Twitter Inc claims that Microsoft Corp broke an agreement over the use of the social media company’s data, according to reports based on the information gathered from a letter.

Elon Musk’s lawyer accused Microsoft of “unauthorised” use of Twitter data, including exchanging data with government agencies without authorisation in some situations.

Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, urged Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a letter to perform an examination of its usage of Twitter’s content. The New York Times was the first to report on the letter.

There were no comments on the issue available from Twitter.

According to the terms of the agreement, Twitter imposes rate limits on the use of its application programming interface (API) for all developers.

“Despite these limitations, the Microsoft Apps accessed Twitter’s APIs over 780 million times and retrieved over 26 billion tweets in 2022 alone”, the letter said.

According to a Microsoft representative, the business received concerns about its earlier use of the free Twitter APIs from a law firm representing Twitter on Thursday.

“We will review these questions and respond appropriately. We look forward to continuing our long term partnership with the company,” the spokesperson said.

Twitter’s claims come at a time when Elon Musk and Microsoft are at odds over Microsoft’s artificial intelligence platform.

Musk announced in April that he will build the AI platform “TruthGPT” to compete with Microsoft and Google’s products.

He has accused Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the company behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, of “training the AI to lie,” and claims that OpenAI has now become a “closed source,” “for-profit” organisation “closely allied with Microsoft.”

He has also accused Google co-founder Larry Page of not taking AI safety seriously.

(Adapted from TheEconomicTimes.com)