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.

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 partnership that launched the AI boom has been strained by disagreements over computing resources.