Microsoft has sealed a deal with Anthropic to give users of Microsoft 365 Copilot the option to use the Claude AI engine.
“Our multi-model approach goes beyond choice,” chirped CEO Satya Nadella on Wednesday. “It’s all about bringing the best AI from across the industry to Copilot, tuned for work and tailored to every business.”
Microsoft is adding Claude Opus 4.1 and its Sonnet 4 bot as options for commercial Frontier Copilot users. Drop down the scrolling menu past version four and five flavors of GPT and there’s a couple samples from Claude to try out, as you can see below. However, you’ll need your admin’s permission to start building a bot on Claude code.
Microsoft’s closer ties with Claude are just the start, explained Charles Lamanna, Redmond’s president of business & industry for Copilot. “Anthropic models will bring even more powerful experiences to Microsoft 365 Copilot,” he teased.
It’s another sign that Microsoft is moving beyond OpenAI as a supplier of its machine-learning machinery, and is moving to a more open approach to AI agents. Despite spending billions to grow OpenAI, Microsoft has increasingly diversified its options of late. The OS slinger has already added Claude into the Visual Studio family – along with Google AI tech – and even added Elon Musk’s Grok AI as an option in Azure.
Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, formerly the co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, has admitted Microsoft does not feel it needs to be an AI leader, and will instead build applications based on the best technology from others.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is plowing its own furrow with the likes of Oracle and others. In a series of announcements over the last few months the duo, with financial help from Softbank, have announced a dramatic expansion of AI datacenters as part of Project Stargate.
The three companies are making optimistic claims about building a globe-spanning AI network, and allocated over half a trillion dollars of cash they don’t have to the project. Microsoft, having spent enough, seems content to sit that one out and check out the competition. ®