For a decade, Microsoft was OpenAI's landlord, bank and shopfront. It now wants to be its rival.At an internal meeting on Tuesday, executives told the company's sales organisation to start negatively comparing AI products from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic against Microsoft's own, pitching the efficiency and lower cost of its in-house models, according to people familiar with the session . The meeting, billed as a strategy session for fiscal year 2027, which began on 1 July, produced two quotes that will follow Microsoft around for some time.About The AuthorAt heart, I am a storyteller drawn to the watershed moments that bend the technology landscape. I braid narrative with data, humanise statistics, and trace the arc from first spark to world-changing impact. My reportage, features and reviews are witty, sardonic, visual and vivid, using anecdote to illuminate rather than eviscerate.

As a technology journalist with over sixteen years of experience, I have travelled the world and the seven seas, covered every major tech conference worth its lanyard, chronicled the defining breakthroughs of the last decade and a half, and played a pivotal role in launching some of India’s most important technology publishing platforms across web, print and TV.