Microsoft’s AI chief says the company wants to “eliminate” what it pays Anthropic
Mustafa Suleyman has identified Microsoft’s biggest AI competitor, and it is not OpenAI. “Anthropic is extremely expensive and I think many people are urgently looking for alternatives,” the head of Microsoft’s in-house model effort told Bloomberg in an interview.
The statement is more than competitive positioning. It is a declaration of intent. “We pay a lot of money to Anthropic, so our goal is to reduce and ultimately eliminate that cost,” Suleyman said.
To back it up, Microsoft this week announced seven new in-house AI models at its annual Build conference for developers, including MAI-Thinking-1, a reasoning model it says matches Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 on a widely used coding benchmark at a lower price point.
The price pitch
Suleyman’s argument arrives at a moment when enterprise AI spending is becoming a genuine problem. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months...
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