Since Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, the exclusive partnership between the two companies has become one of the strongest and most important in the AI industry. However, today OpenAI and Microsoft jointly announced a revised agreement that will allow the company to bypass Microsoft Azure and “serve all of its products to customers across any cloud provider.”
The announcement makes clear that Microsoft will continue to have a license for the OpenAI IP and its models through 2032 and that Azure will remain the “primary cloud partner” for OpenAI during that period (if Microsoft continues to honor that). But Microsoft’s license “will now be non-exclusive,” the announcement said, allowing OpenAI to make its models available through other major cloud providers in the future.
While OpenAI will continue to make the same 20 percent revenue share payments to Microsoft under the revised deal, the total payment will now be limited to an unspecified maximum and guaranteed to continue through 2030. Importantly, this revenue share is now “independent of OpenAI’s technological progress,” an apparent reference to the notorious “AGI clause” in the original partnership that would have negated the exclusivity deal if and when OpenAI achieves the difficult-to-measure benchmark for artificial general intelligence.
