Microsoft is in a unique position as AI overtakes the tech industry. It’s one of the world’s largest cloud providers and software-as-a-service companies, while also holding valuable stakes in the two biggest AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Those incentives are starting to clash as Microsoft posts blockbuster financial results. The company just reported an extremely profitable quarter with $90 billion in revenue and net income of $35.8 billion. For the fiscal year, which ended June 30, Microsoft reported $331.8 billion in revenue with a net income of $133.7 billion for the year.
And CEO Satya Nadella is not about to let the trajectory of Anthropic and OpenAI — which are expanding into applications and agentic infrastructure that could ultimately let them own customer relationships — derail that kind of cash.
Nadella has been preaching to enterprises to use multiple models and to stop relying on the frontier AI labs for the agentic harness/app layer.
Doing so is dangerous, he’s been saying, because it requires companies to share too many of their internal secrets with model makers of dubious trustworthiness. He knows his customers. Enterprise IT fears both data leaks and being locked into a vendor.
