Elon Musk threatens lawsuit against Microsoft, claims AI was trained on Twitter data

The head of Twitter has claimed that Microsoft scraped information from the platform to train its artificial intelligence and sold the data to others.

Microsoft has been threatened with a lawsuit by Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who claims the big tech company is “illegally” training its AI on Twitter data.

On April 19, Musk tweeted that it was "litigation time" in response to a post reporting that Microsoft would stop supporting Twitter's online social advertising tools, Smart Campaigns and Multi-platform, on April 25.

Twitter's boss has accused Microsoft of "illegally using Twitter data for training", suggesting the company mines user tweets to help train its artificial intelligence applications.

Microsoft has not explained why it is winding down support for Twitter, even though its API fees have soared from $0 to $42,000 per month, and in some cases are priced as high as $200,000 per month, according to a March report from Wired magazine.

Musk further accused Microsoft of "demonetizing Twitter data" by removing ads and "then selling our data to other people."

Microsoft’s decision to abandon Twitter means that its customers will no longer be able to access their Twitter accounts through its tools, apart from being able to create, manage, view and schedule tweets.

Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn will remain available to Microsoft customers, its website said.

Microsoft's decision comes a few months after Twitter stopped offering free access to the Twitter API for versions 1.1 and 2.

Academia has been hit hard by the wild price swings. Since 2020, more than 17,500 academic papers have been based on Twitter data. Now their prices have been largely wiped out.

Cointelegraph reached out to Microsoft, which declined to comment on Musk’s claims and its decision to remove advertising support from Twitter.

The software company is now reportedly developing its own AI chip to power ChatGPT in order to cope with rising development costs for both internal and OpenAI projects.

According to Google Finance, Microsoft is valued at $2.15 trillion, making it the second-largest company in the world by market value after Apple.