{"id":481034,"date":"2026-06-17T01:08:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T01:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/481034\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T01:08:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T01:08:14","slug":"microsoft-mulls-chinas-deepseek-for-copilot-probably-to-trumps-chagrin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/481034\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Mulls China’s DeepSeek for Copilot, Probably to Trump’s Chagrin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Microsoft, now free of the shackles that previously tied it to OpenAI, apparently has eyes for other AI models\u2014particularly ones that are cheap. According to a report from Axios<\/a>, tokenmaxxing is taking its toll on Microsoft\u2019s AI tool Copilot, and it is looking at the possibility of using its own version of the Chinese open-source model DeepSeek to keep its costs down.<\/p>\n

Assuming Microsoft were to take this path, the company would reportedly use a modified and self-hosted version of DeepSeek-V4, the latest version of the popular model from China. It would be used as a lower-cost option to power the company\u2019s Copilot Cowork, the agentic AI offered through the Microsoft 365 enterprise suite.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly not hard to understand why Microsoft would want to cut some costs. The company\u2019s Copilot Cowork currently runs on Anthropic\u2019s models and has versions that are compatible with OpenAI\u2019s options. But both of those keep raising their prices and have moved away from \u201call-you-can-eat\u201d pricing<\/a> that was starting to cost them. That has pushed Microsoft to move to a usage-based pricing model for its agentic AI solution, per Axios<\/a>. If it can keep the costs down with a cheaper model, it\u2019ll keep its customers happy.<\/p>\n

Probably will piss off the Trump administration, though! Trump and company have been offering increased scrutiny to AI models, and have a particular hard-on for foreign options. The administration has threatened to come after Chinese AI companies<\/a> over accusations of theft of models trained by American-based companies, mulled banning models including DeepSeek<\/a>, and just suspended the use of Anthropic\u2019s latest model for foreign nationals<\/a> after security concerns were raised. So, hard to imagine they\u2019ll take it well if Microsoft does adopt DeepSeek, no matter what precautions it puts in place.<\/p>\n

This entire decision to take on DeepSeek or (another cheap AI model) comes after Satya Nadella published a long essay on X<\/a> titled, \u201cA frontier without an ecosystem is not stable,\u201d in which he argued that allowing just a few major players in the AI space to dominate would ultimately be harmful for the economy and society. It\u2019s clear Microsoft is trying to move away from being locked into the big players, after having a very tight and tense relationship with OpenAI, and it seems like it\u2019s trying to encourage others to do the same. It might prove hard to get them to follow suit if they will have to worry themselves with government scrutiny if they adopt anything not directly under the control of a US firm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft, now free of the shackles that previously tied it to OpenAI, apparently has eyes for other AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481035,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,8194,363,364,7708,609,134189,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-481034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-models","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-deepseek","tag-microsoft","tag-microsoft-copilot","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}