Tech company Microsoft and artificial intelligence firm OpenAI are reportedly in talks to renegotiate the investment deal between the AI firm and Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s biggest financial backer.<\/p>\n
According to a report<\/a> from the Financial Times, Microsoft may give up a portion of its equity in OpenAI for continued access to the AI company’s products and models beyond 2030, when some of the original terms of a deal signed between the two companies expire.<\/p>\n Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI since 2019, when it first acquired an interest in the artificial intelligence firm.<\/p>\n OpenAI CEO Sam Altman takes the podium at the White House in January 2025 to discuss AI infrastructure investment in the United States. Source: <\/em>The White House<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n OpenAI is attempting to restructure the company to shift its focus to profit-making. However, those plans have met with pushback from co-founders like Elon Musk<\/a> and early investors.<\/p>\n The deal between OpenAI and Microsoft is critical to OpenAI’s restructuring and the future of the US-based AI startup company. Advancing artificial intelligence has also become a key policy objective for global leaders<\/a> as the AI arms race heats up.<\/p>\n Related: <\/strong><\/em>OpenAI to stay nonprofit, scrap proposed overhaul<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n OpenAI was founded as a non-profit entity in 2015 by businessman Elon Musk, tech entrepreneur Sam Altman, and AI researcher Ilya Sutskever.<\/p>\n However, in 2024, the company began mulling a corporate restructuring that would convert the company from a non-profit entity to a for-profit corporation.<\/p>\n Elon Musk has been one of the biggest critics of the plan<\/a>, calling into question the legality of the proposed shift in a November 2024 legal filing<\/a>.<\/p>\n Elon Musk and others file litigation against OpenAI to block its conversion to a for-profit company. Source: <\/em>Court Listener<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n The tech billionaire also blasted the company’s focus on closed-source software development, which he said was not the original objective of OpenAI.<\/p>\n “OpenAI was actually started and was meant to be open source. I named it ‘OpenAI’ after open source, now it is, in fact, closed source. It should be renamed super closed source AI for maximum profit AI,” Musk told<\/a> an audience at the New York Times DealBook Summit.<\/p>\n In February 2025, a group of investors led by Musk submitted a $97.4 billion bid to take over OpenAI. However, the deal was flatly rejected<\/a> by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.<\/p>\n More recently, on May 5, OpenAI announced<\/a> it was abandoning its shift to a purely for-profit model and is choosing to shift to a public benefit corporation \u2014 a profit-driven structure with legal obligations to fulfill social or public goods objectives \u2014 controlled by a non-profit entity.<\/p>\nOpenAI faces staunch pushback against for-profit shift<\/h2>\n