Microsoft is reportedly ditching OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI models in favor of its own to cut costs - SiliconANGLE

Microsoft is reportedly ditching OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI models in favor of its own to cut costs

Microsoft Corp. is reportedly transitioning away from using OpenAI Group PBC’s and Anthropic PBC’s most advanced artificial intelligence models in favor of its own — increasingly leaning on the new Microsoft AI or MAI model family, despite publicly asserting that those models aren’t as sophisticated as other leading frontier AI systems.

That’s according to a report today by Bloomberg, which cited a person familiar with the company’s AI strategy as saying that it has become increasingly concerned about the cost of using top-tier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Apparently, “tens of thousands of prompts” in platforms such as Excel and Outlook, which were previously routed through third-party models, are now being handled by Microsoft’s MAI models in an effort to save costs, the person said.

That’s still only a small fraction of the company’s overall AI usage, since Microsoft Copilot processess many millions of prompts each week.

The report comes about a month after Microsoft unveiled seven new models within the MAI family, including its first reasoning model, MAI-Thinking 1. At the time, Microsoft said MAI-Thinking 1 was designed to provide high performance and efficiency with low token costs, referring to the unit of consumption for AI computing. It describes MAI-Thinking 1 as a midsized model with 35 billion active parameters and a 256,000-token context window. In blind tests, it matched the coding capabilities of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6.