Microsoft is continuing to expand its fleet of AI partners, hedging its bets beyond its high-profile partnership with OpenAI — a change that’s coming into sharper focus this week at the company’s Build developer conference.

Joining forces with Anthropic and other parts of the MCP network, Microsoft has designed an authorization spec to improve security between apps and MCP servers. The new spec lets users implement verified sign-in methods like Microsoft Entra ID to let apps powered by agents and LLMs access data, including personal drives or subscriptions.

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 outperforms OpenAI's GPT-4.1 with unprecedented seven-hour autonomous coding sessions and record-breaking 72.5% SWE-bench score, transforming AI from quick-response tool to day-long collaborator.

Microsoft said it will add an artificial intelligence coding agent from Google-backed startup Anthropic to its GitHub service.

Microsoft has struck a deal with Anthropic to use the startup’s models to power new AI agent features in its GitHub Copilot product, the company said on Thursday. The move reflects Microsoft’s willingness to branch out from OpenAI,

GitHub and Microsoft, GitHub's corporate parent, are joining the steering committee for MCP, Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to the systems where data resides.

When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella ran into Meta’s former engineering chief, Jay Parikh, at a conference last summer, he had the future of AI top of mind. The pair have known each other for around 15 years,

When Anthropic’s older Claude model played Pokémon Red, it spent “dozens of hours” stuck in one city and had trouble identifying nonplayer characters. With Claude 4 Opus, the team noticed an improvement in Claude’s long-term memory and planning capabilities.