Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, was defended by a lawyer who urged an investigation into Microsoft’s alleged misuse of the service’s data. The letter focuses mostly on a rather limited range of claimed transgressions by Microsoft when extracting data from Twitter’s database of tweets. However, the action can be a sign of worse things to come. Musk has tweeted in the past alleging Microsoft and its partner OpenAI were “illegally” using data from Twitter to develop advanced artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT. In April, Musk made the claim in a tweet.

The letter, however, skirted that issue and was signed by Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro. It said that Microsoft’s contract with Twitter prohibited it from using the service’s data in excess, including going beyond “reasonable request volume” or engaging in “excessive or abusive usage.” Following that, Spiro said that “despite these limitations,” Microsoft has successfully recovered over 26 billion tweets in 2022 alone. He gave the statistics no context at all. AI algorithms search written material for patterns that they may use to understand language and massive banks of information as part of the training process for AI systems, which involves enormous volumes of data.

In other ways, the letter mainly set forward a number of ambiguously phrased accusations. For instance, it was discovered that, although being required to inform Twitter of its intended use of the data, Microsoft failed to do so for six out of the eight Microsoft programmes that accessed the Twitter database. The letter also claimed that at least one Microsoft programme has sent Twitter data to a variety of online domains that “reference a governmental organisation or agency.” According to the letter, this seemed to be a breach of Microsoft’s contract with Twitter, which forbade the business from obtaining Twitter data “on behalf of ‘any government-related entity'” without first informing Twitter.