Eleven plaintiffs file class action complaint in San Francisco
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Image: Angela Bena via Pexels
A recent lawsuit in the United States accuses Microsoft of illegally manipulating artificial intelligence prices through a secret deal with ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
On Monday, eleven plaintiffs filed a class action complaint in a federal court in San Francisco, accusing Microsoft of restricting the availability of the computing resources required to run ChatGPT through an exclusive cloud computing contract.
The plaintiffs argue that this restriction violates US antitrust laws, and has driven up prices since ChatGPT was launched in November 2022.
Microsoft initially declined to comment. OpenAI, which is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, also did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did the lawyers representing the eleven plaintiffs.
The lawsuit points to Microsoft’s investment of more than $13 billion (€11.2 billion) in OpenAI and suggests the company is leveraging the agreement to benefit from OpenAI’s success while simultaneously developing its own competing AI products, such as Copilot. While the alleged restrictions have been partly lifted since June, when OpenAI began sourcing computing power from Google, the lawsuit states these restrictions still pose a threat due to Microsoft’s significant influence over its main competitor.
In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion (€860 million) in OpenAI and entered into a multi-year partnership to jointly develop AI technologies on the Azure cloud platform.
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