Amazon touts a ‘major expansion’ with OpenAI as Microsoft ties loosen

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Amazon announced what it called a "major expansion" of its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Tuesday, a day after the artificial intelligence company said it was loosening its ties to longtime backer Microsoft.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the collaboration with Amazon's cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, would involve co-developing a new platform for AI agents that can do computer-based work on people's behalf.

Altman spoke via prerecorded video message to an Amazon event in San Francisco at the same time as he was appearing in federal court across San Francisco Bay in Oakland for a civil trial brought by rival OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk.

Microsoft had said Monday it will no longer pay a share of its revenue to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the latest move to untether a close partnership that helped unleash an artificial intelligence boom.

OpenAI relied exclusively on Microsoft's investments in cloud computing services to build the technology that helped make ChatGPT a household name. Microsoft, in turn, relied on OpenAI's technology to build its own AI assistant Copilot.

But the partnership has evolved as San Francisco-based OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, has shifted to a capitalistic enterprise on a path toward an initial public offering on Wall Street and has balanced its reliance on Microsoft with other cloud partners like Amazon, Google and Oracle.

OpenAI said Monday it will continue to pay Microsoft a share of its revenue through 2030, though the rate will be capped. OpenAI has been on a race to boost sales of its AI technology by focusing on big business customers. Its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, also spoke at the Amazon event.

Microsoft remains the primary cloud computing partner for OpenAI, and products made by the AI company will ship first on Microsoft's cloud platform, called Azure, "unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities," both companies said.

Altman suggested in his remarks Tuesday that Amazon had those capabilities.

"These systems need to run reliably and robustly," Altman said. "They need to be secure, they need to scale, and they need to fit in the environments where companies already run their businesses. And they need infrastructure that customers already trust for their most important workloads. That's what makes this partnership with AWS so important."