Microsoft Adds OpenAI To List Of Competitors For The First Time

Microsoft published its annual SEC report on Tuesday, including OpenAI as one of the company’s competitors for the first time.

OpenAI and Microsoft have built a partnership for a long time, but Microsoft now considers the generative AI startup a potential threat in AI offerings, and news advertising and searches—as OpenAI recently launched a new AI-powered search engine.

According to CNBC, Microsoft is one of OpenAI’s major investors and has reportedly provided a capital of $13 billion to the company. Microsoft is also OpenAI’s only cloud provider.

“We have a long-term partnership with OpenAI, a leading AI research and deployment company,” states the document. “We deploy OpenAI’s models across our consumer and enterprise products. As OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Azure powers all of OpenAI’s workloads.”

Microsoft also highlights its investment efforts to accelerate the company’s research by helping deploy and develop supercomputer systems.

Now Microsoft included OpenAI in the competition segment of the document among other companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple, traditionally included in the report.

“Our AI offerings compete with AI products from hyperscalers such as Amazon and Google, as well as products from other emerging competitors, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and other open source offerings, many of which are also current or potential partners,” acknowledges the company.

Regarding search services and news advertising, the tech giant considers Google, OpenAI, and social media platforms like Meta to be business competition.

According to TechCrunch, this might be a strategy from Microsoft to protect the company as the Federal Trade Commission of the United States has been investigating AI companies due to antitrust concerns. The business relationship has raised concerns for the government agency, which required transparency.

Microsoft moves forward in the AI race as its competitors are doing. The tech giant also recently launched its AI-powered Designer app for Android and iOS.