A lawyer for Twitter owner Elon Musk accused Microsoft of misusing the service’s data and demanded an audit from the software giant.

The letter primarily addresses a seemingly narrow set of alleged infractions by Microsoft in drawing information from Twitter’s database of tweets. But the move could foreshadow more serious developments. Musk has previously accused Microsoft and its partner OpenAI in a tweet of “illegally” using Twitter data to develop sophisticated AI systems such as ChatGPT.

“Lawsuit time,” Musk wrote in that April tweet.

[Tweets are public, but commercial use of them without proper licensing would have to remain within “fair use.” Twitter suggests that Microsoft culled 26 *billion* tweets last year to build its AI engine. That won’t fit within anyone’s “fair use” paradigm, if true. — Ed]