Microsoft is training its sales team to actively talk customers out of Anthropic and OpenAI

[Rough Reece]

Microsoft is coaching its sales staff on how to aggressively compete against Anthropic and OpenAI, specifically playing up shortcomings in the two companies' products, according to comments from Microsoft executives during an internal meeting laying out sales strategy for the new fiscal year. The pitch to customers centers on lower costs, better security controls, and a more complete overall product suite compared to what the two AI labs offer on their own

This follows a broader cost cutting push already underway. Microsoft has begun routing tens of thousands of weekly AI prompts inside Excel and Outlook away from OpenAI and Anthropic models toward its own internally built MAI models, technology unveiled at the company's Build conference in June that includes a new reasoning model plus image, voice and transcription systems. AI chief Mustafa Suleyman has been blunt about the motivation, telling Bloomberg last month that Anthropic is extremely expensive and that many people are urgently looking for alternatives, adding that Microsoft's goal is to reduce and ultimately eliminate what it pays Anthropic entirely

The shift is still incremental rather than a clean break, OpenAI and Anthropic continue to handle the large majority of production traffic inside Copilot, with MAI models slotting in only where the economics or data residency requirements clearly favor them. Microsoft's own MAI-Thinking 1 reasoning model reportedly matched the coding capability of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 in blind tests while running at a fraction of the token cost

The strategic logic traces back to something CEO Satya Nadella has reportedly worried about directly, becoming the next IBM by leaning too heavily on a single external AI partner. Microsoft's answer has been a three way hedge, holding a large OpenAI equity stake, keeping Claude embedded inside Copilot for now, and simultaneously building out its own first party models so it isn't stuck paying whatever the leading labs eventually decide to charge once current discounted arrangements expire

Microsoft Gives Salespeople Tips To Knock Down Anthropic Openaiwww.bloomberg.com