon while gaining greater operational independence. Financially, the dynamics now favor a one-directional cash flow; Microsoft will no longer share revenue from customers accessing OpenAI products. OpenAI's obligation to share revenue is maintained but less financially burdensome under the new terms. The previous AGI clause linked to Microsoft's exclusivity has been removed, reflecting a shift in perspective within the AI industry regarding artificial general intelligence. Enterprise customers are poised to benefit from this transition, gaining access to OpenAI's models across multiple providers. Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy confirmed that OpenAI's models will soon be available to customers on AWS Bedrock. The evolving competitive landscape features companies like Amazon and Google also investing heavily in AI technology. Despite the restructuring, Microsoft and OpenAI maintain significant ties. Microsoft remains a primary cloud provider and major shareholder in OpenAI, holding approximately 27% of its for-profit entity. The change signals OpenAI's growth into a competitive player capable of engaging with Microsoft's rivals. As this partnership evolves, key questions remain unanswered, including the precise revenue-share cap figure and the implications of limitations regarding initial availability on Azure. Nonetheless, the revision reflects a broader maturation of the AI industry and highlights rapid shifts within the competitive landscape. OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman succinctly announced the updates, stating, "We have updated our partnership with Microsoft." The restructuring signifies a crucial moment, with power dynamics in the AI industry undergoing a rapid transformation.

OpenAI's latest AI models, Codex now available on Amazon Bedrock - The Economic Times

OpenAI is now available on Amazon's cloud. This move follows a contract change with Microsoft. OpenAI's AI models and coding agent can be accessed on Amazon Web Services. Customers can now build AI agents using OpenAI's frontier models directly on AWS. This partnership aims to boost OpenAI's computing power and enterprise business.OpenAI is now offering its latest AI models as well as its Codex coding agent on Amazon's cloud services platform, the companies said on Tuesday, a day after the ChatGPT creator loosened its ties with long-time backer Microsoft. OpenAI said it is also rolling out a service for ⁠developers ⁠to build production-ready AI agents with its frontier models on Amazon Web Services. "This is what our customers have been asking for a really long time. Their production applications run in AWS. Their data is AWS," said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, at an event in San Francisco. He said customers will no ⁠longer have to leave AWS to find the AI models they want. OpenAI and Microsoft on Monday renegotiated a contract ⁠that had allowed the Windows maker to exclusively sell OpenAI's AI models on its Azure cloud platform, making room for OpenAI to forge new partnerships with the likes of Amazon and Google. Amazon and OpenAI have been deepening their ties in recent months. While Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI, the AI startup committed to spend $100 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next eight years. The companies have also reached an agreement for OpenAI to use two gigawatts ⁠of compute powered by Amazon's in-house Trainium AI chips. The deal comes at a time when OpenAI is racing to secure more computing capacity to beef up its enterprise business and better compete with rival Anthropic, whose Claude models have gained steady popularity among enterprises and made the startup a front-runner in the AI race.

Microsoft Cuts OpenAI Revenue Share in a Fresh Step to Loosen Their AI Alliance

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Microsoft said Monday it will no longer pay a share of its revenue to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the latest move to untether a close partnership that helped unleash an artificial intelligence boom. OpenAI relied exclusively on Microsoft's investments in cloud computing services to build the technology that helped make ChatGPT a household name. Microsoft, in turn, relied on OpenAI's technology to build its own AI assistant Copilot. But the partnership has evolved as San Francisco-based OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, has shifted to a capitalistic enterprise on a path toward an initial public offering on Wall Street and has balanced its reliance on Microsoft with other cloud partners like Amazon, Google and Oracle. OpenAI said Monday it will continue to pay Microsoft a share of its revenue through 2030. The two companies said Microsoft remains the primary cloud computing partner for OpenAI, and products made by the AI company will ship first on Microsoft's cloud platform, called Azure, "unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities." Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors Monday that the new agreement "puts OpenAI on a strong path forward to going public through IPO given its clearer opportunity in the cloud environment while reducing significant barriers from its original partnership with Microsoft." Ives said it's also important for Microsoft as it "looks to develop tech independence from OpenAI" in advancing Copilot's capabilities and partnering with other AI providers such as OpenAI rival Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude.

Microsoft Drops OpenAI Exclusivity: Amazon, Google Impact - Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GO

Microsoft Drops OpenAI Exclusivity -- What It Means For Amazon, Google And The AI Race The old model was simple: own the model, lock it to your cloud, capture the value. That model just broke. From Exclusivity To Everywhere OpenAI can now deploy across cloud providers, not just Azure. That sounds like a technical tweak -- but it's a structural shift. AI is no longer about who owns the best model. It's about who can distribute it fastest, cheapest and at scale. And that changes the leaderboard. Amazon's Opening: Distribution At Scale For Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), this is the clearest upside. AWS already sits inside a massive chunk of enterprise infrastructure. If OpenAI models start showing up there, Amazon doesn't need to win the model race -- it just needs to win the workload. In a multi-cloud world, that's a powerful position. Google's Play: The Multi-Model Ecosystem For Alphabet Inc's (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google, the shift validates its broader strategy. Rather than betting on a single model, Google has leaned into offering multiple AI options across its cloud. OpenAI going multi-cloud strengthens that approach -- turning AI into a platform layer rather than a walled garden. Microsoft Didn't Lose -- But It Let Go This isn't a clean loss for Microsoft. It still owns a significant stake in OpenAI, retains access to its technology through 2032, and continues to benefit from its growth. But what it gave up is control -- the kind that made Azure the default home for OpenAI. And that's the real story. The AI race isn't about exclusivity anymore. It's about reach. Image via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Microsoft, OpenAI Alter Partnership Terms, Revenue Share

'While this amendment simplifies the partnership, the work we're doing together remains ambitious,' Microsoft and OpenAI said in statements Monday. Microsoft and OpenAI have revised their partnership so that Microsoft no longer pays a revenue share to the ChatGPT maker, Microsoft no longer has an exclusive license to OpenAI intellectual property and OpenAI can serve all products to customers across any cloud provider. The revised deal, disclosed Monday in online posts by Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft and San Francisco-based OpenAI, also applies an unspecified total cap to OpenAI's revenue share payments to Microsoft. The revised deal affirms that Microsoft is OpenAI's primary cloud partner and OpenAI products ship first on Microsoft Azure unless Microsoft can't and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities. "While this amendment simplifies the partnership, the work we're doing together remains ambitious," according to the companies' posts. "From scaling gigawatts of new datacenter capacity, to collaborating on next-generation silicon, to applying AI to advance cybersecurity, and more, we're excited to keep partnering to advance and scale AI for people and organizations around the world." [RELATED: Microsoft Unveils E7 Suite, Copilot Cowork In Enterprise AI Push] CRN has reached out to Microsoft and OpenAI for comment. Although Microsoft now has a non-exclusive license for OpenAI models, products and other IP, the license lasts through 2032. OpenAI's revenue share payments to Microsoft will continue through 2030 and are unaffected by OpenAI's technology progress, according to the companies' posts. The new agreement notes that Microsoft continues to act as a major OpenAI shareholder. Microsoft's stake is valued at more than $135 billion, according to The New York Times. The new deal is focused on benefitting customers and both companies through greater flexibility, certainty and broader AI benefits delivery, according to the companies' posts. Amit Kapur, chief AI and services transformation officer at Mumbai, India-based Tata Consultancy Services-No. 3 on CRN's 2025 Solution Provider 500 and a rare partner of OpenAI-told CRN in an interview that OpenAI's Codex tool is not only speeding up and expanding the scope of work companies like TCS can do in software engineering and software development life cycle, but aiding in other contexts as well. "When you look at it as an element of a productivity tool or a coding tool or a coding assistant, then that would have led it only to be working with developers," Kapur said. "But now you can say that it is actually going much beyond, and it can become an execution layer in a way that can take an idea and turn it into a workable code. So rather than just assisting developers for developer productivity, it is going a step beyond." Dawn Sizer, CEO and co-founder of 3rd Element Consulting-a Mechanicsburg, Pa.-based Microsoft solution provider and member of CRN's 2026 MSP 500-told CRN in an interview that the new deal shows how AI is becoming agnostic and more complex for workplaces that want to be at the cutting edge of AI innovation and avoid AI-first competitors leaving them behind. Managing vendor risk for customers and making popular AI products safe and secure for business users present opportunities for solution providers, Sizer said. But the work required can be complex, and AI is moving at a fast pace for just any channel partner to digest. "Margins, licensing terms and data path are about to change, again," Sizer said. "Unmanaged AI exposure is going to show up everywhere." Microsoft and OpenAI previously revised their partnership in October to allow, in part, Microsoft to independently pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI) alone or in partnership with third parties and extend Microsoft's IP right for models and products through 2032-including models post-AGI. OpenAI had been looking for greater independencefrom Microsoft in recent months, including signing a $38 billion deal with Microsoft cloud rival Amazon Web Services in November and reaching a $50 billion deal in February. In March, The Financial Times reported that Microsoft considered suing Amazon and OpenAI over their $50 billion arrangement, alleging that the deal breached its exclusive cloud partnership with the AI upstart. The deal also comes as OpenAI appears to be building out its own channel partner program, making moves like hiring former Google and Snowflake channel executive Colleen Kapase and naming solution provider giants Accenture, Capgemini, CGI, Cognizant, Infosys, PwC and TCS as partners to help scale its Codex product. Solution providers who are not OpenAI partners have told CRN that they see opportunities with Codex should OpenAI explore a broader channel strategy beyond working with large-sized solution providers.

Microsoft to end exclusive license for OpenAI's technology - The Economic Times

Microsoft's exclusive hold on OpenAI's artificial intelligence models is over. This change allows OpenAI to offer its technology to competitors like Amazon and Google. Microsoft will still be OpenAI's main cloud partner and has licensing rights until 2032. This development impacts the ongoing artificial intelligence race.Microsoft will no longer have exclusive access to OpenAI's artificial intelligence models and products, a significant change that will allow the startup to sell its technology across rival cloud platforms including Amazon and Google. Following the joint announcement, Microsoft ⁠shares ⁠slipped about 1% in premarket trading on Monday as some investors saw the shift as the company losing a valuable competitive advantage. Microsoft has in recent years emerged as a major player in the AI race, benefiting from its early bet on ⁠OpenAI that allowed it to quickly launch AI technology across its products. But tensions have been rising ⁠between the companies over the tie-up as OpenAI strikes cloud deals with rival companies and investors scrutinize Microsoft's alliance on OpenAI. The Financial Times reported in March Microsoft was weighing legal action against Amazon and OpenAI over a $50 billion cloud deal that could breach its exclusive cloud partnership. Under the reworked partnership, Microsoft will remain OpenAI's primary cloud partner and with will hold a license ⁠to ChatGPT creator's intellectual property through 2032. Microsoft will also not pay a revenue share to OpenAI. OpenAI products would also first ship on Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing platform unless the software giant cannot or chooses not to roll out the capabilities.

OpenAI Joins Amazon Bedrock After New Agreement With Microsoft | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. As of Tuesday (April 28), Amazon Bedrock offers the latest OpenAI models, OpenAI's Codex coding agent, and a new experience called Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI, that is designed for building production-ready AI agents with OpenAI frontier models on Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS said in a Tuesday press release. These new offerings bring together OpenAI products and AWS infrastructure. "Enterprises want to build with the most capable AI models and agents available," AWS said in the release. "They also need the security posture, operational maturity and data governance that production workloads demand. Starting today, we are bringing those together with three new offerings, all in limited preview." In its own announcement that these products are available on Amazon Bedrock, OpenAI said that the models include its best frontier model GPT-5.5 and that the availability on AWS will enable customers to use the services, security controls, identity systems and procurement processes they already have in place. This will allow developers more flexibility in how they build with OpenAI and provide enterprises with a single path from experimentation to production, the company said. "Our strategic partnership with Amazon is focused on helping organizations deploy advanced AI at production scale," OpenAI said in its announcement. "With OpenAI models, Codex and Managed Agents now coming to Amazon Bedrock, customers have a faster, more secure path to putting AI to work across their business." These announcements came a day after it was reported that OpenAI forged a new revenue and technology agreement with partner/AI competitor Microsoft that allows OpenAI to serve all its products to customers of any cloud provider. While Microsoft will continue to have a license to OpenAI IP for models and products through 2032, the company's license will now be non-exclusive. When OpenAI announced on March 31 that it raised $122 billion in a funding round that valued it at $852 billion, the company said that the round was anchored by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, and that there was continued participation from Microsoft.

AWS and OpenAI expand partnership to bring frontier AI to Amazon Bedrock

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenAI have announced a significant expansion of their partnership, integrating OpenAI's frontier artificial intelligence models and agents into AWS infrastructure. The collaboration is designed to provide enterprises with advanced AI capabilities supported by the security, operational maturity, and data governance required for production workloads. Three new offerings are currently available in limited preview, allowing customers to utilize OpenAI models on the AWS cloud platform. For the first time, AWS customers can access the latest OpenAI models directly through Amazon Bedrock. This integration allows organizations to evaluate and deploy OpenAI models alongside existing options from providers like Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Cohere, and Amazon. Key benefits of this integration include: Codex, an AI coding agent utilized by over four million developers weekly to automate, write, and refactor code, is now available within AWS environments. This allows enterprise teams to operate the OpenAI coding agent at scale using their existing infrastructure. To support complex, multi-step tasks that require memory, specific skills, and permission enforcement, AWS has introduced Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents. This service combines OpenAI's agentic capabilities with AWS's global infrastructure. To support the deployment of these agents, AWS highlights the role of Bedrock AgentCore, an open platform designed to build, connect, and optimize agents at scale across various models and frameworks. For users building on Bedrock Managed Agents, AgentCore serves as the default compute environment. As an organization's agent footprint grows, AgentCore provides critical enterprise capabilities, including authorization policy enforcement, agent discovery, observability, and evaluation metrics. This limited preview marks the beginning of a deeper technical collaboration between AWS and OpenAI. As OpenAI continues to develop new reasoning and agentic capabilities, the two companies plan to bring these ongoing advancements directly to Amazon Bedrock, ensuring enterprise applications benefit from future AI breakthroughs.

Microsoft, OpenAI Loosen Ties in Preparation for the Big AI Battle

While the deal appears to be a win-win for both parties, closer inspection indicates that Microsoft has a slightly larger chunk Microsoft hasn't exactly been the darling of the stock markets over the past 12 months, and nor will it ever match the in-your-face glamour that OpenAI has developed during the same period. However, it appears that the software behemoth might have played its AI cards better by loosening ties with the ChatGPT maker without cutting the chord. At first glance, reports of OpenAI and Microsoft renegotiating the deal binding them together might look like a sign of relief for the former, but on closer inspection it appears that Satya Nadella's team not only managed to have the cake, but also eat it. While OpenAI can now sell its products via any cloud partner, but it also pays the price for this freedom. Microsoft does not give it a cut for selling its services, but will receive 20% share of the AI startup's revenues through 2030. Of course the media headlines caught on to the obvious by linking this loosening of ties with reports around OpenAI planning to sell its agentic solutions via AWS, the leader in cloud services segment in which Microsoft's Azure holds second place. "We are confident that OpenAI understands and respects the importance of living up to legal obligations, a Microsoft spokesperson had said back in March. Both sides took to X to portray the renegotiated deal as a win for themselves though one would say Microsoft got a slight edge in what would have otherwise been a win-win. Besides getting revenue share till 2030 that could translate into billions of dollars, Microsoft continues to hold 27% equity in OpenAI. From OpenAI's perspective, their $50 billion deal with Amazon in preparation of the scheduled IPO is now safe from legal turmoil. Also, Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI to sell its products and IP has a timeline till 2032. And the contract is non-exclusive. Not that Microsoft would care, given that they've access to the more popular Anthropic Claude and related products. What remains to be seen now is how much of an advantage OpenAI can seek from the concession it secured from Microsoft to sell through other clouds. Would it translate into meaningful business expansion or end up being yet another hyped cycle? For starters, Anthropic appears to ignored the development, given that their own solutions have achieved a head start over that of their arch rivals - and we are not even talking about their own hype cycle surrounding the Claude Mythos circus. But things may change quickly once Amazon begins marketing OpenAI solutions. Or maybe they won't as the owner of the world's biggest digital marketplace also has Anthropic solutions on its shelf, besides holding stake in that business and also tightening the ties further through a $5 billion deal last week. Post the deal, both companies continue to refer to Microsoft as OpenAI's "primary cloud partner" suggesting that the two would stay with each other for the next six years which is when the deal can be reworked or shut down. Of course, both are battling each other at another level - OpenAI by rushing to build datacentres and Microsoft by launching its own large language models earlier in April. The language of the deal is confusing, but that's probably how it was designed to be. OpenAI says its product will ship "first on Azure, unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities." But it can "now serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider." Sounds fair? Possibly, but we aren't sure what the "first" denotes in the announcement as it could mean exclusively or for a set period of time. Or it could mean nothing and that Microsoft is just one of the many that OpenAI will partner with. Maybe, that is what was intended. Just to circumvent all possibilities of a lawsuit from Microsoft over Amazon. From Microsoft's point of view, the decision to loosen the strings might be just the shot it requires to get back into favour on Wall Street. Its stock prices are down 12% and is the worst performing tech stock behind Tesla. It remains to be seen how the company builds the narrative based on this development. The fact remains that like Microsoft, both Amazon and Google (the top three cloud services giants) too have deals with Anthropic to sell its products and solutions on their respective cloud platforms. Additionally, all three have other revenue streams raking in the money, so at best we believe Satya Nadella could claim parity with his peers, not an edge in the ongoing AI race.

Microsoft Agrees to End Revenue-Sharing With OpenAI | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The new arrangement is designed to simplify the way the companies work together, OpenAI said in its announcement Monday (April 27). "The greater predictability in the amended agreement strengthens our joint ability to build and operate AI platforms at scale while providing both companies the flexibility to pursue new opportunities," OpenAI said. Under the new agreement, OpenAI can now serve all of its products to customers of any cloud provider, something the company had long hoped for. Microsoft will stay OpenAI's primary cloud partner, and OpenAI products will ship first on Azure, "unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities." While Microsoft will continue to have a license to OpenAI IP for models and products through 2032, the company's license will now be non-exclusive. Microsoft will continue to serve as a major shareholder in OpenAI, but will no longer pay a revenue share to the startup. Revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft will proceed through 2030, "independent of OpenAI's technology progress," the company said. Under a previous arrangement, revenue share payments were set to stop and if OpenAI achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a version of AI that can perform at or above the level of humans. The agreement said the determination of whether OpenAI had reached that milestone would be made by a panel of independent experts. "While this amendment simplifies the partnership, the work we're doing together remains ambitious," the companies said. "From scaling gigawatts of new datacenter capacity, to collaborating on next-generation silicon, to applying AI to advance cybersecurity, and more, we're excited to keep partnering to advance and scale AI for people and organizations around the world." Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI in the last seven years, though their partnership has seen evidence of strain in the last year as they compete with each other. This month saw a report from CNBC that OpenAI revenue chief Denise Dresser had written in a memo -- seen by the network -- that the collaboration had "limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are." She also praised the company's deal with Amazon, which will see the eCommerce giant invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI. "Since we announced the partnership at the end of February, inbound demand from our customers for this offering has been frankly staggering," Dresser wrote.

OpenAI gains multi-cloud access in updated Microsoft agreement

OpenAI on Monday said the rapid pace of innovation requires its partnership with Microsoft to continue evolving in order to benefit customers and both companies. The companies announced an amended agreement aimed at simplifying how they work together, with a focus on flexibility, certainty, and broader delivery of AI benefits. The updated structure is designed to improve predictability, strengthen large-scale AI platform development, and give both companies flexibility to pursue new opportunities. Microsoft remains OpenAI's primary cloud partner. OpenAI products will continue to launch first on Azure unless Microsoft cannot or chooses not to support required capabilities. OpenAI can also provide its products across any cloud provider. While the amended agreement simplifies the partnership structure, both companies said the collaboration remains ambitious. The focus areas include expansion of gigawatt-scale data center capacity, co-development of next-generation silicon, application of AI in cybersecurity, and scaling AI systems for global users and organizations. Both companies said they remain committed to advancing and scaling AI technologies worldwide. Commenting on the announcement, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said:

OpenAI And Microsoft Strike New Deal To Widen AI Distribution Across Cloud Providers

OpenAI and Microsoft have announced a revised partnership agreement that changes how the two companies collaborate on artificial intelligence services. The updated arrangement allows OpenAI to provide its products to customers across multiple cloud platforms instead of a single provider. Microsoft will continue as a , while the agreement shifts certain limits on exclusivity and revenue sharing. The companies said the changes support wider access to AI tools and flexibility for enterprise users. The agreement outlines long-term terms for intellectual property use and financial arrangements through 2030 and beyond.

Microsoft will no longer have exclusive access to OpenAI's technology

Microsoft will no longer have exclusive access to OpenAI's artificial intelligence models and products, a significant change that would allow the startup to sell its technology across rival cloud platforms including Amazon and Google. Shares of Microsoft tumbled nearly three per cent after the announcement on Monday, while Alphabet and Amazon gained slightly. Under the reworked partnership, Microsoft will remain OpenAI's primary cloud partner and have a license to OpenAI intellectual property through 2032. The Windows maker has emerged as a major player in the artificial intelligence race in recent years thanks to its early bet and access to technology from the ChatGPT creator.

The Microsoft-OpenAI Partnership Is On Rocky Ground | Investing.com UK

The relationship between Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and OpenAI has been a defining partnership in the blooming AI technology. But the partnership terms are changing, and what was once a solid relationship may be fracturing. On Monday morning, Microsoft shares quickly fell 5% as the Bloomberg headline "OpenAI Breaks Free From Exclusive AI Pact With Partner Microsoft" sent concern among Microsoft investors. Microsoft shares snapped back once the revised partnership agreement was fully disseminated. Microsoft and OpenAI have mutually agreed to end Microsoft's exclusive rights to sell OpenAI's models. Accordingly, OpenAI can source arrangements with Microsoft's hyperscale competitors, such as Amazon and Meta. In exchange for giving up its monopoly on OpenAI products, Microsoft will no longer pay OpenAI a revenue share from the OpenAI products it sells. However, OpenAI will continue to abide by its revenue-sharing agreement with Microsoft until 2032, two years beyond the original agreement. OpenAI API products will remain exclusive to Microsoft's Azure platform, while non-API products can use any cloud vendor. Further, OpenAI has contracted to purchase an additional $250 billion of Microsoft Azure services. The bottom line is that Microsoft retains significant protections, but OpenAI is gaining some freedom. Analyst Jason Ader of William Blair summarized the revised partnership terms as follows: "By securing IP rights through 2032, Microsoft protects the foundation of its Copilot strategy and Azure OpenAI monetization -- still, Azure will now have to compete for more of OpenAI's workloads going forward." An article published on Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal reports that there are headwinds to OpenAI's once-invincible growth story. Although a private company, OpenAI missed its internal goal of reaching one billion weekly active users by year-end and fell short of its ChatGPT revenue target as it is dealing with larger-than-expected subscriber cancellation rates. This comes on top of a report from earlier this year that also showed they missed multiple monthly revenue targets. CFO Sarah Friar has reportedly raised concerns that the company may be unable to fund its future computing contracts if revenue growth fails to keep pace with its internal goals. That is concerning for its clients, especially given that they just raised over $122 billion in a funding round. The impact of OpenAI's shortfalls is pressuring companies like Oracle (NYSE:ORCL). Oracle provides two core products to OpenAI. It is the primary builder and operator of Stargate data centers that train and run OpenAI's models. Second, Oracle provides cloud computing services directly to OpenAI. More simply, Oracle builds the buildings, fills them with chips, powers them, and charges OpenAI to use them. Accordingly, investors in companies like Oracle are voicing concern over concerns at OpenAI.

Amazon strengthens partnership with OpenAI in enterprise AI

The announcement comes a day after the revision of the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft, which grants OpenAI greater freedom to offer its products through other cloud providers. To date, AWS only offered certain open versions of OpenAI models, which arrived on its platform in August. Henceforth, customers will be able to test OpenAI's latest proprietary models, as well as Codex, the programming agent used to write, debug, or test code. Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, presented this integration as a long-standing request from customers. Denise Dresser, OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer, also acknowledged internally that while the relationship with Microsoft has been essential, it has at times limited OpenAI's ability to serve enterprises where they already operate, particularly on Bedrock. AWS is also launching "Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI," a service designed to create more sophisticated custom agents capable of integrating memory from previous interactions. For Amazon, the objective is to establish Bedrock as a centralized hub for enterprise AI. This flexibility arrives at a pivotal moment for OpenAI as it prepares for a potential initial public offering. Reuters reported that the company could file as early as the second half of 2026, with preliminary discussions suggesting a capital raise of at least $60bn and a valuation that could reach $1,000bn, although the timeline remains subject to market conditions.

OpenAI ends Microsoft exclusivity; frees path for Amazon, Google deals

STORY: The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI just got a little less cozy. In a joint announcement on Monday, the two companies said Microsoft will no longer have exclusive access to OpenAI's AI models and products. The move frees up the ChatGPT creator to sell its AI technology to rival cloud platforms, including Amazon and Google. The news sent Microsoft's shares slightly lower, as some investors saw the shift as the company losing a valuable competitive advantage. :: Microsoft Microsoft emerged as an early winner in the AI race after its investment in OpenAI allowed it to quickly launch AI technology across its products. But tensions have been rising between the two companies as OpenAI strikes cloud deals with rival firms. The Financial Times in March reported that Microsoft was weighing legal action against Amazon and OpenAI over a $50 billion cloud deal that could breach its exclusive cloud partnership. Under the reworked deal, Microsoft will remain OpenAI's primary cloud partner and will hold a license to its intellectual property through 2032. Microsoft will also not pay a revenue share to OpenAI. OpenAI products would also first ship on Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing platform unless the software giant cannot or chooses not to roll out the technology.

OpenAI, Microsoft update AI deal: What is changing

The new deal focuses on giving both companies more flexibility while continuing to work together on AI development. OpenAI and Microsoft have announced an updated agreement that changes key parts of their partnership. The new deal focuses on giving both companies more flexibility while continuing to work together on AI development. Under the new terms, OpenAI is no longer restricted to Microsoft's cloud, and Microsoft will no longer have to pay a revenue share to OpenAI. 'The greater predictability in the amended agreement strengthens our joint ability to build and operate AI platforms at scale while providing both companies the flexibility to pursue new opportunities,' OpenAI explained. One of the biggest changes is around cloud services. Microsoft will still be OpenAI's main cloud partner. This means OpenAI's products will continue to launch first on Microsoft Azure. However, OpenAI can now offer its products through other cloud providers as well. Another key update is around intellectual property (IP). Microsoft will have a license to OpenAI's models and products until 2032, but this access is no longer exclusive. Also read: OpenAI accuses Elon Musk of harassment, smear campaign over lawsuit The financial structure between the two has also changed. Microsoft will no longer pay a share of its revenue to OpenAI. However, OpenAI will continue to share a portion of its revenue with Microsoft until 2030. This arrangement will remain at the same rate as before, but will include a maximum cap, as per the AI company. Despite these changes, Microsoft will continue to participate directly in OpenAI's growth as a major shareholder. Also read: Claude Code product chief says constant AI launches are causing FOMO among users 'From scaling gigawatts of new datacenter capacity, to collaborating on next- generation silicon, to applying AI to advance cybersecurity, and more, we're excited to keep partnering to advance and scale AI for people and organisations around the world,' OpenAI said.