Microsoft taps Claude to make Copilot Cowork a better agent

Microsoft on Monday celebrated freedom of choice by giving customers in the company's Frontier program the option to use Anthropic and OpenAI models via Copilot Chat.

"Microsoft 365 Copilot is model-diverse by design," said Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business, in a blog post. "Rather than betting on a single model, we built a system that makes every model useful at work."

Althoff said Copilot can make use of models from OpenAI and Anthropic in a way that avoids locking customers in.

The competitive love-in coincides with Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 3, which Redmond describes as a move beyond assistance toward embedded agentic capabilities.

Those agentic capabilities come from Anthropic's Claude Cowork, a digital work automation service that has been integrated into Copilot Cowork, Microsoft's automation service for 365 Copilot customers.

"Cowork makes it easy to delegate work," said Charles Lamanna, president of business applications and ...