Microsoft trains sales team to talk down OpenAI, Anthropic AI models, pitches itself as ‘full AI platform’: Report

Microsoft has begun training its sales teams on how to compete vigorously against Anthropic and OpenAI by highlighting the shortcomings in products from the leading AI labs, according to a Bloomberg report.

In an internal meeting reportedly held this week, Microsoft executives said that the Redmond, Washington-based tech giant offers lower costs, better security controls and a more complete suite of products.

Microsoft pitches Copilot over rivals

The report notes that Microsoft executives told employees to pitch the company as a platform for corporations to fine-tune, deploy and monitor AI in their businesses. However, the company is said to still face steep competition in the market from OpenAI and Google.

Meanwhile, investors reportedly fear that newer AI tools will take the place of already established software, leading Microsoft’s stock to drop by up to 20% this year amid these concerns and its increasing spending on AI data centres.

“Everyone else is selling parts — we’re selling the full end-to-end system,” Executive Vice President Jay Parikh reportedly told employees during the meeting.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Executive Vice President Jacob Andreou reportedly compared Microsoft’s Copilot with Anthropic’s Claude for enterprise use in Microsoft Office products. He claimed Claude was slower, less accurate and lacked the security integrations offered by Copilot.

“We know that everyone here is competing every day with products from OpenAI and Anthropic,” Andreou said during the presentation. His team is hard at work “to make Copilot the application even more competitive,” Andreou added.

The report notes that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees that a major topic for customers over the next year will be the ability to monitor AI costs and use cheaper models.

Nadella cited the example of consumer goods giant Unilever, saying the company built an automated claims-processing system on Microsoft’s platform that saved it around $300 million. He noted that while Unilever at one point used the most advanced AI models available, it later went on to swap them for a cheaper Microsoft model.

The latest strategy comes shortly after Bloomberg reported that Microsoft had begun replacing some advanced OpenAI and Anthropic models with its own lower-cost AI models across certain products.

Microsoft tells employees to stop using Claude Code

An earlier report by The Verge had noted that Microsoft had told its Experiences + Devices division, which includes teams working on Windows, Microsoft 365 and Outlook, to wind down the use of Claude Code by the end of June and start transitioning to GitHub Copilot CLI in the coming weeks.

Notably, GitHub Copilot CLI is a command-line version of GitHub Copilot that runs outside development apps like Visual Studio Code.

The company is reportedly telling its employees that the decision to move away from Claude Code is part of a broader push to standardise Copilot CLI as its primary agentic command-line interface tool across the Experiences + Devices division.