Microsoft is openly competing with OpenAI, Anthropic more than ever

Nadella also made clear that Microsoft is happily selling its own homegrown models, the MAI family, on its own homegrown AI chips, Maya, and pitching them as cheaper alternatives.

“Every customer wants the right model for each task based on quality, latency, cost, and compliance. We offer the broadest model catalog in the cloud with over 11,000 models, including the leads from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI, as well as our own MAI family,” he said.

He added: “We’re also accelerating our own model development. We announced more than a dozen new models across image, voice, transcription, coding, security, including our first reasoning model, MAI thinking one, all with cost-efficient inference at the core for the enterprise use cases. We are co-designing these models with our silicon, and we are seeing 40% better performance per watt when running MAI models on Maya 200.”

As for Mythos? Nadella pointed to Microsoft’s new Mythos competitor announced earlier this week, MAI Cyber One Flash. It “achieves better performance than the much larger Mythos model, but at half the cost when combined with our multi-agent security harness,” he said.

Sure, the Microsoft CEO says that enterprises should use the frontier models that OpenAI and Anthropic offer in their mix. But his bigger message is: don’t trust them enough to rely on them.