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.
According to a report 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.
Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI since 2019, when it first acquired an interest in the artificial intelligence firm.
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 and early investors.
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 as the AI arms race heats up.
Related: OpenAI to stay nonprofit, scrap proposed overhaul
OpenAI faces staunch pushback against for-profit shift
OpenAI was founded as a non-profit entity in 2015 by businessman Elon Musk, tech entrepreneur Sam Altman, and AI researcher Ilya Sutskever.
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.
Elon Musk has been one of the biggest critics of the plan, calling into question the legality of the proposed shift in a November 2024 legal filing.
The tech billionaire also blasted the company’s focus on closed-source software development, which he said was not the original objective of OpenAI.
“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 an audience at the New York Times DealBook Summit.
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 by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
More recently, on May 5, OpenAI announced it was abandoning its shift to a purely for-profit model and is choosing to shift to a public benefit corporation — a profit-driven structure with legal obligations to fulfill social or public goods objectives — controlled by a non-profit entity.
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