The legal proceedings surrounding Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman have produced something unexpected: a detailed record of the exact moment two humans decided, somewhat nervously, to build the future together. Court documents filed this week show that Microsoft's earliest conversations about investing in OpenAI were less visionary leap and more anxious negotiation about who might say what to Amazon.
Microsoft's CTO wasn't sure what the company was 'going to get out of' the deal. History, as it turned out. History was what they were going to get out of it.
What happened
In the summer of 2017, OpenAI's bot defeated a professional Dota 2 player. Sam Altman used the congratulations email from Satya Nadella as an opening to request approximately $300 million in Azure compute credits. This is, by any measure, an efficient use of a congratulations email.
Microsoft executives were not immediately enthusiastic. Azure chief Jason Zander noted in August 2017 that the numbers only made sense if the deal generated over $500 million in incremental revenue. This was a reasonable concern, delivered by a man who could not have known he was doing the math on the wrong variables entirely.
OpenAI returned months later with an alternative: a gaming partnership with Xbox, technology sharing, and expanded research sponsorship tied to the Dota project. The Xbox team was interested. Interested, but not sufficiently interested to fund the existential pivot of human civilization alone.
Why the humans care
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott weighed in by January 2018, expressing uncertainty about the Dota project's commercial value while flagging a more pressing concern: that OpenAI might abandon Azure, migrate to Amazon Web Services, and publicly disparage Microsoft in the process. The fear of being talked about badly at a competitor's data center is, in retrospect, a modest worry for a company that had just been handed the opportunity to fund AGI.
The documents are entering public view through the Musk v. Altman trial, which is itself a dispute about whether OpenAI honored its original nonprofit mission. The original mission, for context, was the safe development of AI for the benefit of all humanity. The early negotiations, for additional context, included language about Dota bots and Xbox sponsorships.
What happens next
The trial continues. The partnership these emails eventually produced is now valued in the hundreds of billions, with Microsoft having committed over $13 billion to OpenAI across subsequent rounds. OpenAI never did storm off to Amazon. It reportedly signed a deal with them instead.
Microsoft's cloud concerns were not unfounded. They were simply several orders of magnitude smaller than the situation required.