Microsoft Has Added Anthropic's AI To This Popular Copilot Assistant

Microsoft has poured billions of dollars into OpenAI, the AI giant behind ChatGPT. In return, Microsoft has pushed OpenAI's GPT infrastructure across Copilot experiences, especially those within the Office 365 app ecosystem. Over time, Microsoft developed its own small language models that it's now deploying in certain portions of the Windows experience, including the Settings app. However, OpenAI's GPT foundation has commanded the lion's share of Copilot experiences so far. That is finally changing with the addition of Claude, a family of AI models created by Amazon-backed AI lab, Anthropic.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot bundle now offers access to Anthropic's AI models, and they're also available in Microsoft Copilot Studio, where developers can create AI agents. Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 AI models are not replacing OpenAI's GPT models, but they will exist as a choice for users within the Copilot ecosystem. This is a major move, not just for Microsoft and its user base, but also for the close partnership it has shared with OpenAI until now.

More importantly, it implies that even tech giants such as Microsoft might now consider Anthropic's AI tools powerful enough to go head-to-head against those offered by OpenAI. Interestingly, OpenAI has also praised Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.1 model, noting that it offered the strongest results on the GPDval performance test. Claude Opus 4.1 also emerged as the best-performing model when compared to the latest AI models such as GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 4.

It's not all for developers — consumers will benefit, too. Thanks to Claude's arrival in Microsoft 365 Copilot, you can now choose that model for the Researcher agent. As the name suggests, Researcher is an agentic AI that helps users perform multi-step research based on the material available. 

For example, you can feed it internal marketing and sales data, and it will create a detailed business strategy. It can also pull data from external services such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Confluence using a system of connectors. Think of it as a dedicated research assistant that can gather, assess, summarize, and present information based on the files you work with. It can also surf the web and look up competitor reports.

Meanwhile, in Copilot Studio, developers can build custom AI agents to automate and speed up boring tasks. For example, devs can create an AI agent that looks at resumes and shortlists candidates by matching them against a select list of internal requirements for skills and qualifications. 

This won't be the first time that Anthropic has made inroads into Microsoft's ecosystem. Last year, Anthropic began the rollout of Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI within GitHub Copilot. GitHub Copilot is Microsoft's AI-powered tool for developers that helps them write and fix code.