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.

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

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.