Microsoft is considering putting a Chinese AI model inside its enterprise Copilot, and the reason is money.
The company told Axios it is exploring a self-hosted, fine-tuned version of DeepSeek V4, or another open-source model, as a cheaper option to power Copilot Cowork, the agentic assistant in its Microsoft 365 suite. It expects to offer a lower-cost model within weeks.
At the same time, Microsoft is moving Copilot Cowork to usage-based pricing, charging companies for the compute they actually burn rather than a flat fee.
Why even Microsoft can’t eat the bill
The shift is a window into the economics of agentic AI. Tools like Copilot Cowork, Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex call a model over and over as they work through a task, which is powerful and, it turns out, expensive.
