Microsoft has begun substituting models from OpenAI and Anthropic with its in-house MAI family across Excel, Outlook, and GitHub Copilot to cut licensing costs, with AI chief Mustafa Suleyman aiming to reduce partner payments to zero. Its new Thinking-1 reasoning model is claimed to match Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 on coding tasks, though third-party benchmarks put it on par with DeepSeek V3.2. CEO Satya Nadella has also floated moving away from unlimited subscriptions toward usage-based pricing, where MAI models would be the default and OpenAI/Anthropic offerings would become paid add-ons.

Bloomberg: Microsoft Replaces OpenAI, Anthropic With Own AI in Some Apps