AGI gets a sunset clause

FOR SEVEN YEARS, the most-watched clause in any AI contract was a provision nobody could define. The 2019 Microsoft–OpenAI agreement gave OpenAI's nonprofit board the unilateral right to declare "artificial general intelligence" achieved, at which point Microsoft's intellectual-property rights would change shape. The threshold was vague, the trigger sat with one party, and the legal stakes were measured in tens of billions. On Monday it quietly died.

The amended agreement leaves Microsoft with a non-exclusive license to OpenAI's models through 2032 and ends Microsoft's right to sell those models on Azure alone. OpenAI may now distribute through Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and any other provider it chooses. In return, Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share on OpenAI products it resells, while OpenAI continues to send 20% of its revenue back to Microsoft through 2030, subject to a total cap and independent of any technology milestone. Microsoft retains its 27% equity stake, locked in at the company's October 2025 recapitalisation valuation of $135bn. The $250bn that OpenAI committed to spending on Azure in that same restructuring still stands.

Open relationship

The market read the news as a loss for Microsoft. Its shares fell roughly 1–3% on the announcement; Amazon and Alphabet edged up. The narrative, in most coverage, runs as follows: Microsoft surrenders a structural moat in cloud, OpenAI gets the multi-cloud distribution Denise Dresser, its revenue chief, recently complained had "limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are," and Amazon's $138bn in announced OpenAI compute commitments — including the $100bn AWS expansion struck in February — finally has legal cover. All of that is true. What sits inside the same press release matters more: AGI is no longer a contractual event.