Elon Musk's Lawyer Accuses Microsoft of Abusing Twitter's API to Collect Data
It looks like Elon Musk is moving to carry out his threat to sue Microsoft after the company refused to pay Twitter’s new API access fees.
On Thursday, Musk’s personal lawyer, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Microsoft, accusing the software giant of violating Twitter’s rules on its API use, according(Opens in a new window) to The New York Times.
PCMag also obtained the letter(Opens in a new window) from Spiro’s office, and it reveals Microsoft allegedly collected a massive number of tweets through Twitter’s API, even though the social media company enforces “rate limits(Opens in a new window)” on the access.
“Despite these limitations, the Microsoft Apps accessed Twitter’s APIs over 780 million times and retrieved over 26 billion tweets in 2022 alone,” Spiro wrote. “Indeed, for one of the Microsoft Apps, Microsoft’s account information outright states that it intends to allow its customers to ‘go around throttling limits.’”
Twitter’s API allows third-party apps and sites to quickly pull and post information to the social media platform. But under Elon Musk, Twitter has begun charging for access to the API, which has prompted companies including Microsoft to bail on the fee, which can range from $42,000 to as much as $210,000 per month.
As a result, Microsoft was recently forced to drop Twitter support from the company’s Smart Campaigns advertising platform. In response, Musk signaled he was ready to sue while implying Microsoft had abused Twitter’s API access to train its AI algorithms.
“They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time,” Musk said in a tweet(Opens in a new window) last month.
Spiro’s letter doesn’t mention anything about Microsoft using the Twitter API access to train AI language models.
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