Once tied tightly together, Microsoft and OpenAI have amended their agreement, making the Windows giant’s license non-exclusive. In exchange, Microsoft will no longer owe OpenAI a revenue share.
Both companies announced the changes this morning, which they described as providing “long-term clarity” for the relationship. Microsoft’s stock dipped briefly on the news before recovering.
Under the revised terms, Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner, with OpenAI products continuing to ship first on Azure. However, OpenAI can now turn to other providers if Microsoft lacks capacity or declines to support new features.
Microsoft retains a license to OpenAI’s models and products through 2032, just no longer exclusively. OpenAI’s own revenue-share payments to Microsoft will continue through 2030, and Microsoft remains a major shareholder.
This is at least the third significant restructuring of the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI. A previous “next chapter,” announced in late 2025, had OpenAI committing to $250 billion in Azure spending while granting Microsoft exclusive rights to its software IP.
In January 2026, investor concerns over Microsoft’s exposure to OpenAI hammered its share price. By April, the Windows biz was publicly previewing its own home-grown machine learning models, focused on speech recognition and synthesis, as well as image generation.
In March, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent the former Copilot boss, Mustafa Suleyman, off to pursue superintelligence and deliver “world-class models for Microsoft over the next five years.”
That move that wouldn’t be necessary if Microsoft and OpenAI were joined at the hip. ®