Here’s how the new Microsoft and OpenAI deal breaks down

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 collaborative work on custom models for Alexa. Microsoft wasn’t happy about OpenAI cutting a deal with its main rival, and it was weighing legal action ahead of this renegotiation. Amazon and OpenAI clearly wanted a closer partnership, especially as Amazon is playing catch-up in the AI market and trying to push agents to businesses through its Bedrock service. …