Chris Young, Microsoft executive vice president of business development, strategy, and ventures, at the GeekWire Summit in 2021. (GeekWire File Photo /

Microsoft's LinkedIn has been sued by Premium customers who said the business-focused social media platform disclosed their private messages to third parties without permission to train generative artificial intelligence models.

The suit alleges LinkedIn quietly introduced a privacy setting that let users enable or disable the sharing of their personal data.

Microsofts LinkedIn is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit, accused of sharing private messages from Premium users without permission to train generative AI models. The complaint, filed in federal court in San Jose,

The new agreement “includes changes to the exclusivity on new capacity, moving to a model where Microsoft has a right of first refusal (ROFR),” Microsoft says. “To further support OpenAI, Microsoft has approved OpenAI’s ability to build additional capacity, primarily for research and training of models.”

The software giant was previously the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI and now retains right of first refusal.

Microsoft’s multi-year partnership with OpenAI is taking a new direction as the ChatGPT maker will no longer exclusively choose Microsoft Azure for new cloud capacity.