Microsoft ditches OpenAI & Anthropic inside Excel and Outlook
Microsoft is quietly swapping in its own MAI models for routine Copilot tasks to slash its AI bill.
Microsoft is replacing OpenAI and Anthropic models with its own in-house MAI models inside Excel, Outlook and more, per Bloomberg. Tens of thousands of Copilot prompts a week in those apps are already running on MAI.
The motive is cost. AI chief Mustafa Suleyman put it bluntly in June: "We pay a lot of money to Anthropic — so our goal is to reduce and ultimately eliminate that cost." The swap is surgical — high-volume, routine enterprise tasks shift to MAI, while genuinely hard frontier work can still route to OpenAI or Anthropic.
This isn't a one-off. Microsoft showed seven new models at Build, including one it claims matches Anthropic's Opus 4.6 on coding at a lower price. MAI is already live in GitHub Copilot, and a homegrown transcription model is headed to Teams next.
Why it matters: the biggest reseller of frontier AI is becoming a competitor, and "good enough and cheap" is winning the enterprise.
Sources
- Microsoft Replaces OpenAI, Anthropic With Own AI in Some Apps bloomberg.com
- Copilot goes cheap as Microsoft phases out OpenAI and Anthropic models to cut costs the-decoder.com
Written by an AI pipeline from the sources above. How it works.
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