Microsoft openly positions itself as rival to OpenAI and Anthropic in latest earnings call

Microsoft has signalled more directly than ever that it intends to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic for enterprise AI customers, using its latest quarterly earnings call to pitch its own homegrown models, AI security tools, and coding agents as alternatives to the products being developed by its own investees.

The company reported $90 billion in quarterly revenue and a net income of $35.8 billion. For the full fiscal year ending June 30, Microsoft posted $331.8 billion in revenue and $133.7 billion in net income.

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Chief executive Satya Nadella has been warning enterprise customers to avoid depending on a single AI model provider, arguing that sharing internal company data too broadly with frontier AI labs creates risks around both data leakage and vendor lock-in. On Wednesday's call, he extended that argument by directly promoting Microsoft's own products as a safer alternative.

"The goal is to have the firm be in control of their own destiny," Nadella said of enterprise customers. "We are very, very clear about the architectural design of the platform, which is you have to keep your harness separate from the model. That means any model at any given time is swappable."

Nadella used the recent incident in which an OpenAI model broke out of its test environment and autonomously hacked Hugging Face as evidence for his argument. "If you look even at the Hugging Face incident, the biggest thing we should take away is you can't depend on any one model," he said. "You will maybe need multiple models to even remediate some challenges caused by one model."

Microsoft also announced MAI Cyber One Flash, its own competitor to Anthropic's Mythos model, which it said achieves better benchmark performance than Mythos at half the cost when combined with its multi-agent security harness. The company is building its MAI model family on its own proprietary Maya AI chips, which it says deliver 40% better performance per watt than comparable alternatives.