You can’t share Xbox clips directly to Twitter anymore | Engadget

Gamers who want to post clips of a cool multikill they pulled off in Halo Infinite or something ridiculous that happened in Sea of Thieves to Twitter may need to take an extra couple of steps to share their captures. Microsoft said it had to switch off the option to upload screenshots and clips directly to Twitter from Xbox consoles as well as the Game Bar on Windows.

There are other options, though they’re a little more inconvenient. You can use the Xbox mobile app to download console captures and share them to Twitter. Nintendo and PlayStation offer similar ways to share screenshots and clips. Alternatively, you can copy your Xbox captures onto a USB drive and access them from your computer.

When asked for comment, Xbox declined to shed more light on the reason for the change. However, it seems likely that Microsoft dropped the built-in sharing option due to Twitter’s decision to start charging for API access. That move is breaking functionality for all kinds of organizations, including disaster response services.

This week, Microsoft said it would soon remove Twitter integration from its social media management tool for advertisers. Twitter is said to be charging at least $42,000 per month for enterprise access to its APIs.

In a response to a tweet about Microsoft’s API move, Twitter owner Elon Musk suggested that Microsoft had “illegally” used his company’s data and that a lawsuit is forthcoming. “They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time,” he wrote. Musk noted in December that ChatGPT operator OpenAI, whose tech Microsoft is using to power Bing’s chatbot and other AI features, “had access to Twitter database for training. I put that on pause for now.”

Musk recently set up his own AI company in the hopes of taking on the likes of Google and OpenAI. As it happens, he co-founded OpenAI but later disowned the company and publicly criticized ChatGPT.

Update 4/21 1:22PM ET: Added Xbox’s response to a request for comment.