Microsoft is coaching its sales team to badmouth OpenAI and Anthropic
The company that built its AI business on partners' models is now telling salespeople those same models are slower, less accurate, and too expensive.
Key points
- Microsoft held an internal sales strategy meeting in fiscal year 2027 planning sessions where executives told staff to pitch the company's own AI models as superior to those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
- Executive Vice President Jacob Andreou reportedly told salespeople that Anthropic's Claude chatbot is "slower and less accurate" than Microsoft's Copilot when used inside Microsoft's office apps.
- Microsoft amended its partnership with OpenAI in April 2025, dropping a clause that had given Microsoft exclusive access to OpenAI's technology.
- Microsoft has already begun swapping OpenAI and Anthropic models out of flagship apps like Word and Excel in favour of cheaper, in-house alternatives.
For years, Microsoft and OpenAI were practically the same company in the public eye. Microsoft poured billions into OpenAI and got exclusive access to its models in return. That relationship quietly shaped every AI feature Microsoft shipped, from the Copilot assistant built into Word and Excel to the search tools inside Bing.
Now, according to reporting first published by TechCrunch AI, Microsoft is teaching its sales force to say the opposite: that rival models are not good enough.
At an internal meeting this week, executives laid out the company's strategy for the new financial year. Executive Vice President Jay Parikh told the room: "Everyone else is selling parts. We're selling the full end-to-end system." Executive Vice President Jacob Andreou went further, presenting a direct comparison between Microsoft's Copilot, its AI assistant product, and Anthropic's Claude, a competing AI chatbot made by the San Francisco company Anthropic. Andreou reportedly told staff that Claude was "slower and less accurate" inside Microsoft's own office apps, and that it lacked the right security features.
Microsoft and Anthropic had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
The shift is striking because of who Microsoft is now criticising. These are not random competitors. OpenAI and Anthropic are companies Microsoft once relied on almost entirely for the AI brains inside its products. The April 2025 amendment to the OpenAI partnership, which removed Microsoft's exclusive access rights and freed OpenAI to sell to Microsoft's rivals, seems to have accelerated the split.
Cost is almost certainly part of the calculation. Licensing powerful AI models from outside companies is expensive. Microsoft has been under investor pressure over the past year, with questions mounting about whether its enormous spending on AI infrastructure will ever pay off. Building and using its own models cuts that bill sharply.
What does this mean for people who use Microsoft products?
If you use Word, Excel, or any Microsoft 365 app with Copilot switched on, the AI already responding to you may be a Microsoft-built model rather than one from OpenAI or Anthropic, and you probably would not know the difference. Microsoft has been making that swap quietly for some time now.
The bigger question is whether Microsoft's own models are genuinely as good as the ones they are replacing. The company's salespeople will now argue that they are. Independent benchmarks, the standardised tests researchers use to compare AI systems, will be the real check on that claim. Watch for those results before taking the pitch at face value.
