The Loop · Issue N°033

The Loop

A field journal of the AI frontier — for engineers who ship.

Tag

#Microsoft

· News
News
$3.2 billion in one quarter — Microsoft's eight-month-old Anthropic bet is closing on a full year of OpenAI on its own books
Microsoft closed fiscal 2026 with a $3.2 billion gain on its eight-month-old Anthropic stake — nearly matching what its ~27% OpenAI position added to the full year. First quarter Microsoft's own books read out the diversification.
Jul 30, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Jul 30, 2026
· News
News
Selling parts vs. selling the system — Microsoft's leaked FY27 sales playbook tells salespeople Claude is "slower and less accurate
On Tuesday July 14, 2026 Microsoft's fiscal-year 2027 sales all-hands told salespeople to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic by name. Copilot EVP Jacob Andreou called Claude "slower and less accurate." Bloomberg had it by Wednesday. Microsoft closed up 2.78 per cent.
Jul 17, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Jul 17, 2026
· News
News
The Palantir playbook — three days apart, AWS and Microsoft stood up billion-dollar forward-deployed-engineering units, joining Anthropic and OpenAI in the trade Palantir has been running since 2003
On June 30 AWS launched a $1B Forward Deployed Engineering unit. Seventy-two hours later Microsoft unveiled Frontier Company — $2.5B, 6,000 engineers. Four of the biggest names in AI have now stood up the same business in nine weeks, close to $9B between them.
Jul 11, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Jul 11, 2026
· News
News
Behind the meter — Microsoft signs a 20-year Chevron gas deal for 2 gigawatts in Pecos, with the activist fund that beat Exxon co-financing the turbines
Microsoft and Chevron named a 2-gigawatt data centre campus in Pecos, Texas on June 22 — a 20-year, behind-the-meter natural gas PPA. The $7B plant is co-developed by Engine No. 1, the activist fund that beat ExxonMobil in 2021.
Jun 23, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Jun 23, 2026
· News
News
The architect of RSS shipped a directory layer for AI agents — Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Databricks and seven other names co-signed the specification. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is on the list.
On June 17, 2026, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Databricks and seven others co-shipped Agentic Resource Discovery — a spec for how AI agents find the tools they may call. The author is Ramanathan Guha, the engineer behind RSS and Schema.org.
Jun 20, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Jun 20, 2026
· News
News
Capped at $1,500 — Uber and Microsoft both put hard limits on Claude Code in the weeks before Anthropic's S-1
On June 2 Bloomberg reported Uber capped Claude Code at $1,500 per tool per month after burning its 2026 AI-tools budget in four months. Three weeks earlier Microsoft set a June 30 sunset on Claude Code for its E+D engineers. Anthropic's S-1 went in on June 1.
Jun 4, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Jun 4, 2026
· News
News
Learned, not inherited — Microsoft's first reasoning model ships a benchmark chart that doesn't mention OpenAI
On June 2, 2026, Microsoft's Superintelligence team released MAI-Thinking-1 and MAI-Code-1-Flash at Build. The press release uses the word "inherited" once and the word "OpenAI" never. The competitor named on every chart is Anthropic.
Jun 3, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Jun 3, 2026
· News
News
Twenty-four hours — OpenAI's models hit AWS Bedrock the day after Microsoft's exclusivity ended
On April 27 Microsoft and OpenAI rewrote a contract that had quietly survived since 2019. On April 28 OpenAI's frontier models, Codex, and Managed Agents were live on AWS Bedrock. The pacing tells you everything.
Apr 29, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Apr 29, 2026