Elon Musk’s lawyer accuses Microsoft of abusing its access to Twitter data

Elon Musk’s personal attorney Alex Spiro sent a letter on behalf of Twitter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella accusing Microsoft of violating Twitter’s developer agreement. as told by the new York Times, In Thursday’s letter (available in full below), Spiro claims Microsoft may have violated “multiple provisions” of Twitter’s developer agreement “for an extended period of time.”

Until recently, Microsoft integrated Twitter’s API with some of its products – Twitter’s letter claims that Microsoft operates “eight separate Twitter API apps” integrated with products such as Xbox, Bing and its advertising platform . But it began pulling support for those APIs in April, including Twitter’s dropping of clip sharing from Xbox, possibly due to Twitter’s newer and generally more expensive API tiers.

According to the letter, examples of Microsoft violating Twitter’s developer agreement include using the API for “unauthorized uses and purposes” and Microsoft notifying Twitter of “any use case for six of the eight Microsoft apps.” Not informed, which continued to function till last month.” Claiming their agreement requires full cooperation from Microsoft, Spiro’s letter requests “compliance audits” for each of the eight apps by April 2023, when Microsoft shuts them down. It sought comprehensive information from Microsoft about each app and how it uses Twitter data, all of which has been provided by June 7.

Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw shared the following statement The edge “Today we heard from a law firm representing Twitter that they have some questions about our past use of the free Twitter API. We will review these questions and respond appropriately. We look forward to continuing our long-term partnership with the company.” Looking forward to.” The company also said NYT that it does not currently pay Twitter for the data.

Twitter’s press email responded to a request for comment with a poop emoji, as in since march,

Spiro’s letter does not mention any pending legal action. However, in April, Musk had already threatened to sue Microsoft because it “illegally trained using Twitter data,” large language models used in chatbots like Microsoft’s Bing and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. referring to the data used to train the . Other companies have taken less drastic approaches to try and take advantage of the models they train; Reddit, for example, recently announced API changes to let it better monetize its data.