Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, right, on stage with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI Dev Day in San Francisco this week. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)

A brief restriction on employees ability to use ChatGPT inside Microsoft triggered at least one report Thursday that the tech giant was taking a curious approach in its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI.

Microsoft cited security and data concerns in an update on an internal website as it cut off AI tools such as ChatGPT for employee use, CNBC reported.

But the lockout was brief and apparently not intended, and was related to a large language model test being conducted by Microsoft.

We were testing endpoint control systems for LLMs and inadvertently turned them on for all employees, a Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement to GeekWire. We restored service shortly after we identified our error.

The spokesperson said that Microsoft encourages its employees and customers to use services like Bing Chat Enterprise and ChatGPT Enterprise that come with greater levels of privacy and security protections.

ChatGPT provides sophisticated answers and detailed information in response to natural language queries. OpenAI said this week that the tool, which has more than 100 million users, was experiencing outages due to a targeted attack.

The situation with Microsoft had OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joking on X about retaliation rumors, as he posted the CNBC story.

It was all love earlier this week when Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared a stage at OpenAIs developer event in San Francisco on Monday.

We love you guys, Nadella told Altman, saying the OpenAI partnership requires us to be on the top of our game.

Altman said later, I think we have the best partnership in tech, and were excited to build AGI together, referring to their ambitions to create artificial general intelligence.

Microsoft announced its initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI in July 2019.

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