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Microsoft trains sales team to undercut OpenAI and Anthropic
At an internal FY27 kickoff, Microsoft told sales staff to pitch its in-house AI models as cheaper, more complete, and better than rivals it still uses.
Image: TNW
Microsoft used an internal meeting on Tuesday to teach its sales force how to argue against OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic—even though OpenAI and Anthropic still supply models inside Microsoft products.
The session was framed as a strategy kickoff for the fiscal year that began this month. The message was straightforward: Microsoft’s in-house MAI models are cheaper, more efficient, and bundled with the rest of the company’s software stack.
“Everyone else is selling parts. We’re selling the full end-to-end system. That’s the story that we all need to get out there and tell in FY27.”
Another executive vice president, Jacob Andreou, reportedly went further by directly comparing Copilot with Anthropic’s Claude. Inside Microsoft’s office apps, Andreou said Claude was slower, less accurate, and missing the right security integrations. That is awkward, because Claude is currently embedded in Copilot.
The broader shift has been building for months. Earlier this month, Microsoft began replacing OpenAI and Anthropic models in Word and Excel, a move previously reported as cost-cutting. Microsoft’s AI chief has also said the company wants to eliminate what it pays Anthropic.
A key change came in April, when Microsoft and OpenAI revised their partnership and removed the exclusivity clause, allowing OpenAI to sell to Microsoft’s rivals. Soon after, Amazon started offering OpenAI models through AWS.
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The backdrop is financial as well as technical. Microsoft has spent the past year defending its AI capital spending to investors, and the article points to a $357bn drawdown as added pressure. Positioning MAI as not just cheaper but better helps Microsoft argue that its spending produced something defensible.
Whether customers buy that pitch is another question. The article notes that Claude has become a default model in enterprise AI coding tools, and many buyers selected it based on benchmark results rather than vendor claims. TechCrunch contacted Microsoft and Anthropic, but neither had commented by publication.
For now, Microsoft is still balancing all three positions at once: it holds a large OpenAI stake, ships Anthropic models in Copilot, and sells its own MAI models against both.
Enterprise Editor
Marcus follows the money. He covers enterprise software, cloud architecture, and the tectonic shifts in Big Tech strategy. He translates dense earnings calls and complex M&A activity into actionable insights about where the industry is actually heading. If a tech giant makes a silent pivot, Marcus is usually the first to notice.
via TNW
