Microsoft, along with Meta, Nvidia, and more than 20 other companies, is pushing for open-weight AI models in an open letter. The strategic logic is simple: the more models running on Azure, the less Microsoft depends on expensive OpenAI and Anthropic models. The company is also swapping external models in products like Copilot for its in-house MAI family, which performs significantly worse in independent benchmarks.

Microsoft has started routing work inside its own products away from OpenAI and Anthropic, and towards models it built itself. Satya Nadella laid out the reasoning in a long post…

Leading American technology firms have jointly endorsed open-weight artificial intelligence models. They believe this approach is crucial for maintaining United States leadership…

Letter explaining support comes amid rift over AI development philosophies and governance