Expert panel will determine AGI arrival in new Microsoft-OpenAI agreement (arstechnica.com)

Microsoft and OpenAI announced a revised partnership that installs an independent expert panel to verify when OpenAI achieves artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a determination that will trigger major shifts in IP rights and revenue sharing. The deal values Microsoft’s stake in OpenAI at about $135 billion, extends their exclusive partnership through 2032, and keeps Microsoft as OpenAI’s frontier model partner with Azure API exclusivity until the AGI threshold is met. After the panel confirms AGI, Microsoft’s intellectual-property rights to OpenAI’s research methods would expire and the current revenue-sharing arrangement would end (though payouts would continue over a longer timeframe). The agreement also gives both firms greater freedom to pursue AGI independently. The change is significant because it replaces OpenAI’s former unilateral ability to declare AGI — a vague, technically fraught concept — with third‑party oversight, creating a new checkpoint with billions at stake. Key unknowns remain: who will serve on the panel and what concrete criteria they’ll use (the companies previously discussed an economic $100B profit benchmark). Technically and strategically, the move affects control of frontier models, commercialization paths, and cloud-compute dynamics (Microsoft has been OpenAI’s main Azure provider but may be unable to meet rising compute demand). More broadly, independent verification could set an industry precedent for how AGI is defined, validated, and governed.