Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks with CNBC on May 16, 2023.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Twitter accuses Microsoft to use social media company data in an unauthorized and never-disclosed manner.
Alex Spiro, partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and attorney for the owner of Twitter Elon Musksent a letter to Microsoft on Thursday outlining the allegations, including that the software company “may have violated multiple provisions” of its data use agreement with Twitter.
It’s the latest rift among tech companies in the growing debate over who owns the data that can be used to train artificial intelligence and machine learning software. The New York Times reported for the first time on the letter, a copy of which was got by CNBC.
After Musk led the takeover of Twitter in October and named himself CEO, the company began charging for use of its application programming interface, which allows developers to embed tweets into their software and services. and access Twitter data.
The API was previously free to select researchers, partners, and developers who accepted Twitter’s terms. Applications driven by the Twitter API include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Sprinklr.
According to Spiro’s letter to Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella and the company’s board last month Microsoft “refused to pay even a discounted rate for continued access to Twitter’s APIs and content.”
In April, Microsoft had at least five products that used the Twitter API, including the Azure cloud, the Bing search engine and the Power Platform low-code app development tools, Spiro wrote.
The agreement limits excessive use of Twitter programming interfaces. However, for one of the Microsoft services using Twitter’s data, “the account information clearly indicates that it intends to allow its customers to ‘bypass throttling limits,'” Spiro wrote.
A Microsoft spokesperson acknowledged receipt of the letter and told CNBC the company would review it and “respond appropriately.”
“Today we heard from a law firm representing Twitter asking us about our past use of the free Twitter API,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We look forward to continuing our long-term partnership with the company.”
Musk has openly criticized Microsoft’s close relationship with OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT chatbot. 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 commodity products.
“Microsoft has a very strong say in, 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 that Microsoft has “a non-controlling interest” in the startup.
Spiro did not name OpenAI or mention its ChatGPT and DALL-E applications or its large language models in the letter. It pressed Microsoft for details of “a description of any token pooling implemented in any of Microsoft’s applications, including the time period(s) during which such token pooling occurred and the number of tokens that have been pooled”.
Musk and Nadella have had other interactions lately.
Last year, Musk approached Nadella while raising money for his Twitter takeover, according to text messages which became public via court filings. Nadella wrote in a text to Musk, “will be following up on team feedback for sure!” Teams is Microsoft’s chat application.