Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI cracked when it hired Mustafa Suleyman, rival Marc Benioff says | TechCrunch

Abstraction: Microsoft-OpenAI partnership fracturing over competing AI ambitions

Key points:

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says Microsoft's hiring of Mustafa Suleyman (DeepMind/Inflection co-founder) as Microsoft AI CEO cracked the Microsoft-OpenAI relationship, as Suleyman and Sam Altman are known rivals
• OpenAI joined SoftBank and Oracle on the $500B Stargate data center project, ending Microsoft's exclusive cloud provider status
• Microsoft invested $1B in OpenAI in 2019; their exclusive agreement was set to end when AGI is achieved (with a financial definition agreed between both parties)
• Microsoft is reportedly building its own frontier LLM called MAI-1 and launched a new AI group led by Jay Parikh without mentioning OpenAI
• Tensions date to at least mid-2023 after OpenAI launched its own enterprise product competing with Microsoft
• Salesforce, also an Anthropic investor, benefits from OpenAI broadening its cloud partnerships

Connections: Microsoft · Openai · Mustafa Suleyman · Salesforce · Large Language Models · AI Industry

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/22/microsofts-relationship-with-openai-cracked-when-it-hired-mustafa-suleyman-rival-marc-benioff-says/