OpenAI keeps cutting deals left and right, one of the latest ones being a massive partnership with Amazon that ought to see a total of $188 billion circle between both companies. Sam Altman may have cut that one a little too close, according to Microsoft, which is reportedly considering releasing the lawyers over an API exclusivity clause.
Microsoft is apparently taking umbrage with the situation, despite its position in the partnership having been repeatedly revised. Redmond was originally OpenAI's sole cloud services provider, but eventually changed to having the right of first refusal over said services, and was further weakened in October 2025.
Article continues belowThe PR about that latest agreement states that "API products developed with third parties will be exclusive to Azure. Non-API products may be served on any cloud provider." Under that logic, OpenAI has the freedom to develop and implement new products, but if they offer them as APIs, they have to go through Azure.
Redmond believes that OpenAI's offering access to Frontier via Amazon Web Services (AWS)'s Bedrock platform would be in breach of the agreement. Getting even more technical, the dispute may well come down to the definition of a "stateless" versus "stateful" when applied to AI models.
Even though it appears to remember your information, a standard chatbot is actually stateless — adding a new question requires the bot to re-process the entire conversation again. A storage and orchestration layer to facilitate something like Frontier is arguably a "stateful" implementation, more specifically a "Stateful Runtime Environment."
According to FT's sources, Microsoft thinks that running Frontier on AWS instead of Azure would breach either the spirit or the letter of the contract. This is illustrated by a report that Amazon is pointedly instructing its staff to never say that SRE "enables access" or "calls on" ChatGPT as a backend, instead preferring vaguer terms like "powered by," "enabled by," or "integrates with."
The whole stateless/stateful discussion has reportedly been a hot topic among lawyers from both camps, though FT states that a Microsoft employee referring to the situation isn't mincing words, saying that "we know our contract," and that "we will sue them if they breach it. If Amazon and OpenAI want to take a bet on the creativity of their contractual lawyers, I would back us, not them."
Predictably, OpenAI's position is the opposite, as the firm seemingly believes the Amazon deal is compatible with the Microsoft agreement. FT further reports that Amazon and OpenAI are building an unspecified system meant to work around the contract.
Nevertheless, FT points out that this latest development may cast a pall over OpenAI's upcoming IPO by placing doubts in prospective stockholders' hearts. That would be a nightmare scenario for the company, as the magnitude of its ongoing investments means that the flow of money cannot stop.
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