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 allows advert consumers to handle all of their social media accounts in a single place.

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

Musk, who can be CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, usually 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 rapidly turning 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 yr in an unusually structured deal. Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI earlier than leaving its board in 2018, and has complained just lately of the corporate’s transfer from a nonprofit mannequin to a extremely worthwhile enterprise influenced by Microsoft.

LLMs like GPT require terabytes of knowledge for coaching, a lot of which is scraped from web sites like Reddit, StackOverflow, and Twitter. Coaching information from social networks is effective 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 will 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 symbolize “each a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright regulation” in response to a viral video of a track that claimed to make use of AI to mimic the rapper Drake.

And inventory photograph database Getty Photos is suing Steady 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 certainly one of his firms known as TruthGPT.

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