Microsoft Faces Legal Threat from Elon Musk Over Alleged Misuse of Twitter Data to Train AI

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and Twitter, has threatened to sue Microsoft over allegations that the tech giant unlawfully trained its artificial intelligence using data from Twitter.

Musk’s tweet came in response to news that Microsoft would be discontinuing support for Twitter on its advertising tools, Smart Campaigns and Multi-platform.

Musk implied that Microsoft used user tweets to train its AI-powered applications without permission.

While Microsoft has not explained why it is ending its support for Twitter, it may be due to the steep increase in API fees, which have gone from $0 to $42,000 per month and can go as high as $200,000 per month.

Musk also accused Microsoft of “demonetizing” Twitter data by removing ads and then selling the data to others.

Microsoft’s recent move to abandon Twitter will result in its clients losing their ability to use the company’s tools to access, manage, schedule and view Tweets from their Twitter accounts.

It is worth noting that Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are still available to its customers.

The significant increase in Twitter’s API fees has adversely affected the academic community, as more than 17,500 academic papers have been based on Twitter data since 2020. However, with the current pricing structure, most researchers have been priced out of the market.

According to Cointelegraph, it seems that Mirosoft the is allegedly working on creating its own AI chips to power ChatGPT, as the costs of developing in-house and OpenAI projects continue to increase.

Based on data from Google Finance, with a market capitalization of $2.15 trillion, Microsoft is the world’s second-largest company after Apple.