Microsoft wants the spotlight

TL;DR: At its Build conference this week, Microsoft unveiled its first in-house AI models and an AI assistant whose internal goal, per leaked documents, is to “make people addicted.” The message was loud and clear: The tech giant wants its own hit AI products and to finally shed its “Microslop” reputation.

What happened: Among the seven new models Microsoft plans to release is (the thrillingly named) MAI-Thinking-1, a reasoning model which it says was trained without distillation. Meanwhile, it says its coding model beat Claude Haiku 4.5 across multiple coding benchmarks while running on just 5 billion parameters, which puts it “closer to Haiku in size but cheaper in cost," per AI chief Mustafa Suleyman.

These models were far from the only new offerings on display at Build. Microsoft also announced Scout, a personal AI agent built on OpenClaw, alongside an AI cybersecurity tool and a Copilot super app similar to one its partner-slash-rival is working on.

Conscious uncoupling: Much of Microsoft’s AI business so far has been tied up with OpenAI. Its strategic partnership with the firm, signed in 2019, made Microsoft the sole cloud provider that could offer OpenAI’s models and gave it the right to build those models into its own products (such as Copilot). But now, with a deal restructuring in April, the two have effectively separated—freeing OpenAI to sell its models on other cloud systems and freeing Microsoft to finally build big models of its own.

That might explain why, as the Verge put it, Build had “the vibe of a freshly single divorcée posting a thirst trap on Instagram.” This determination to lean less on its AI competitors is showing up internally, too: In May, Microsoft said goodbye to Claude Code licenses and ordered its engineers to start using GitHub Copilot instead.

Playing catch-up: Microsoft’s desire to introduce a killer AI product isn’t surprising, given how it lags in popularity to rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that few of its enterprise subscribers actually use Copilot.

Bottom line: Whether Microsoft’s latest AI products actually turn out to be addictive remains to be seen—but a tech juggernaut whose OS and productivity tools are the default for so many people (never mind all the complaints about bugs and flaws) is hard to count out. —WK

Also at Microsoft…

• If you have an older version of Microsoft Office for Mac, you may be unable to edit documents starting July 13.