The in-house models still handle only a small fraction of total requests, but Microsoft wants to keep cutting its spending on third-party AI over time. The MAI models are also available in\u00a0GitHub Copilot<\/a>, and a proprietary transcription model is expected to ship in Teams soon.<\/p>\n At the Build conference, Microsoft unveiled seven new AI models, including MAI-Thinking 1, its first reasoning model. Microsoft claimed it could match Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 in coding based on human evaluations. But\u00a0the benchmarks released at the time<\/a>\u00a0told a different story, with Thinking-1 trailing the competition from OpenAI and Anthropic by a wide margin and landing roughly on par with Deepseek V3.2.<\/p>\n For Copilot and Office customers, this could mean paying the same amount for weaker AI so that Microsoft can lower its own costs. Microsoft’s head of AI, Mustafa Suleyman,\u00a0openly acknowledged this plan in June<\/a>: “We pay a lot of money to Anthropic\u2014so our goal is to reduce and ultimately eliminate that cost.” This is the same Microsoft that just argued vendor lock-in with OpenAI and Anthropic is a bad thing and that it wants to be\u00a0a platform-neutral alternative<\/a>.<\/p>\n Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also hinted that\u00a0AI billing could shift further toward usage-based pricing instead of flat-rate subscriptions<\/a>. One possible setup would make cheaper MAI models the default, with third-party models from OpenAI or Anthropic available as premium add-ons at extra cost. That way, Microsoft would pass its OpenAI and Anthropic expenses on to customers with a surcharge.<\/p>\n Microsoft also claimed that the MAI models are trained on clean, commercially licensed data, making them safe for businesses. But\u00a0according to the technical paper<\/a>, Microsoft used the Common Crawl dataset, a collection of freely accessible web data whose use for AI training is\u00a0not\u00a0legally settled. Every other AI company does the same thing, but Microsoft portrays its own training data as particularly clean.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tAI News Without the Hype \u2013 Curated by Humans<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive “AI Radar” frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/MAI-Thinking-1-metrics-1920x1049-1.webp\")
<\/a>Image: Microsoft
\nCustomers may get less capable AI for the same price<\/p>\n