OpenAI drops AGI clause, eyes phone

OpenAI and Microsoft said Monday they rewrote their partnership, scrapping Microsoft’s exclusive access to OpenAI models and products. (microsoft.com) Microsoft said OpenAI can now serve all of its products across any cloud provider, while Microsoft keeps a non-exclusive license to OpenAI intellectual property through 2032. (microsoft.com) Microsoft also said it will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI, though Azure remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner and OpenAI products will ship there first unless Microsoft cannot support required capabilities. (microsoft.com) That is a clear break from Microsoft’s January 21, 2025 description of the relationship, when it said exclusivity on OpenAI application programming interfaces and revenue sharing would continue through 2030. (microsoft.com) The old contract fight centered on artificial general intelligence, the idea of systems that can match humans across many tasks. A February 27, 2026 joint statement had still said Microsoft maintained an exclusive license and unchanged revenue sharing. (microsoft.com) OpenAI reinforced the shift a day earlier by publishing five new public principles on April 26. Sam Altman wrote that OpenAI wants “to put truly general AI in the hands of as many people as possible.” (openai.com) Business Insider reported the new principles dropped the 2018 charter’s pledge to stop competing with a “value-aligned, safety-conscious” project and toned down older language about broad sharing and collaboration. (businessinsider.com) (openai.com) A separate report added a hardware angle. TechCrunch, citing analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, said OpenAI is exploring a phone with MediaTek and Qualcomm as chip partners and Luxshare as manufacturing partner. (techcrunch.com) TechCrunch said the device could rely on artificial intelligence agents instead of traditional apps and could enter mass production in 2028, though OpenAI has not announced a phone publicly. (techcrunch.com) Put together, Monday’s contract rewrite and Sunday’s principles update move OpenAI further from a tightly bounded lab partnership and closer to a multi-cloud, multi-product company with room to distribute software and possibly hardware more broadly. (microsoft.com) (openai.com)