Twitter is accusing Microsoft of using the social media company’s data in unauthorized ways. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, an attorney for Twitter owner Elon Musk, sent a letter to Microsoft on Thursday, detailing the claims and accusing the software company of violating multiple provisions of its agreement with Twitter over data use. The letter is the latest rift among tech companies in the growing debate over who owns data that can be used to train artificial intelligence and machine learning software.
After Musk led a buyout of Twitter in October and appointed himself CEO, the company started charging for use of its application programming interface (API), which enables developers to embed tweets into their software and services and access Twitter data. The API was previously free to use for some researchers, partners and developers who agreed to Twitter’s terms. Twitter API-driven apps include Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Sprinklr.
The dispute
According to the letter from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the company’s board, last month Microsoft “declined to pay even a discounted rate for continued access to Twitter’s APIs and content.” As of April, Microsoft had at least five products that used the Twitter API, including the Azure cloud, Bing search engine, and Power Platform low-code application-development tools.
The agreement restricts excessive use of Twitter’s programming interfaces. However, for one of the Microsoft services using Twitter data, “account information outright states that it intends to allow its customers to ‘go around throttling limits,’” according to the letter. The attorney representing Twitter has pressed Microsoft for any details about “a description of any token pooling implemented in any of the Microsoft Apps, including the time period(s) when any such token pooling occurred and the number of tokens that were pooled.”
Microsoft has acknowledged receipt of the letter and said it would review it and “respond appropriately.” A Microsoft spokesperson said, “We look forward to continuing our long-term partnership with the company.”
Related issues
Elon Musk has been openly critical of Microsoft’s tight relationship with OpenAI, the creator of the chatbot ChatGPT. Musk was an early backer of OpenAI, but the company has since raised billions of dollars from Microsoft, which is embedding its AI technology into many core products. “Microsoft has a very strong say, if not directly controls, OpenAI at this point,” Musk told CNBC in an interview this week. Nadella recently challenged Musk’s claim in an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, saying Microsoft has “a non-controlling interest” in the startup.
Last year, Musk approached Nadella as he was raising money for his Twitter buyout, according to text messages that became public via court filings. Nadella wrote in one text to Musk, “will for sure follow-up on Teams feedback!” Teams is Microsoft’s chat app.
Leave a Reply