Microsoft Turns to Anthropic in Shift From OpenAI Relationship

Is Microsoft’s relationship with its longtime artificial intelligence (AI) partner taking a turn?

As CNBC reported Wednesday (Sept. 24), the tech giant has for years served as AI startup OpenAI’s chief cloud partner. Now, however, it has begun using more technology from OpenAI competitor Anthropic.

For example, there’s Microsoft’s announcement that it has begun employing an AI model from Anthropic to answer questions in the Microsoft 365 Copilot assistant for commercial customers.

The report noted this marks another step toward diversification in Microsoft generative AI efforts, which have largely involved using OpenAI models for AI features in its Windows operating system and Bing search engine.

The partnership has seen Microsoft invest upwards of $13 billion in OpenAI, with OpenAI operating its models in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. The companies have an agreement to share revenue until 2030.

However, their arrangement is changing, the CNBC report pointed out. Last year, Microsoft said it would let software engineers get coding assistance from Anthropic and Google models in the GitHub Copilot Chat assistant, and not solely from OpenAI.

For its part, OpenAI has been adding to its stable of Big Tech partners. The company has said recently that it intends to spend $300 billion with Oracle, while also inking a $10 billion pact with chip designer Broadcom.

And earlier this week, Nvidia, the AI industry’s most valuable chipmaker, said it would commit as much as $100 billion to OpenAI starting next year, with OpenAI agreeing to purchase millions of Nvidia AI processors.

The deal ties the investment to the development of “at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure to train and run its next generation of models on the path to deploying superintelligence,” according to the company’s announcement.

The deal is the largest private-company investment on record, assuming Nvidia invests the full $100 billion.

“The investment gives OpenAI capital and the secured supply of the hardware it needs to continue scaling,” PYMNTS wrote.

“The company has signed several large agreements in recent months, including a $300 billion, five-year contract with Oracle to supply compute infrastructure for training and inference workloads. That deal requires more than four gigawatts of electricity and positions Oracle as a central provider for OpenAI’s workloads.”