Microsoft (MSFT) has become one of Anthropic’s (ANTHRO) top customers and was recently on track to spend about $500M a year for Anthropic AI to power Microsoft products, The Information reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
The U.S. tech giant is also making more efforts to sell Anthropic AI models to its cloud customers, which could generate more revenue for both companies, the report added.
Microsoft and Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
Microsoft is incentivizing Azure sales staff to sell Anthropic models and is also boosting spending on Anthropic AI models for its own internal use and products. The initiatives come as OpenAI (OPENAI) — which is backed by Microsoft — does more business with Microsoft competitors, the report noted.
Microsoft recently told some salespeople in its Azure cloud division that selling Anthropic AI models to Microsoft cloud customers will count toward their sales quotas just like Microsoft-made software, according to two Microsoft employees, the report added. Microsoft typically does not provide such a sales incentive for non-Microsoft products, as such products are less lucrative to Azure. The current Anthropic sales incentive runs through the end of June.
The company has offered salespeople the same incentive for selling OpenAI models, which Microsoft also sells via Azure. The new quota system functionally means salespeople have just as much incentive to sell Anthropic models as OpenAI ones, according to the report.
The moves show how Microsoft, similar to other established tech companies, is working closely with several AI developers, representing both a major revenue opportunity and a potential threat to some of its core businesses. Microsoft is also racing to use OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s technologies to make its own AI automation products useful for enterprise customers to avoid the risk of ceding such business to the AI upstarts, the report added.
In November 2025, Microsoft committed to investing up to $5B in Anthropic — which is backed by Amazon (AMZN) and Alphabet’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) Google. Anthropic also said it has committed to spend $30B on Microsoft’s Azure compute capacity and to contract additional compute capacity up to one gigawatt.
Microsoft has invested over $13B in OpenAI, giving it nearly 27% stake in the ChatGPT maker.
Anthropic mainly generates revenue from selling its AI directly to businesses, but some salespeople at Microsoft and Anthropic are working together to pitch businesses on buying Anthropic models via Azure, according to the report. Anthropic has similarly teamed up with Amazon and Google to jointly sell Anthropic models to large customers.
As of July last year, Microsoft was spending over $40M per month, a pace of about $500M a year, on Anthropic models that powered coding agent features in GitHub Copilot, such as the ability to monitor a website for outages and automatically fix them, the report noted.
Since then, Microsoft has boosted its purchases of Anthropic models to power features in other products like 365 Copilot and Security Copilot, including complex actions such as generating PowerPoint presentations based on short written prompts. Anthropic previously forecast it would generate between $7.5B and $9B in annualized revenue as of the end of 2025, the report added.
Anthropic is giving Microsoft a discount on using Anthropic models for internal purposes like developing prototypes or analytics and other research, compared to the startup’s listed retail prices, the report noted.
Microsoft first went ahead with adding Anthropic models to 365 Copilot after executives grew frustrated with how some OpenAI-powered features were struggling to perform well, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has more recently pushed product groups to use the Anthropic models to accelerate development, the report added.
Recently, Anthropic engineers provided support to Microsoft engineers developing Copilot features powered by Anthropic models, the report noted.