OpenAI and Microsoft announced on April 27, 2026, that they have renegotiated the terms of their partnership, resolving a legal dispute that had been building since OpenAI signed a deal worth up to $50 billion with Amazon earlier this year.
The central change: Microsoft’s exclusive license to OpenAI’s intellectual property now has a defined end date — 2032 — replacing an open-ended arrangement that had previously remained in effect until OpenAI achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI). Critically, the license is now non-exclusive, meaning OpenAI can sell its products across any cloud provider, including Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The dispute traces back to February 2026, when Amazon announced an investment of up to $50 billion in OpenAI, contingent on an agreement that gave AWS exclusive rights to host OpenAI’s agent-making tool Frontier and to co-develop stateful runtime technology on AWS Bedrock. On the same day, Microsoft publicly pushed back, asserting that its exclusive rights remained intact. The Financial Times later reported that Microsoft was considering legal action to enforce those terms.
The new agreement removes that threat. OpenAI’s products will still launch on Azure first — unless Microsoft cannot or chooses not to support the required capabilities — and Microsoft remains OpenAI’s “primary cloud partner.” OpenAI also committed in October 2025 to purchase an additional $250 billion worth of Microsoft cloud services.
Microsoft gained concessions of its own. Under the revised terms, Microsoft is no longer required to pay a revenue share to OpenAI, while OpenAI will continue paying revenue share to Microsoft through 2030, subject to a cap. Microsoft also retains approximately 27 percent ownership of OpenAI’s for-profit entity and reported $7.5 billion in a single quarter from that investment.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy welcomed the deal on X, saying OpenAI’s models would become available to AWS customers on Bedrock in the coming weeks. Microsoft, meanwhile, has developed its own AI partnership with Anthropic to power agentic products using Claude.
For enterprise customers, the revised arrangement may expand choice — they can now access OpenAI’s products across multiple cloud platforms as the major providers compete for their business.
Source: TechCrunch