Microsoft’s new Anthropic partnership brings Claude AI models to Azure

Microsoft is announcing a strategic partnership with Anthropic today that will bring the AI startup’s models to Microsoft Foundry for the first time. As part of the deal, Anthropic is also committing to purchasing $30 billion of Azure compute capacity and “to contract additional compute capacity up to one gigawatt.”

Microsoft Foundry customers will now be able to access Anthropic’s frontier Claude models including Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5. Despite these models coming to Microsoft’s AI servers, Amazon will still remain Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and training partner.

Nvidia and Anthropic are also partnering today as part of this deal, to optimize Anthropic’s models for the best performance on future Nvidia architectures. Anthropic is committing to up to one gigawatt of compute capacity using Nvidia Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.

As part of these partnerships, Nvidia is investing up to $10 billion in Anthropic, with Microsoft also investing $5 billion.

Microsoft’s deal with Anthropic comes just weeks after its OpenAI partner completed its for-profit restructuring and struck a new deal with Microsoft. The new deal with OpenAI extends Microsoft’s IP rights to models from OpenAI through 2032 and also includes post-AGI (artificial general intelligence) models. The potential for a declaration of AGI had been a sticking point in Microsoft’s OpenAI deal, but the pair have now agreed the milestone would be verified by an independent expert panel.

Microsoft and OpenAI have also relaxed the exclusive parts of their partnership even more, allowing OpenAI to collaborate with third parties and release open weight models. Microsoft also no longer has the right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute provider.

All of these OpenAI partnership changes have allowed Microsoft to pursue this deal with Anthropic. Microsoft has been increasingly embracing Anthropic’s models across its Copilot services in recent months. In fact, Microsoft has been favoring Anthropic’s Claude 4 over GPT-5 in its new auto AI model selector in Visual Studio Code. Microsoft also brought Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 to Microsoft 365 Copilot users recently.