Microsoft may have put out a five-alarm fire around its most important technology move in years. But fires leave scorch marks—and sometimes flare up again. 

A leadership crisis at Silicon Valley startup OpenAI over the weekend threatened to seriously singe the world’s second-largest company by market value. That is because OpenAI developed the key generative artificial-intelligence technology that has helped power Microsoft’s aggressive move into the field. Microsoft has invested a total of $13 billion into the company and already launched commercial products and services based on its technology, including a chatbot-enabled Bing search engine and a superpowered digital assistant called Copilot that can render emails, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.