Elon Musk’s Legal Battle with Microsoft and Virtual Appearance at Build Meeting

Elon Musk finds himself in a legal dispute with Microsoft, yet he made a friendly virtual appearance at the company’s annual tech showcase. During the event, he announced that his Grok artificial intelligence chatbot will be hosted in Microsoft’s data center.

“It’s great to be in a developer meeting,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a pre-recorded video that aired Monday at the Build meeting in Seattle.

Musk had previously challenged Microsoft and its partner, OpenAI, regarding his significant contributions to OpenAI, which he co-founded. He is currently in charge of Xai, the company behind Grok, which is seen as a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also participated in a live video call during the meeting.

This collaboration means the latest iteration of Xai’s Grok will run on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform, placing it alongside competing models from OpenAI, Meta, European startup Mistral, Black Forest Lab, and the Chinese company Deepseek.

The announcement of the Grok partnership follows a recent incident where Xai had to address the chatbot’s repeated engagement with a controversial topic related to South African racial politics on Musk’s social media platform, X.

Although Musk didn’t touch on the controversy during his chat with Nadella, he emphasized that integrity should be the “best policy” for ensuring AI safety.

“We make mistakes, we make mistakes, but we aim to fix them very quickly,” Musk stated.

Protests Disrupt Microsoft Event Over Gaza

Monday’s meeting was also interrupted by protests regarding Microsoft’s dealings with the Israeli government. This isn’t the first time; Microsoft employees have previously faced consequences for protesting at company events, including its 50th anniversary in April.

“Satya, try to show that Microsoft is killing the Palestinians,” some protesters shouted during the early moments of Nadella’s speech, demanding accountability for Israeli actions.

Nadella continued with his presentation, even as protesters were escorted out. Microsoft confirmed last week that it provides AI services to Israeli forces involved in the Gaza conflict. However, the company stated it has not found any evidence that its Azure platform has been used to specifically target or harm people in Gaza.