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Microsoft and OpenAI have a new deal that could clear the way for an IPO
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Microsoft and OpenAI have a new deal that could clear the way for an IPO

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As OpenAI attempts to restructure itself and eventually go public, a hurdle for the startup, recently valued at $500 billion, is its increasingly complicated partnership with Microsoft. On Thursday afternoon, the two companies released this joint statement about an agreement they’ve reached.

Microsoft & OpenAI:

Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the next phase of our partnership. We are actively working to finalize contractual terms in a definitive agreement. Together, we remain focused on delivering the best AI tools for everyone, grounded in our shared commitment to safety.

Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, and shares in the revenue earned by ChatGPT as well as its API. Microsoft also now includes OpenAI as a competitor, allows OpenAI to lean on other cloud providers for compute power, and has started to increase its reliance on its own AI models.

In a company town hall meeting on Thursday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and AI chief Mustafa Suleyman committed to “significant investments” in its own models. “We should have the capacity to build world class frontier models in house of all sizes, but we should be very pragmatic and use other models where we need to,” said Suleyman.

There was one specific detail about the agreement with Microsoft released by OpenAI in another statement, saying that its nonprofit parent company will continue to hold authority over the for-profit business, with an equity stake worth more than $100 billion.

Other philanthropies and nonprofits have reportedly pushed back against OpenAI’s unusual restructuring plan, and the attorneys general of California and Delaware have opened investigations. In its announcement, OpenAI said, “We continue to work with the California and Delaware Attorneys General as an important part of strengthening our approach, and we remain committed to learning and acting with urgency to ensure our tools are helpful and safe for everyone, while advancing safety as an industry-wide priority.”



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Xbox is coming to cars thanks to an LG and Microsoft partnership
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Xbox is coming to cars thanks to an LG and Microsoft partnership

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Microsoft and LG are partnering up to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to internet-connected vehicles. A new Xbox app will soon be available on cars that use LG’s Automotive Content Platform (ACP), allowing Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers to access cloud versions of Xbox titles directly on in-car screens.

The Xbox app will be able to stream games when you’re charging an EV or trying to entertain passengers on a road trip. LG’s ACP is already available on Kia’s EV3 in Europe, and is also coming to the EV4, EV5, and new Sportage. ACP runs LG’s webOS platform, the same software that powers its smart TVs, and provides access to a variety of content like Netflix, Disney Plus, YouTube, and more.

Microsoft already partnered with LG to bring its Xbox app to smart TVs earlier this year, and the extension to compatible cars comes as the software maker gets ready to expand Xbox Cloud Gaming to Game Pass Core and Standard subscribers. “Our work with LG is the latest example of Xbox expanding to new places, building on partnerships that already bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to mobile devices, PCs, and TVs,” says Christopher Lee, vice president of Xbox marketing. “By adding vehicles to the mix, we’re giving players more choice than ever in how they enjoy their games.”

Speaking of cars, Microsoft also announced overnight that it’s returning to the Tokyo Game Show later this month. An Xbox stream will be held on September 25th at 3AM PT / 6AM ET / 11AM UK, where Forza Horizon 6 is widely expected to be announced. The Xbox teaser for the Tokyo Game Show includes an urban neon aesthetic street scene that looks like it would be ideal for a new Forza game set in Japan.



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Microsoft open-sources its 6502 version of BASIC from 1976
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Microsoft open-sources its 6502 version of BASIC from 1976

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After years of unofficial copies of Microsoft’s 6502 BASIC floating around on the internet, the software giant has released the code under an open-source license. 6502 BASIC was one of Microsoft’s first pieces of software, adapted in 1976 by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and early employee Ric Weiland to run on the 6502 CPU that powered the Apple II, Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Commodore 8-bit series.

Microsoft’s open-source release of 6502 BASIC is a throwback to the initial days of coding, as the software helped standardize programming language implementations and allowed some of the first developers to use a Commodore machine and learn programming by typing 10 PRINT “HELLO” and 20 GOTO 10.

“In 1977, Commodore licensed it for a flat fee of $25,000, a deal that placed Microsoft BASIC at the heart of Commodore’s PET computers and, later, the VIC-20 and Commodore 64,” explains Microsoft in a blog post announcing Microsoft’s 6502 BASIC open source news.

While 6502 BASIC and Microsoft’s other early software projects helped with the development of MS-DOS and established the company’s software licensing business model, interest in this early code and the MOS 6502 CPU is still very much alive nearly 50 years later. Preservationists and hobbyists have been experimenting with FPGA-based re-creations and emulator projects, and the 6502 BASIC code has also appeared in museum archives.

“Over the years, dedicated preservationists have reconstructed build environments and verified that the historical source can still produce byte-exact ROMs,” says Microsoft. “This open-source release builds on that work, now with a clear, modern license. It follows Microsoft’s earlier release of GW-BASIC, which descended from the same lineage and shipped in the original IBM PC’s ROM.“

If you’re interested in experimenting with the assembly language source code of Microsoft’s 6502 BASIC, the complete source code is now available on GitHub.



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Everwild's exec producer moves from Rare to Xbox Game Studios following cancellation and Microsoft layoffs
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Everwild’s exec producer moves from Rare to Xbox Game Studios following cancellation and Microsoft layoffs

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Everwild’s executive producer has a new role at Xbox, following the cancellation of Rare’s long-in-development project.


Amidst layoffs at Microsoft in July, Rare’s fantasy adventure Everwild was cancelled and a number of employees at the British studio lost their jobs.


Now, as reported by VGC, the game’s executive producer Louise O’Connor has moved to Xbox Game Studios as its chief of staff, following 25 years at Rare.

Everwild – Eternals Trailer – Xbox Games Showcase JulyWatch on YouTube


The move comes almost a year after former head of Rare Craig Duncan became head of Xbox Game Studios, after Alan Hartman retired.


O’Connor first worked at Rare on Conker’s Bad Fur Day for the N64. She later worked at the studio as head of animation and its incubation director, responsible for innovation.


Everwild was first revealed in 2019 as the next big project from Rare. It surfaced again in 2020 with a trailer (above) featuring gorgeous environments and creatures, but little was seen aftewards until its cancellation.


Notably, Rare veteran Gregg Mayles also left the studio in the wake of the Microsoft layoffs, after 35 years.

This is a news-in-brief story. This is part of our vision to bring you all the big news as part of a daily live report.



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Blizzard's Diablo team forms union seeking protection in wake of Microsoft layoffs
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Blizzard’s Diablo team forms union seeking protection in wake of Microsoft layoffs

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Blizzard’s Diablo team is the latest group of Microsoft workers to form a union, with over 450 developers voting in favour of representation with the Communications Workers of America.


The decision follows mass layoffs at Microsoft back in June, with workers at the company seeking fair compensation, job security, and an opportunity to improve workplace conditions.


Other unions formed by Microsoft workers include Blizzard’s story and franchise development team, as well as employees at ZeniMax Media and Raven Software. There are now over 3,500 employees at Microsoft in CWA organised unions.


“With every subsequent round of mass layoffs, I’ve witnessed the dread in my coworkers grow stronger because it feels like no amount of hard work is enough to protect us,” said Kelly Yeo, a game producer on Diablo and organising committee member. “I am overjoyed that we have formed a union – this is just the first step for us joining a movement spreading across an industry that is tired of living in fear. We are ready to begin fighting for real change alongside our Diablo colleagues.”


The union includes developers, artists, designers, engineers, and support staff working across the Diablo franchise.


“My entire career as a developer has seen my peers and I paying the ‘passion tax’ for working in an industry that we love,” said Nav Bhatti, a senior software engineer and organising committee member. “At some point you have to choose between fight or flight, and forming a union is us doing just that – standing our ground in the industry.”


“Diablo workers are the latest to show that California has become a hub for video game worker organising,” said CWA local 9510 president Jason Justice. “What’s happening here is part of a much larger story about turning the tide in an industry that has long overlooked its labour. Entertainment workers across film, television, music, and now video games are standing together to have a seat at the table. The strength of our movement comes from that solidarity.”


Eurogamer recently spoke to members of Blizzard’s story and franchise development team about their union, discussing their demands from Microsoft.

This is a news-in-brief story. This is part of our vision to bring you all the big news as part of a daily live report.



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Microsoft fires two more employees for participating in Palestine protests on campus
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Microsoft fires two more employees for participating in Palestine protests on campus

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Microsoft has fired two more employees who participated in recent protests against the company’s contracts with the Israeli military and government. The two employees, Nisreen Jaradat and Julius Shan, were fired “in connection” with demonstrations that saw protesters set up encampments at Microsoft’s headquarters, according to Hossam Nasr, an organizer with the No Azure for Apartheid group.

Two other Microsoft employees were fired last night for their involvement with a protest that saw members of the group gain access to a company building and live stream themselves inside the office of Microsoft president Brad Smith. Jaradat had previously sent a mass email around Microsoft saying she was “fed up” with the company’s treatment of her as a Palestinian worker, bypassing the company’s restrictions on language around Palestine and Gaza internally in order to do so.

The No Azure for Apartheid group has been taking public actions against Microsoft throughout the year. The group interrupted Microsoft executives during live streamed presentations on multiple occasions this spring. More recently, the group attempted to occupy a plaza on Microsoft’s headquarters. After being removed, they returned the next day with tents and tables and poured red paint across a Microsoft sign; 18 people were arrested.

Protesters returned again on Tuesday for the demonstration in Smith’s office. Afterward, Smith held a press conference saying that Microsoft is “working every day” to investigate potential misuse of Azure in Israel. But he said the protesters’ actions were “not ok.”

Microsoft declined to provide an attributable statement to The Verge.



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Microsoft introduces a pair of in-house AI models

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Microsoft is expanding its AI footprint with the release of two new models that its teams trained completely in-house. MAI-Voice-1 is the tech major’s first natural speech generation model, while MAI-1-preview is text-based and is the company’s first foundation model trained end-to-end. MAI-Voice-1 is currently being used in the Copilot Daily and Podcast features. Microsoft has made MAI-1-preview available for public tests on LMArena, and will begin previewing it in select Copilot situations in the coming weeks.

In an interview with Semafor, Microsoft AI division leader Mustafa Suleyman said the pair of models was developed with a focus on efficiency and cost-effectiveness. MAI-Voice-1 runs on a single GPU and MAI-1-preview was trained on about 15,000 Nvidia H-100 GPUs. For context, other models, such as xAI’s Grok, took more than 100,000 of those chips for training. “Increasingly, the art and craft of training models is selecting the perfect data and not wasting any of your flops on unnecessary tokens that didn’t actually teach your model very much,” Suleyman said.

Although it is being used to test the in-house models, Microsoft Copilot is primarily built on OpenAI’s GPT tech. The decision to build its own models, despite having sunk billion-dollar investments in the newer AI company, indicates that Microsoft wants to be an independent competitor in this space. While that could take time to reach parity with the companies that have emerged as forerunners in AI development, Suleyman told Semafor that Microsoft has “an enormous five-year roadmap that we’re investing in quarter after quarter.” With some concerns arising that AI could be facing a bubble-pop, Microsoft’s timeline will need to be aggressive to ensure taking the independent path is worthwhile.



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Microsoft fires two employee protesters who occupied its president’s office
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Microsoft fires two employee protesters who occupied its president’s office

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Microsoft has fired two employees that were involved in a sit-in protest in vice chair and president Brad Smith’s office. Software engineers Riki Fameli and Anna Hattle were both dismissed today, after being part of a group of seven protesters that managed to get inside Smith’s office in Building 34 yesterday.

Microsoft was forced to temporarily lock down its executive building. The protesters live streamed themselves on Twitch entering Smith’s office, and demanded that the company cut ties with the Israeli government. Microsoft employees Anna Hattle and Riki Fameli were both arrested during the incident, alongside former Microsoft employees Vaniya Agrawal, Hossam Nasr, and Joe Lopez. A former Google employee and another tech worker were also arrested.

An unnamed Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire that the two employees were terminated “following serious breaches of company policies and our code of conduct.” Microsoft refused to provide an attributable statement to The Verge.

Hours after the protesters were arrested, Brad Smith then held an emergency press conference in his office. Seated on the edge of his desk, Smith addressed a group of reporters and viewers on a YouTube live stream. Smith said that Microsoft is “committed to ensuring its human rights principles and contractual terms of service are upheld in the Middle East.” He said the company launched an investigation earlier this month after The Guardian reported that Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform was being used for surveillance of Palestinians.

Hattle was previously arrested during protests at Microsoft’s headquarters last week, where Redmond police arrested 20 people after a group took over a plaza at Microsoft’s headquarters to protest against the company’s contracts with Israel. Protestors at Microsoft’s campus set up a “Liberated Zone” encampment, and poured red paint over a Microsoft sign on campus.

The latest protests were organized by No Azure for Apartheid, a group of current and former Microsoft workers who are demanding that the company cut its ties with the Israeli government. The group has carried out a variety of protests in recent months, with the latest disruptions escalating to the homes and offices of Microsoft executives.



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Microsoft hosts emergency press conference after protesters ‘storm a building’
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Microsoft hosts emergency press conference after protesters ‘storm a building’

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Microsoft president Brad Smith hosted an impromptu press conference on Tuesday afternoon, just hours after protesters gained access to a building at the company’s headquarters and held a sit-in demonstration inside his office.

Seated on the edge of his desk, in the office that had been occupied by protesters earlier that day, Smith addressed a group of reporters and viewers on a live stream. “Obviously, this was an unusual day,” he said, the camera shaking as he spoke.

The protesters were part of the No Azure for Apartheid group, which on several occasions this year interrupted Microsoft’s public presentations to demand that the company terminate all contracts with the Israeli government and military.

Smith said that Microsoft is “committed to ensuring its human rights principles and contractual terms of service are upheld in the Middle East.” He said the company launched an investigation earlier this month after the Guardian reported that Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform was being used for surveillance of Palestinians. Smith said that Microsoft disagreed with some of the report’s findings, but that others warranted investigation.

“We are working every day to get to the bottom of what’s going on, and we will,” Smith said.

An organizer for No Azure for Apartheid, Abdo Mohamed, earlier today told The Verge that Microsoft employees Riki Fameli and Anna Hattle were part of the protest. They were joined by former Microsoft employees Vaniya Agrawal, Hossam Nasr, and Joe Lopez.

Smith said that seven people in total were involved with today’s protests, with two of them being Microsoft employees. The people were removed by Redmond police, he said.

“When seven folks do as they did today, storm a building, occupy an office, lock other people out of the office, plant listening devices — even in crude form, in the form of telephones, cellphones hidden under couches and behind books — that’s not ok,” Smith said. “When they’re asked to leave and they refused, that’s not ok.”



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Pro-Palestinian demonstrators hold banners and signs as they protest outside the Microsoft Build conference at the Seattle Convention Center in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025. (Photo by Jason Redmond / AFP) (Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)
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Protestors occupy Microsoft president’s office as opposition to the company’s dealings with the Israeli military continue to escalate

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Less than a week after 18 protesters associated with activist group No Azure for Apartheid were arrested while protesting Microsoft’s dealings with the Israeli military, the group has staged a sit-in inside the office of Microsoft president Brad Smith. A report by The Verge says the building was subsequently locked down.

The protesters recorded at least two videos from inside Microsoft’s Building 34, including one showing what appears to be security attempting to remove them, and posted them to Twitch, but they were quickly deleted.

No Azure for Apartheid said protesters also deployed noisemakers attached to balloons prior to the sit-in, and posted notices reading, “The People’s Court Summons Bradford Lee Smith on Charges of Crimes Against Humanity.”


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Two banners were also hung inside Building 34, one declaring it renamed to “Mai Ubeid Building” and another repeating No Azure for Apartheid’s demands:

  1. Cut Ties with Israel
  2. Call for an End to the Genocide and Forced Starvation
  3. Pay Reparations to the Palestinians
  4. End the Discrimination Against Workers

Current and former Microsoft workers are supporting the sit-in with a rally being held outside, during which copies of the document “We will not be cogs in the Israeli genocidal machine: a call for a Worker Intifada” were distributed. An 18-foot scroll displaying the signatures of more than 2,000 people who have signed No Azure for Apartheid’s online petition was also displayed.

The occupation of Smith’s office represents a significant escalation over previous protests, which began earlier this year with individual employees disrupting Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event and Build conference. Earlier this month, protesters set up an encampment in Microsoft’s East Campus Plaza, which was dispersed by police; the group returned the following day, and police subsequently arrested 18 protesters.

Microsoft has thus far refused to engage with the protesters but they seem to be having an impact, as pressure on the company to end its work with the Israeli government is growing. A group of Microsoft shareholders have demanded a report into the company’s “human rights due diligence” over allegations of war crime complicity in Gaza and some employees of Microsoft-owned studio Arkane Lyon have also called on the company to stop supporting the Israeli government. The BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement has called for a boycott of Microsoft’s products due to its dealings with Israel.

A recent report by The Guardian has alleged that Israel is using Microsoft’s cloud services for mass surveillance of Palestinians. Microsoft has said that it’s “pursuing a thorough and independent review of new allegations first reported earlier this month about the purported use of its Azure platform in Israel.”

We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update if we receive a reply.



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