OpenAI ends its exclusive partnership with Microsoft

Amended agreement clears the way for OpenAI models to run on Amazon Bedrock.

TL;DR

OpenAI and Microsoft have amended their exclusive partnership agreement.
OpenAI can now offer its services to customers on any cloud provider, beyond Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft retains a non-exclusive license for OpenAI's IP and models through 2032.
Azure remains OpenAI's primary cloud partner.
The revenue share payments to Microsoft are capped and guaranteed only through 2030.
The amended deal addresses concerns about meeting enterprise needs on other cloud platforms like Amazon Bedrock.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy expressed excitement about making OpenAI models available on Bedrock.

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Sam Altman

we have updated our partnership with microsoft.

microsoft will remain our primary cloud partner, but we are now able to make our products and services available across all clouds.

will continue to provide them with models and products until 2032, and a revenue share through 2030.

Elon Musk reposted

NIK

🚨 OpenAI just REMOVED the AGI clause that was a structural protection of OpenAI's charitable mission, while jury selection was happening today

The 2019 capped-profit structure had three protections for the charitable mission:

1. 100x profit cap: REMOVED in PBC conversion

2. AGI clause: REMOVED today

3. Microsoft exclusivity: REMOVED today

All three are gone.

This is exactly what Musk's lawsuit alleges: the people running OpenAI systematically dismantled the mission-protection mechanisms. Today they did it again.

The defense theory just got harder.

OpenAI's defense includes: "Microsoft's $13 billion-plus investment was necessary for our mission. Without that capital, OpenAI couldn't have shipped GPT-4 or scaled ChatGPT."

But today, on the morning of trial, OpenAI announced they are decoupling from Microsoft:

• AGI clause REMOVED. The nuclear option that let the non-profit board terminate Microsoft's commercial rights once AGI was achieved. Gone.

• Microsoft IP license now NON-EXCLUSIVE through 2032. OpenAI can license to anyone.

• Cloud exclusivity ENDED. OpenAI can sell across AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle.

• Revenue share capped. Microsoft no longer pays revenue share to OpenAI; OpenAI still pays Microsoft through 2030.

If Microsoft was so necessary, why restructure on the day the case reaches a jury?

Musk's lawyers will use this in court tomorrow.

Yann LeCun reposted

Hedgie

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.

My Take

The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.

This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.

Hedgie🤗

clem 🤗

Super excited to announce that @arcee_ai is the first major American AI lab to replace AWS S3 with Hugging Face for ALL their models and datasets, public AND private 🔥🔥🔥

Multi-million $ partnership to support American open-source AI, let’s go! https://t.co/AU5AtHIzPq

Sam Altman reposted

Psyho

All problems have been solved by OpenAI! https://t.co/Hn94fcYqxu

Arthur Mensch

We’re super excited to announce an expanded global strategic partnership with Microsoft to give enterprises and regulated industries frontier AI they can control.

With this multi-billion dollar commitment from Microsoft, we're accelerating the construction of our AI infrastructure in Europe, to better serve our customers across the globe.

Combining our complementary strengths, we're making our open-weight models available to Microsoft customers in Copilot Studio, Azure Foundry and Azure Local. One shared goal: bringing our customer to AI-enabled growth, as fast as possible.