Microsoft fears OpenAI's AWS deal may violate Azure exclusivity contract.
"We are confident that OpenAI understands and respects the importance of living up to [its] legal obligation," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Information. A statement that sounds less like confidence and more like a warning.
Microsoft holds the exclusive rights to sell OpenAI's models directly to cloud customers through its Azure platform. But OpenAI and AWS are planning a new product, what they call a "stateful runtime environment," that runs OpenAI models entirely on AWS infrastructure without relying on the Microsoft-hosted versions.
AWS doesn't intend to sell model APIs directly but rather offer tools for developing custom AI applications, effectively sidestepping the contractual exclusivity on a technical level.