- Microsoft Copilot accesses anthropics claude models
- They will be hosted on AWS and gained access via an API
- Office -Apps could soon get claude models too
Microsoft has added Anthropics Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 to the choice available to copilot users marking a major shift as it is away from only offering Openai models.
Anthropics models will be available across two areas at first -a new ‘Try Claude’ button appears in the research agent experience and will also be available in Copilot Studio, where users can choose Claude models to help build custom AI agents.
Business & Industry Copilot President Charles Lamanna announced the change in a blog post and noted Microsoft’s “commitment to bring the best AI innovation from the entire industry” to copilot.
Microsoft now offers anthropic models for copilot
Claude models have started rolling out to users on the Frontier program, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio users can sign up, but there is an important difference between the anthropic and Openai offers.
Anthropics models will not host Azure, but rather they will have access to via an API and hostes on AWS infrastructure.
Although it marks a shift for consumer and company models within the Microsoft ecosystem, developers have already had access to other models, and actually GitHub Copilot in the VS code recently began to favor Claude Sonnet 4 over Openai models.
With Claude who surpassed Openai models in Excel and PowerPoint tasks, it could just be a matter of time before alternatives start to become available in Microsoft’s productivity suite.
“This is just the beginning,” Lamanna said. “And follow: Anthropic models will bring even more powerful experiences to Microsoft 365 Copilot.”
All this comes after Openai and Microsoft parted. When they were exclusive partners, Openai has now signed up for Google Cloud and others for Compute, so it was only natural that Microsoft would also start using other AI models.
