On Monday, Microsoft and OpenAI announced that they have, once again, renegotiated the deal binding the two companies. Despite some opinions on X that frame it as a victory for the ChatGPT maker over the Windows giant, both sides are walking away winners.

Most important, the new terms solve an issue that was hanging over OpenAI’s head since it signed its up-to-$50 billion dollar deal with Amazon.

With this new deal, instead of Microsoft having exclusive access to all of OpenAI’s products and IP until the magical day when OpenAI produces AGI, it’s partnership has a definitive timeline. This contract gives Microsoft a non-exclusive license to OpenAI IP for models and products through 2032.

The two companies are still calling Microsoft OpenAI’s “primary cloud partner,” meaning that the bulk of OpenAI’s cloud will likely be served by Azure for the six years this deal covers, even as OpenAI rushes to build its own data centers with other partners. In October, OpenAI agreed to buy an additional $250 billion worth of Microsoft’s cloud. This line is a message to Microsoft shareholders that OpenAI will still be an enormous Azure customer.

OpenAI products will ship “first on Azure, unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities,” the companies say. But, critically, “OpenAI can now serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider.”

Again, “first” is not defined clearly in this announcement, whether that means exclusive on Azure only for some time period or just that Microsoft will also be among the vendors carrying OpenAI’s latest products.

But the most important part of this term: it solves the possibility that Microsoft could sue OpenAI over the AI lab’s deal with Amazon.

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To recap that messiness: In February, OpenAI announced that Amazon was investing up to $50 billion in the model maker, comprised of a $15 billion initial investment and another $35 billion “in the coming months when certain conditions are met,” the companies said, without specifying what those conditions were.

In exchange, OpenAI agreed to co-develop a “stateful runtime technology” on AWS Bedrock (the AWS service that serves up various AI models and services). Stateful runtime is the tech that supports AI agents, allowing them to remember tasks and contexts for long periods of time.

OpenAI also promised that AWS would have exclusive rights to serve up OpenAI’s new agent-making tool Frontier. And there’s the rub.

OpenAI’s initial agreement with Microsoft prevented OpenAI from selling Frontier exclusively on AWS, and possibly prevented AWS from selling it at all.

While Microsoft had previously agreed to let OpenAI run certain select products, like consumer ChatGPT, on other cloud providers, it retained exclusive rights to any OpenAI product accessed through an API, such as Frontier.

In fact, the same day that OpenAI announced its AWS deal, Microsoft publicly refuted the AWS exclusively terms, writing (emphasis Microsoft’s):

“Microsoft maintains its exclusive license and access to intellectual property across OpenAI models and products. … Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider of stateless OpenAI APIs. … Any stateless API calls to OpenAI models that result from a collaboration between OpenAI and any third party – including Amazon – would be hosted on Azure. … OpenAI’s first party products, including Frontier, will continue to be hosted on Azure.“

Microsoft also emphasized that its terms were in effect until OpenAI achieved AGI. The Financial Times reported that Microsoft even contemplated legal action if it had to enforce these contract terms.

So, the new agreement eliminates Microsoft’s exclusive rights and solves the AWS legal peril. In a post on X, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy celebrated the deal, adding that it meant OpenAI’s models would become available to customers on AWS Bedrock.

> Very interesting announcement from OpenAI this morning. We’re excited to make OpenAI's models available directly to customers on Bedrock in the coming weeks, alongside the

OpenAI ends Microsoft legal peril over its $50B Amazon deal