Twitter CEO Elon Musk threatened to sue Microsoft on Wednesday, accusing the software program large of illegally utilizing the social media firm’s information to coach its synthetic intelligence mannequin.

Musk’s risk by tweet got here after Mashable and different publications reported that Microsoft would drop Twitter from its promoting platform, which permits advert consumers to handle all of their social media accounts in a single place.

“They educated illegally utilizing Twitter information,” Musk tweeted. “Lawsuit time.”

Musk, who can be CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, typically tweets about plans that by no means come to fruition, and no lawsuit seems to have been filed. Twitter’s press line did not reply meaningfully to a request for remark, and a Microsoft consultant declined to remark.

Musk’s risk is the newest indication that information possession is shortly changing into a fraught battleground within the generative AI rush. Huge Tech firms are working to develop cutting-edge AI fashions like OpenAI’s GPT, and information house owners are looking for to cease them or cost to be used of their content material.

Microsoft develops its personal so-called massive language fashions (LLMs) and sells entry to OpenAI’s fashions. Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI final 12 months in an unusually structured deal. Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI earlier than leaving its board in 2018, and has complained lately of the corporate’s transfer from a nonprofit mannequin to a extremely precious enterprise influenced by Microsoft.

LLMs like GPT require terabytes of information for coaching, a lot of which is scraped from web sites like Reddit, StackOverflow, and Twitter. Coaching information from social networks is efficacious as a result of it captures casual, back-and-forth conversations.

As these new AI fashions transfer from analysis labs and universities into the company world, the house owners of the information are beginning to make calls for.

For instance, Reddit mentioned earlier this week that it could cost firms for entry to its programming interface used to feed the conversations amongst Redditors into AI coaching software program. Common Music Group additionally mentioned this week that such coaching of artists’ music would characterize “each a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright legislation” in response to a viral video of a track that claimed to make use of AI to mimic the rapper Drake.

And inventory picture database Getty Pictures is suing Secure Diffusion, alleging that the corporate copied its content material to coach its AI picture generator.

Musk mentioned in December that Twitter would “pause” OpenAI’s entry to its database. He is additionally introduced plans to construct his personal massive language mannequin in one in every of his firms known as TruthGPT.

WATCH: Elon Musk needed to take cost of OpenAI in 2018