Twitter sent a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday accusing the tech giant of misusing the social media company’s data.
In the letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times, Twitter said Microsoft had violated an agreement over its data and had refused to pay for that use. In some cases, the letter said, Microsoft had used more Twitter data than intended. Microsoft also shared the Twitter data with government agencies without permission, the letter said.
“Microsoft may have violated multiple provisions of the agreement over an extended period of time,” Alex Spiro, the personal attorney for Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, wrote in the letter to Mr. Nadella.
The letter could be a prelude to Twitter attempting to tax Microsoft for its data. Mr Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, has said the company is in urgent need of cash and that it is close to bankruptcy. Twitter has since introduced new subscription products and made other moves to generate more revenue. In March, the company said it would charge developers more to access the stream of tweets.
Last month, Musk publicly called out Microsoft for “illegally” using Twitter’s data to train its artificial intelligence technologies. “Time for a trial,” he said tweeted at the time.
Microsoft said it has not currently paid Twitter for its data. Frank Shaw, a Microsoft spokesperson, said the company had received the letter from Twitter and would review and answer questions. “We look forward to continuing our long-term partnership with the company,” he said.
Mr Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk and Microsoft have had a rocky relationship lately. Among other things, Musk has a fight with Microsoft about OpenAI, the start-up behind the ChatGPT chatbot. Mr Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015, has said Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, controls the start-up’s business decisions. Microsoft has disputed that characterization.
Last month, Microsoft also said it would not pay for access to Twitter’s data and told customers of its advertising platform it would remove Twitter from the platform. Advertisers use Microsoft’s advertising platform to manage their social media accounts, including Twitter.
In recent months, Twitter and other organizations have also begun to complain that the latest wave of AI technologies are built using their digital data. Reddit said last month it would begin charging for access to its application programming interface, or API, so its data couldn’t be used for free.
Microsoft’s Bing chatbot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are built on so-called large-language models, or LLMs, that build their skills by analyzing massive amounts of data collected across the web.
In December, Mr. Musk OpenAI off of Twitter’s data. OpenAI had paid $2 million a year to access the data, but Mr. Musk believed the amount was not enough to fairly compensate Twitter.
The letter to Mr. Nadella does not specify whether Twitter will take legal action against Microsoft or seek financial compensation. It demands that Microsoft abide by Twitter’s developer agreement and investigate the data usage of eight of its apps.
Twitter also said Microsoft must submit a report by June on how much Twitter data it owns, how that data was stored and used, and when government-related organizations accessed that data. Twitter’s rules prohibit the use of its data by government agencies unless the company is first notified.
The letter adds that Twitter’s data has been used in Xbox, Microsoft’s gaming system; Bing, its search engine; and various other advertising and cloud computing tools.
Twitter imposes limits on how much of its data can be used, saying access should not exceed a “reasonable” volume. But Microsoft used Twitter’s data portal “more than 780 million times and pulled in more than 26 billion tweets in 2022 alone,” the letter said.
