Court documents filed in the Elon Musk v. Sam Altman trial show Microsoft worried OpenAI might “storm off to Amazon” and “shit‑talk” Azure during early partnership talks in 2017 1.
The filings capture internal Microsoft exchanges from days after OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot beat a professional player, when Altman responded to Satya Nadella’s congratulations by proposing a much larger partnership to fund OpenAI’s next phase of work 1.
Altman told Nadella OpenAI would need “probably something like $300 million at Azure list prices,” a sum that far exceeded the Azure credits OpenAI then received and that unsettled some Microsoft executives, the documents say 1.
The exchanges took place as OpenAI moved from a non‑profit toward a capped‑profit model and sought substantial outside compute and funding to scale its research 1.
The filings do not show whether Amazon was actively courting OpenAI at the time, but they underscore how cloud providers compete for partnerships with leading AI startups—partnerships that can influence where models are trained and commercialised 1.
Microsoft’s eventual investment in OpenAI set the stage for a deep commercial relationship, including integration of OpenAI models into Microsoft products and Azure services, a relationship these documents illuminate from its earliest negotiations 1.
The documents surfaced as part of the broader Musk–Altman litigation, which has opened a window into internal deliberations at both OpenAI and Microsoft about governance, funding and competitive risk 1.
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