Microsoft will integrate Anthropic’s AI into its Office 365 apps, including Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint, according to a report by The Information. The move marks a significant shift, reducing Microsoft’s reliance on OpenAI, which until now has been the sole AI provider for its productivity suite.
Although Microsoft is still in talks for a new deal with OpenAI, the report notes that the Anthropic partnership is not simply a negotiation tactic. Executives at Microsoft believe Anthropic’s latest model—Claude Sonnet 4—outperforms OpenAI’s technology in certain functions.
OpenAI remains Microsoft’s default model, but the company has diversified before. Through GitHub Copilot, it already offers Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok, alongside its own in-house systems, MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview.
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Microsoft has long been OpenAI’s biggest financial backer, investing $13 billion in the company. “As we’ve said, OpenAI will continue to be our partner on frontier models and we remain committed to our long-term partnership,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
According to the report, Microsoft will pay its cloud rival Amazon Web Services—one of Anthropic’s largest shareholders—for access to Anthropic’s models.
At the same time, OpenAI is working to reduce its own dependence on Microsoft. Last week, the company launched a jobs platform to compete with Microsoft’s LinkedIn. The Financial Times also reported that OpenAI plans to begin mass production of its first AI chips in 2026, in partnership with Broadcom. That development would allow OpenAI to run training and inference on its own hardware, rather than relying solely on Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure.
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Meanwhile, Microsoft recently entered a deal with AI infrastructure firm Nebius. Nebius had announced it had struck a multi-year deal with Microsoft to provide cloud computing power for AI workloads. The deal will be worth $17.4 billion through 2031 to Nebius, which counts Nvidia and Accel as its investors.
Microsoft may also acquire additional computing capacity under the arrangement. Nebius, which was spun out of Russian internet giant Yandex, provides graphic processing units and AI cloud as services. The company offers AI developers the computing, storage, managed services and tools they need to build, tune and run their AI models with the help of its cloud software architecture and in-house designed hardware. Starting this year, Nebius will provide Microsoft with access to dedicated GPU infrastructure capacity from its new data center in Vineland, New Jersey.