MSFT
Microsoft’s AI diet plan
Microsoft seems to be trying to trim the fat off its AI spending — and the kitchen is OpenAI and Anthropic. According to Bloomberg, tens of thousands of prompts each week in Excel and Outlook are now being handled by Microsoft’s in-house MAI models instead of outside models.
That may sound like a small slice of the AI buffet, but it matters. Microsoft has been leaning hard on AI across Copilot, Office, GitHub, and Teams, and those tokens add up fast. If you’ve ever upgraded a phone plan because the “unlimited” part turned out to have a catch, you get the vibe here.
Why this matters to your portfolio
Microsoft still gets a lot of its AI muscle from OpenAI — and apparently at a discount, thanks to the long-running partnership. But that deal doesn’t last forever, and Microsoft clearly doesn’t want to wake up one day paying full retail for the same AI it can build itself.
The company has already rolled out seven MAI models, says one can match Anthropic’s coding performance at a lower cost, and now those models are showing up in GitHub Copilot too. Translation: Microsoft is trying to become less of an AI customer and more of an AI manufacturer.
The bigger picture
This isn’t a full breakup. It’s more like Microsoft quietly moving from “we’ll pay you to do the hard stuff” to “we’d rather own the engine ourselves.” That could be good for margins, strategic control, and bargaining power when the next AI pricing war starts.
Big picture: Microsoft is still all-in on AI, but it’s starting to look less like a renter and more like a homeowner.