{"id":3491377,"date":"2026-07-30T00:21:06","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T00:21:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/30\/microsoft-is-openly-competing-with-openai-anthropic-more-than-ever\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T00:21:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T00:21:06","slug":"microsoft-is-openly-competing-with-openai-anthropic-more-than-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/30\/microsoft-is-openly-competing-with-openai-anthropic-more-than-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft is openly competing with OpenAI, Anthropic more than ever"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n
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Microsoft is in a unique position as AI overtakes the tech industry. It\u2019s one of the world\u2019s largest cloud providers and software-as-a-service companies, while also holding valuable stakes in the two biggest AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n

Those incentives are starting to clash as Microsoft posts blockbuster financial results. The company just reported an extremely profitable quarter with $90 billion in revenue and net income of $35.8 billion. For the fiscal year, which ended June 30, Microsoft reported $331.8 billion in revenue with a net income of $133.7 billion for the year.<\/p>\n

And CEO Satya Nadella is not about to let the trajectory of Anthropic and OpenAI \u2014 which are expanding into applications and agentic infrastructure that could ultimately let them own customer relationships \u2014 derail that kind of cash.<\/p>\n

Nadella has been preaching to enterprises to use multiple models and to stop relying on the frontier AI labs for the agentic harness\/app layer.<\/p>\n

Doing so is dangerous, he\u2019s been saying, because it requires companies to share too many of their internal secrets with model makers of dubious trustworthiness. He knows his customers. Enterprise IT fears both data leaks and being locked into a vendor.<\/p>\n

Now he has openly told Wall Street analysts during the company\u2019s quarterly conference call Wednesday that this is an opportunity for Microsoft to sell customers its own homegrown models, alongside agents, AI security and more, while promising lower costs.<\/p>\n

In other words, he\u2019s pitching Microsoft as an alternative to many of the upscale services that OpenAI and Anthropic are developing for their own growth.<\/p>\n

When UBS analyst Karl Keirstead specifically asked Nadella to weigh in on the open vs. closed-sourced debate roiling the AI industry, and how Microsoft will benefit from it, Nadella came out swinging.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal is to have the firm be in control of their own destiny,\u201d the CEO said of enterprises. \u201cWe are very, very clear about the architectural sort of design of the platform, which is you got to keep your harness separate from the model \u2026 that means any model at any given time is swappable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Microsoft, of course, sells a menu of harnesses (aka AI agents), too, under the Copilot name, including its coding agent GitHub Copilot. Coding agents are where much of the AI dollars are being spent today. <\/p>\n

And he used the high-profile incident from last week as proof of his warnings.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look even at the Hugging Face incident, the biggest thing that we should take away from that is you can\u2019t sort of depend on any one model,\u201d Nadella said. \u201cYou will maybe need multiple models to even remediate some challenges that get caused by one model. Like that\u2019s the way to think about it, right? Which is you can\u2019t be subject to a refusal of one model.\u201d<\/p>\n

The incident involved an unreleased model from OpenAI breaking out of its sandbox and successfully mounting a full-scale hack on Hugging Face, all in pursuit of besting a benchmark. Trying to understand what happened, Hugging Face at first tried to use a private frontier model (which it hasn\u2019t named) that refused to help it. So it turned to the Chinese open-source model Z.ai GLM 5.2 to analyze logs and defend its infrastructure. The incident has so shocked the industry that even Sam Altman is now saying that maybe AI development should slow down a bit.<\/p>\n

Nadella also made clear that Microsoft is happily selling its own homegrown models, the MAI family, on its own homegrown AI chips, Maya, and pitching them as cheaper alternatives. <\/p>\n

\u201cEvery customer wants the right model for each task based on quality, latency, cost, and compliance. We offer the broadest model catalog in the cloud with over 11,000 models, including the leads from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI, as well as our own MAI family,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cWe\u2019re also accelerating our own model development. We announced more than a dozen new models across image, voice, transcription, coding, security, including our first reasoning model, MAI thinking one, all with cost-efficient inference at the core for the enterprise use cases. We are co-designing these models with our silicon, and we are seeing 40% better performance per watt when running MAI models on Maya 200.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Mythos? Nadella pointed to Microsoft\u2019s new Mythos competitor announced earlier this week, MAI Cyber One Flash. It \u201cachieves better performance than the much larger Mythos model, but at half the cost when combined with our multi-agent security harness,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Sure, the Microsoft CEO says that enterprises should use the frontier models that OpenAI and Anthropic offer in their mix. But his bigger message is: don\u2019t trust them enough to rely on them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/div>\n
\n

Microsoft is in a unique position as AI overtakes the tech industry. It\u2019s one of the world\u2019s largest cloud providers and software-as-a-service companies, while also holding valuable stakes in the two biggest AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n

Those incentives are starting to clash as Microsoft posts blockbuster financial results. The company just reported an extremely profitable quarter with $90 billion in revenue and net income of $35.8 billion. For the fiscal year, which ended June 30, Microsoft reported $331.8 billion in revenue with a net income of $133.7 billion for the year.<\/p>\n

And CEO Satya Nadella is not about to let the trajectory of Anthropic and OpenAI \u2014 which are expanding into applications and agentic infrastructure that could ultimately let them own customer relationships \u2014 derail that kind of cash.<\/p>\n

Nadella has been preaching to enterprises to use multiple models and to stop relying on the frontier AI labs for the agentic harness\/app layer.<\/p>\n

Doing so is dangerous, he\u2019s been saying, because it requires companies to share too many of their internal secrets with model makers of dubious trustworthiness. He knows his customers. Enterprise IT fears both data leaks and being locked into a vendor.<\/p>\n

Now he has openly told Wall Street analysts during the company\u2019s quarterly conference call Wednesday that this is an opportunity for Microsoft to sell customers its own homegrown models, alongside agents, AI security and more, while promising lower costs.<\/p>\n

In other words, he\u2019s pitching Microsoft as an alternative to many of the upscale services that OpenAI and Anthropic are developing for their own growth.<\/p>\n

When UBS analyst Karl Keirstead specifically asked Nadella to weigh in on the open vs. closed-sourced debate roiling the AI industry, and how Microsoft will benefit from it, Nadella came out swinging.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal is to have the firm be in control of their own destiny,\u201d the CEO said of enterprises. \u201cWe are very, very clear about the architectural sort of design of the platform, which is you got to keep your harness separate from the model \u2026 that means any model at any given time is swappable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Microsoft, of course, sells a menu of harnesses (aka AI agents), too, under the Copilot name, including its coding agent GitHub Copilot. Coding agents are where much of the AI dollars are being spent today. <\/p>\n

And he used the high-profile incident from last week as proof of his warnings.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look even at the Hugging Face incident, the biggest thing that we should take away from that is you can\u2019t sort of depend on any one model,\u201d Nadella said. \u201cYou will maybe need multiple models to even remediate some challenges that get caused by one model. Like that\u2019s the way to think about it, right? Which is you can\u2019t be subject to a refusal of one model.\u201d<\/p>\n

The incident involved an unreleased model from OpenAI breaking out of its sandbox and successfully mounting a full-scale hack on Hugging Face, all in pursuit of besting a benchmark. Trying to understand what happened, Hugging Face at first tried to use a private frontier model (which it hasn\u2019t named) that refused to help it. So it turned to the Chinese open-source model Z.ai GLM 5.2 to analyze logs and defend its infrastructure. The incident has so shocked the industry that even Sam Altman is now saying that maybe AI development should slow down a bit.<\/p>\n

Nadella also made clear that Microsoft is happily selling its own homegrown models, the MAI family, on its own homegrown AI chips, Maya, and pitching them as cheaper alternatives. <\/p>\n

\u201cEvery customer wants the right model for each task based on quality, latency, cost, and compliance. We offer the broadest model catalog in the cloud with over 11,000 models, including the leads from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI, as well as our own MAI family,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cWe\u2019re also accelerating our own model development. We announced more than a dozen new models across image, voice, transcription, coding, security, including our first reasoning model, MAI thinking one, all with cost-efficient inference at the core for the enterprise use cases. We are co-designing these models with our silicon, and we are seeing 40% better performance per watt when running MAI models on Maya 200.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Mythos? Nadella pointed to Microsoft\u2019s new Mythos competitor announced earlier this week, MAI Cyber One Flash. It \u201cachieves better performance than the much larger Mythos model, but at half the cost when combined with our multi-agent security harness,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Sure, the Microsoft CEO says that enterprises should use the frontier models that OpenAI and Anthropic offer in their mix. But his bigger message is: don\u2019t trust them enough to rely on them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3491378,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3491377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3491377"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3491377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3491377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3491378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3491377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3491377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3491377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}