By Tom Warren
Publication Date: 2026-04-30 16:00:00
Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI has always been complicated, so I expected the close partnership-turned-situationship to end in tears. After all, executive disagreements, rearranged contracts, and frustrations over AI infrastructure have all regularly been part of the partnership, creating plenty of tension along the way. But against all odds, Microsoft and OpenAI divorced this week in a way that looks strangely amicable.
Microsoft announced the updates to its long-standing OpenAI deal on Monday, with the most important change allowing OpenAI to make its products and services available across all cloud providers. A day later, OpenAI announced it was bringing its latest AI models, Codex, and other tools to AWS — Microsoft’s biggest cloud rival.
It’s a move that seemed likely ever since Amazon announced its $50 billion deal with OpenAI earlier this year, which was originally framed as a deal to make AWS a third-party provider of OpenAI Frontier, together with some…
