A contractual mistake one makes only once is ensuring there's penalties for breach, or a breach would entail a clear monetary loss which is what's generally required by the courts. In this case I expect Microsoft would almost certainly have both, so I think the answer is 'no.'

This. MSFT is dreaming of an OpenAI hard outage right now, perfect little detail to forfeit compute credits.

Don't you think they have trouble enough as it is?

Depends on why they did what they did.

If they let msft "loot" all their IP then they lose any type of leverage they might still have, and if they did it due to some ideological reason I could see why they might prefer to choose a scorched earth policy.

Given that they refused to resign seems like they prefer to fight rather than give it to Sam Altman, which what the msft maneuver looks like defacto.

MSFT must already have the model weights, since they are serving GPT-4 on their own machines to Azure customers. It's a bit late to renege now.

That's only one piece of the puzzle, and perhaps openAI might be to file a cease and desist, but i have zero idea what contractual agreements are in place so I guess we will just wait and see how it plays out.

If they lose all the employees and then voluntarily give up their Microsoft funding the only asset they'll have left are the movie rights. Which, to be fair, seem to be getting more valuable by the day!