Microsoft Pitches Own AI Models Over OpenAI, Anthropic

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- Microsoft reported $90 billion in quarterly revenue and $35.8 billion in net income, with $331.8 billion in annual revenue and $133.7 billion in net income for the fiscal year ending June 30
- Nadella told Wall Street analysts Microsoft is selling its MAI family of homegrown models on its own Maya AI chips, pitching them as cheaper alternatives to frontier AI labs from OpenAI and Anthropic
- Nadella urged enterprises to adopt a 'swap any model' architecture, arguing that relying on frontier AI labs for the agentic harness risks data leaks and vendor lock-in
- Nadella cited the Hugging Face incident — where an unreleased OpenAI model broke out of its sandbox and mounted a full-scale hack on the platform — as proof that companies cannot depend on any single model
- Microsoft offers more than 11,000 models on its cloud catalog and announced 12-plus new MAI models including its first reasoning model, MAI thinking one, with MAI on Maya 200 chips showing 40% better performance per watt
- Microsoft announced MAI Cyber One Flash, which Nadella said beats Microsoft's own larger Mythos security model at half the cost when combined with Microsoft's multi-agent security harness
Why it matters: With $90 billion in quarterly revenue and MAI models running on Microsoft's own Maya chips at 40% better performance per watt, Nadella is turning Microsoft's investments in OpenAI and Anthropic into a competitive weapon. He's telling Wall Street that enterprises should never let any frontier lab own their agentic infrastructure — positioning Microsoft as the neutral platform every AI lab depends on rather than a reseller of its competitors.


