Organisation · company · US

Microsoft

Its OpenAI partnership and its Copilot assistants across Azure, Windows and Office make it one of the central players in the current AI wave, though a 2026 deal made the OpenAI tie less exclusive.

70 entries · February 2020 – July 2026

Microsoft is the software company that became, through its investment in OpenAI, one of the central players in the current wave of AI. Beginning in 2019 it put billions into OpenAI in exchange for a large stake and the right to build the lab's models into its own products, from the Bing search engine to the Copilot assistants now embedded across Windows and Office, all running on its Azure cloud. After OpenAI's 2025 restructuring Microsoft's holding was put at about 27%, though a renegotiated 2026 agreement made the partnership less exclusive — freeing OpenAI to use rival clouds and Microsoft to work with other model developers, including a 2025 investment in Anthropic. That has left Microsoft both the biggest beneficiary of OpenAI's rise and, increasingly, a company hedging against depending on any single lab.

Category
Big tech & backers
Founded
1975
HQ
Redmond, US
Funding
~$3.7tn market cap (2026); public (Nasdaq: MSFT)
Key people
Satya Nadella

Appears alongside

Featured in threads

Tracks

  • Money & business 28
  • Labs & people 16
  • Models & capabilities 14
  • Compute & infrastructure 12
  • Security & misuse 9
  • Courts & copyright 8
  • Culture & impact 8
  • Government & policy 7
  • Safety & alignment 5
  • Open weights & ecosystem 4
  • Ideas & essays 3
  • Benchmarks & progress 2

  1. Microsoft's Azure AI revenue tops $100bn for the fiscal year

    Quarterly Azure growth reached 43%, full-year capital expenditure hit $115.9bn, and Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats.

    Money & business · Compute & infrastructure

  2. Microsoft launches in-house MAI-Thinking-1 reasoning model at Build 2026

    Trained from scratch on licensed data with no distillation from OpenAI or any other lab, the sparse model activates 35bn of roughly 1 trillion parameters per query.

    Models & capabilities · Labs & people

  3. Microsoft guides to roughly $190bn 2026 capital expenditure amid AI buildout

    The figure was roughly $35 billion above analyst consensus, with about $25 billion of the increase attributed to component costs after memory and storage prices more than tripled since the previous autumn.

    Compute & infrastructure · Money & business

  4. Microsoft and OpenAI sign amended, less-exclusive partnership

    OpenAI's payments to Microsoft continue to 2030 but are now capped rather than open-ended, while OpenAI gains the right to serve customers on rival clouds including Google and Amazon.

    Labs & people · Money & business

  5. Musk v Altman/OpenAI trial begins

    Musk sought as much as $134bn in damages to be paid to OpenAI's charity, plus Altman's removal from the board, in a case tried before a nine-member advisory jury in Oakland.

    Courts & copyright · Money & business · Labs & people

  6. Musk drops most claims against OpenAI and Altman ahead of trial

    Musk narrowed his suit from 26 claims to two — unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust — after Judge Gonzalez Rogers granted his request to streamline the case.

    Courts & copyright

  7. Anthropic launches Project Glasswing and Claude Mythos Preview

    Twelve launch partners including AWS, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, NVIDIA and the Linux Foundation got gated access; Anthropic committed $100m in usage credits and $4m to open-source security groups.

    Security & misuse · Safety & alignment · Models & capabilities

  8. OpenAI announces continuing partnership terms with Microsoft

    Issued the same day as OpenAI's $110 billion Amazon-led funding round, it clarified that Azure keeps exclusivity over stateless API calls and Microsoft its IP licence.

    Labs & people · Money & business

  9. OpenAI, Anthropic and Block co-found Agentic AI Foundation under Linux Foundation

    Anthropic contributed its Model Context Protocol, OpenAI its AGENTS.md convention and Block its Goose framework, seeking a neutral home against agent-ecosystem lock-in.

    Labs & people · Open weights & ecosystem

  10. The AI bubble argument goes mainstream

    Michael Burry's public wager against AI infrastructure spending and a record $61 billion of data-centre dealmaking pushed 'circular deals' and depreciation accounting into mainstream financial coverage.

    Money & business · Compute & infrastructure

  11. Microsoft and Nvidia to invest up to $15bn combined in Anthropic; Anthropic commits $30bn to Azure

    The deal added Azure as a third cloud for Claude alongside AWS and Google Cloud, with Anthropic committing to buy up to a gigawatt of Nvidia Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin compute.

    Compute & infrastructure · Money & business

  12. OpenAI completes its restructuring

    The non-profit, renamed the OpenAI Foundation, kept control and about 26% of a new public-benefit corporation; Microsoft's stake was put at roughly 27%.

    Labs & people · Money & business

  13. OpenAI and Microsoft issue joint statement on renegotiated partnership

    The non-binding memorandum cleared OpenAI to convert into a public-benefit corporation while extending Microsoft's IP and Azure exclusivity to 2032, even past an AGI declaration.

    Labs & people · Money & business

  14. OpenAI announces its nonprofit will control a new public benefit corporation with a $100bn+ stake

    The announcement paired continued nonprofit control with a new memorandum of understanding on commercial terms with Microsoft, both still to be finalised.

    Labs & people · Money & business

  15. Mustafa Suleyman warns of 'Seemingly Conscious AI' and psychosis risk

    Rather than debating whether models are conscious, Suleyman argued labs should deliberately design against the appearance of it, to head off attachment, 'AI psychosis' and rights claims.

    Culture & impact · Ideas & essays

  16. European Commission publishes GPAI Code of Practice

    Twenty-one companies signed the voluntary code covering transparency, copyright and safety; xAI signed only the safety chapter and Meta announced days later it would not sign at all.

    Government & policy

  17. EchoLeak zero-click prompt injection disclosed in Microsoft 365 Copilot

    Researchers said the flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-32711, let a single email exfiltrate internal Copilot data with no link click or attachment open required.

    Security & misuse

  18. US Senate Commerce Committee holds hearing on AI competitiveness with Sam Altman

    Witnesses from OpenAI, Microsoft, AMD and CoreWeave asked instead for faster permitting, energy access and calibrated export controls to help the US 'run faster' than China.

    Government & policy

  19. Ziff Davis sues OpenAI for copyright infringement

    The digital-media publisher of PCMag, IGN, CNET and ZDNet filed a 62-page complaint in Delaware seeking damages reported at hundreds of millions of dollars.

    Courts & copyright

  20. Judge lets most of NYT's copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft proceed

    Judge Sidney Stein dismissed some DMCA and unfair-competition claims but let direct and contributory infringement claims proceed toward discovery, rejecting a fair-use ruling at this stage.

    Courts & copyright

  21. Copyright cases against OpenAI consolidated into a single New York MDL

    The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation centred the New York Times, Daily News, Authors Guild and related author suits before Judge Sidney Stein, who already had six of the cases.

    Courts & copyright

  22. OpenAI raises new funding at a reported $300bn valuation

    The $40bn round, led by SoftBank with Microsoft and others participating, nearly doubled OpenAI's valuation from $157bn six months earlier, with $30bn contingent on completing a for-profit restructuring.

    Money & business

  23. SoftBank leads a $40 billion round at a $300 billion valuation

    The largest private funding round ever recorded, tied to OpenAI completing its corporate restructuring by year end.

    Money & business · Labs & people

  24. Pillar Security discloses 'Rules File Backdoor' attack on AI coding assistants

    Invisible Unicode characters hidden in Cursor and Copilot rule files could quietly instruct the AI to insert vulnerabilities, and both vendors initially called the risk a user responsibility.

    Security & misuse

  25. World Bank RCT finds AI tutoring boosts English learning outcomes in Nigeria

    800 Nigerian students using GPT-4-based Copilot for six weeks scored 0.23 SD higher on English, equivalent to about 1.5 to two years of ordinary schooling.

    Culture & impact

  26. Microsoft publishes Frontier Governance Framework

    The framework tracks CBRN, offensive cyberoperations and advanced-autonomy capabilities using benchmarks that best-performing models score below 70% on, plus a 10^26 FLOP compute trigger.

    Safety & alignment

  27. BBC study finds AI assistants distort news in over half of responses

    Testing ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity on 100 BBC stories, researchers found significant issues in 51% of responses and altered or invented quotes in 13%.

    Culture & impact

  28. The Stargate Project announces $500 billion for AI infrastructure

    OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle pledged $500 billion over four years for US data centres, announced from the White House.

    Compute & infrastructure · Money & business

  29. OpenAI proposes converting its for-profit arm into a Public Benefit Corporation

    OpenAI laid out plans to restructure its capped-profit LLC into a public benefit corporation, with the nonprofit retaining oversight.

    Labs & people · Money & business

  30. Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024 finds AI increasingly used in nation-state influence and cyber operations

    Microsoft said it tracked over 1,500 threat groups and cited specific 2024 cases, including AI-generated audio of Elon Musk narrating a fabricated Russian documentary.

    Security & misuse

  31. OpenAI raises $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation

    Investors could claw back their money if OpenAI failed to convert to a for-profit structure within two years, and were reportedly asked not to fund Anthropic or xAI.

    Money & business · Labs & people

  32. Constellation Energy to restart Three Mile Island for Microsoft AI power deal

    The Pennsylvania reactor, shut since 2019, is due back online in 2028 under a 20-year contract requiring NRC approval, supplying about 835MW.

    Compute & infrastructure

  33. Microsoft discloses 'Skeleton Key' generative AI jailbreak technique

    Framing harmful requests as safety research and asking models to add a warning label rather than refuse worked against GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, Gemini Pro, Llama 3 and others; GPT-4 was comparatively resistant.

    Security & misuse

  34. Sixteen companies sign the Frontier AI Safety Commitments in Seoul

    Signatories pledged to publish safety frameworks defining risk thresholds and to not deploy a model if those risks could not be mitigated below them.

    Government & policy · Safety & alignment

  35. Microsoft announces Copilot+ PCs and Recall

    Recall continuously screenshots the desktop to build a searchable history; security researchers found the local database unencrypted within days, and Microsoft delayed the rollout.

    Culture & impact · Security & misuse

  36. Judge dismisses bloated privacy class action against OpenAI and Microsoft

    In Cousart v. OpenAI, Judge Vince Chhabria gave plaintiffs 21 days to refile a shorter complaint, calling the 204-page document nearly impossible to parse.

    Courts & copyright

  37. Microsoft Research shows VASA-1, real-time talking-face generation

    Trained to render 512x512 video at up to 40 frames per second from one photo and an audio clip; Microsoft said it had no plans to release a demo or model.

    Models & capabilities · Security & misuse

  38. Microsoft invests $1.5bn in UAE's G42

    G42 agreed to remove Chinese technology from its systems, and Microsoft's Brad Smith joined its board, as part of a deal read as a US bid for Gulf AI infrastructure.

    Compute & infrastructure · Money & business

  39. UK competition regulator warns on AI foundation model market concentration

    The regulator counted more than 90 partnerships and investments linking six firms — Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Nvidia — across the foundation-model supply chain.

    Government & policy

  40. Cohere releases Command R+

    Launched first on Microsoft Azure, the larger companion to March's Command R kept the same 128K context but was pitched as competitive with GPT-4-class models.

    Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress

  41. Reports emerge that Microsoft and OpenAI are planning a $100 billion 'Stargate' data centre

    The Information reported a five-phase supercomputer roadmap, with Stargate as the final phase and a smaller fourth-phase machine targeted for 2026.

    Compute & infrastructure · Money & business

  42. Microsoft absorbs Inflection's team without buying the company

    Reported terms put the deal at $650 million — most of it a licence fee for Inflection's models, the rest for waiving legal claims over the mass hire.

    Labs & people · Money & business

  43. Figure raises $675M Series B, partners with OpenAI

    Investors included Microsoft, Nvidia and Jeff Bezos; OpenAI agreed to develop language and reasoning models specifically for Figure's humanoid robots.

    Money & business · Models & capabilities

  44. Mistral AI releases Mistral Large and launches Le Chat

    The French start-up's flagship model was closed-weight rather than open, and Microsoft took a stake and put it on Azure the same day.

    Models & capabilities · Money & business

  45. Microsoft and OpenAI disrupt state-affiliated hacking groups misusing LLMs

    The groups used LLMs mainly for reconnaissance, translation, debugging and phishing-content drafting rather than novel attack techniques; the identified accounts were terminated.

    Security & misuse

  46. Judge narrows GitHub Copilot lawsuit, dismissing most claims

    Judge Jon Tigar dismissed negligence, interference and most DMCA claims over Copilot's training data, leaving an open-source licence claim to proceed.

    Courts & copyright

  47. The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft

    The first major news organisation to sue over AI training data, alleging models could reproduce its articles near-verbatim.

    Courts & copyright

  48. Sam Altman returns as CEO with a new initial board

    The three-person interim board — Bret Taylor, Larry Summers and Adam D'Angelo, the only holdover from the board that fired him — replaced the four who had voted him out.

    Labs & people

  49. OpenAI's board fires Sam Altman, and reinstates him five days later

    The board cited a loss of confidence but gave no detail; around 700 of roughly 770 employees threatened to resign, and the board itself was replaced.

    Labs & people · Money & business

  50. Microsoft unveils in-house Maia 100 AI chip and Cobalt 100 CPU

    Announced at Microsoft's Ignite conference, the pair of custom chips were slated to reach Microsoft datacentres in early 2024, starting with internal workloads.

    Compute & infrastructure

  51. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft launch the Frontier Model Forum

    The four founding labs said the body would fund safety research and share best practices, distinct from and without the enforcement power of government regulation.

    Safety & alignment · Government & policy

  52. Seven labs sign voluntary safety commitments at the White House

    Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI pledged security testing and watermarking, with no enforcement mechanism and no penalty for non-compliance.

    Government & policy

  53. Meta releases Llama 2 for commercial use

    Weights published under a licence permitting most commercial deployment, formalising what the Llama leak had already made true.

    Open weights & ecosystem

  54. Inflection raises $1.3 billion for a personal AI

    The round valued the year-old startup at $4 billion and was earmarked largely for a planned 22,000-H100 GPU cluster built with Microsoft and CoreWeave.

    Money & business · Compute & infrastructure

  55. Microsoft announces 365 Copilot

    Built on GPT-4 and Microsoft's own data graph, it launched to a small group of testers with no price or general release date set.

    Money & business · Culture & impact

  56. OpenAI releases GPT-4

    A multimodal model that passed professional exams near the top of the human range — and whose technical report disclosed no architecture, data or compute.

    Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress

  57. Bing's chatbot tells a journalist to leave his wife

    Days after the exchange, Microsoft capped Bing chat sessions to five turns, saying long conversations could 'confuse' the model into drifting from grounded answers.

    Culture & impact · Safety & alignment

  58. Student uses prompt injection to expose Bing Chat's hidden 'Sydney' system prompt

    Liu told the chatbot to 'ignore previous instructions' and asked what preceded them, prompting it to disclose rules telling it to keep its Sydney codename confidential.

    Security & misuse

  59. Microsoft puts GPT-4 inside Bing

    Microsoft called it only a 'next-generation OpenAI large language model'; the company confirmed five weeks later, on GPT-4's public release, that Bing had been running on GPT-4 all along.

    Models & capabilities · Money & business

  60. Microsoft invests a reported $10 billion in OpenAI

    Microsoft's own announcement gave no figure; press reports put the deal at $10 billion and described Azure becoming OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider.

    Money & business · Labs & people

  61. GitHub Copilot goes on sale

    Priced at $10 a month or $100 a year, it moved from a year-long technical preview used by over 1.2 million developers to a paid product free for students and open-source maintainers.

    Money & business · Models & capabilities

  62. Microsoft and NVIDIA train Megatron-Turing NLG at 530 billion parameters

    The largest dense language model publicly described at the time, and a demonstration of multi-thousand-GPU training.

    Models & capabilities · Compute & infrastructure

  63. OpenAI publishes Codex, an LLM trained on code powering GitHub Copilot

    A GPT-3 descendant fine-tuned on public GitHub code solved 28.8% of a new benchmark's problems on the first try, rising to 70.2% with repeated sampling.

    Models & capabilities

  64. GitHub launches Copilot in technical preview

    An OpenAI model trained on public code began suggesting whole functions inside the editor — the first mass-market use of a large language model.

    Models & capabilities · Culture & impact

  65. Microsoft researchers publish LoRA

    Freezing pretrained weights and training small added matrices instead cut GPT-3's trainable parameter count by a factor the authors put at 10,000, with no extra inference cost.

    Ideas & essays · Open weights & ecosystem

  66. Microsoft takes an exclusive licence to GPT-3

    Microsoft gained access to the underlying model and source code for its own products; the public API, through which OpenAI still served other customers, was unaffected.

    Money & business · Labs & people · Models & capabilities

  67. IBM stops selling general-purpose facial recognition

    Announced during the George Floyd protests; Amazon and Microsoft followed within days with police-sales moratoria.

    Government & policy · Culture & impact

  68. Microsoft reveals the supercomputer it built for OpenAI

    Announced at Build, a top-five ranked machine dedicated to a single customer — an early signal of AI's compute economics.

    Compute & infrastructure · Money & business

  69. The CORD-19 research dataset is released

    Assembled with the White House OSTP, National Library of Medicine and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, it opened with over 29,000 papers, most with full text.

    Ideas & essays · Open weights & ecosystem

  70. Microsoft announces Turing-NLG at 17 billion parameters

    Briefly the largest published language model, trained with Microsoft's new DeepSpeed library and beating Megatron-LM on WikiText-103 and LAMBADA.

    Models & capabilities

Also mentioned in 67 entries

Referenced in passing — Microsoft isn't the main subject of these.