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 agents at Microsoft, in a blog post. "Describe the outcome you want and Cowork automatically grounds the work in your emails, meetings, messages, files, and data."
In other words, armed with contextual information surfaced through Work IQ – Microsoft's package of tenant data, context (chat and files supplied to AI models), skills (text and scripts explaining stuff to AI models), and tools (applications models can interact with) – Copilot Cowork can do some of your work on your behalf.
When AI models do this with code, the resulting output has gotten pretty good in recent months – the functional nature of programming means you and your AI tools can check whether generated code runs, even if it's not the sort of finely crafted, highly optimized code skilled human developers can produce.
When AI models produce content for people, the results may be harder to assess – how do you write tests to verify whether a presentation is compelling? If Copilot Cowork can complete the designated task and the work is nothing you take pride in and those on the receiving end of the AI output don't mind, why not burn a bunch of resource-squandering compute cycles to generate a sales proposal or clean up your inbox?
Lamanna offers various scenarios for how Copilot Cowork might be helpful, such as preparing for a customer meeting.
"With Cowork, you can hand off the effort from start to finish," he said. "Cowork pulls relevant inputs from email, meetings, and files, schedules prep time on the calendar, then produces a connected set of deliverables: a briefing document, supporting analysis, and a client-ready deck."
He also suggests that Cowork might be useful for delegating research projects that involve scouring the web for reports, financial filings, and news, then whipping that into a summary of some sort, a pitch deck, or a spreadsheet.
This comes with the usual reassurance that Copilot Cowork is prevented from doing harm by Microsoft 365's security and governance controls. Cowork, it's claimed, runs in a protected, sandboxed cloud environment.
Seeing as it was only two months ago that Prompt Armor warned attackers could exfiltrate files from Claude Cowork via indirect prompt injection, it might be wise to take Microsoft's reassurances under advisement. Online anecdotes about files lost to Claude Cowork may also provide food for thought.
Microsoft is presently making Copilot Cowork available as a Research Preview to a select set of customers, and promises broader availability through the Frontier program later this month. ®
Source: The register