Microsoft Adds xAI's Grok 3 Models to Azure AI Foundry, Signaling Shift in AI Partnerships

xAI's Grok 3 comes to Microsoft Azure | TechCrunch

Microsoft on Monday became one of the first hyperscalers to provide managed access to Grok, the AI model developed by billionaire Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI. Available through Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry platform, Grok -- specifically Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini -- will "have all the service-level agreements Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product," says Microsoft. They'll also be billed directly by Microsoft, as is the case with the other models hosted in Azure AI Foundry. When Musk announced Grok several years ago, he pitched the AI model as edgy, unfiltered, and anti-"woke" -- in general, willing to answer controversial questions other AI systems simply won't. He delivered on some of that promise. Told to be vulgar, for example, Grok will happily oblige, spewing colorful language you likely wouldn't hear from ChatGPT. According to SpeechMach, a benchmark comparing how different models treat sensitive subjects, Grok 3 is among the more permissive models. Grok, which powers a number of features on X, Musk's social network, has been the subject of much controversy lately. A recent report found that Grok would undress photos of women when asked. In February, Grok briefly censored unflattering mentions of Donald Trump and Musk. And just last week, an "unauthorized modification" caused Grok to repeatedly refer to white genocide in South Africa when invoked in certain contexts. The Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models in Azure AI Foundry are decidedly more locked down than the Grok models on X. They also come with additional data integration, customization, and governance capabilities not necessarily offered by xAI through its API.

Microsoft is now hosting xAI's Grok 3 models

Sources tell me Nadella has been pushing for Microsoft to host Grok, as he's eager for Microsoft to be seen as the hosting provider for any popular or emerging AI models. Grok is the latest model to join the Azure AI Foundry, which is quickly becoming an important AI service for Microsoft as it seeks to be seen as the platform to host AI models for businesses and app developers. The announcement of Grok on Azure AI Foundry comes just days after the chatbot spent hours telling every X user that the claim of white genocide in South Africa is highly contentious. xAI blamed the behavior on an "unauthorized modification" to Grok's code. xAI has had a similar problem earlier this year, when the company blamed an unnamed ex-OpenAI employee for pushing a change to Grok that saw it disregard any sources that accused Elon Musk or Donald Trump of spreading misinformation.

Musk's Grok AI Comes to Microsoft Azure. Why Am I Not Surprised?

The close relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI is no secret. After all, Microsoft picked the GPT family of AI models as the foundation for Copilot and made an 11-figure investment in Sam Altman's firm. That's why one announcement from Microsoft's business- and developer-centric Build conference sticks out. Prior to this morning's keynote, we spotted an interesting paragraph in the ninth section of the publicly available Book of News for this year's Build is the following paragraph: Azure AI Foundry Models is expanding with new direct, first-party offerings hosted and billed directly by Microsoft, including Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models from xAI. These models will have all the service level agreements (SLAs) Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product. Forty-five minutes into the Build opening keynote presentation, after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that integration (and well after Altman made his own appearance), xAI CEO Elon Musk popped up on-screen for a pre-recorded chat with Nadella. Grok is a competing AI chatbot integrated into Musk's X social network. It has a questionable track record, producing bizarre and sometimes dangerous results, which Musk acknowledged in his Build cameo. "We have and will make mistakes, but we aspire to correct them quickly," he told Nadella before urging Microsoft developers to kick the tires on Grok and provide feedback, and teasing the imminent release of Grok 3.5. Like other big tech companies, Microsoft seems to want to cozy up to the head of DOGE; it's always useful to have a friend in Washington. But Microsoft hasn't switched its main AI tool, Copilot, from OpenAI GPT models to Grok. In fact, at Build, Microsoft announced that Copilot would implement OpenAI's GPT-4o image-generation model. So, I don't think securing government work is the main reason for the Grok additions. Besides, it's not even Microsoft's first involvement with xAI. Earlier in 2025, the two companies joined forces with Nvidia on an AI infrastructure partnership. Plus, Microsoft previously made the cheap and fast Chinese AI model DeepSeek R1 available to Azure developers and added Meta's Llama 2 model before that. Clearly, the company is opportunistic when it comes to embracing and integrating generative AI tech. Google doesn't seem to be in a rush to add Gemini to Azure, but it wouldn't shock me if some of that tech eventually makes its way over. I expect to hear plenty about Gemini at Google I/O, which starts on May 20, and a Microsoft cameo at that event isn't entirely out of the question. What's Microsoft's End Goal? Nadella hasn't been subtle about the company's goals. He has repeatedly made the clever remark that Copilot is "the UI of AI." Now it seems Microsoft wants Azure to be the clearinghouse of generative AI development. This seems like a wise goal since AI is still the hottest game in town, even if it means adding tech with an unsavory history.

Microsoft adds xAI's Grok 3 models to Azure AI Foundry

Microsoft has added xAI's Grok 3 family to its Azure AI Foundry platform, seemingly unfazed by the firm's rivalry with Microsoft investee OpenAI or the chatbot's recent descent into conspiracy territory. Azure AI Foundry is a cloud-based platform for creating and managing AI apps and agents, which Microsoft says is used by "more than 70,000 enterprises and digital natives" - a figure that obscures its actual popularity by failing to differentiate corporate adoption from individual adoption. Now, Microsoft says, "we're bringing Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models from xAI to our ecosystem, hosted and billed directly by Microsoft," said Frank Shaw, chief communications officer at Microsoft, in a blog post. "Developers can now choose from more than 1,900 partner-hosted and Microsoft-hosted AI models, while managing secure data integration, model customization and enterprise-grade governance." It's another bit of evidence that OpenAI, which has received billions of dollars of investment from Microsoft, no longer has exclusive most-favored-AI status as Redmond seeks to offer a broad range of AI technologies to cloud customers. The two companies are fierce rivals. Elon Musk, CEO of xAI, is currently suing OpenAI, an outfit in which he was an early investor. His failed attempt to buy the org triggered a countersuit accusing Musk of unfair competition and harassment. For OpenAI, seeing its patron cozy up to an assertively litigious competitor could make for some awkward conversations during future negotiations. In addition, Grok has raised some eyebrows in the last week following the model's unsolicited screeds about claims of White genocide in South Africa, which it blamed on unknown parties making a middle-of-the-night code change, and a post expressing skepticism about the number of Jews killed by Germany's Nazi government during World War II. A note on Grok's X account later attributed the Holocaust denial incident to a May 14, 2025, programming error: An unauthorized change caused Grok to question mainstream narratives, including the Holocaust's 6 million death toll, sparking controversy. xAI corrected this by May 15, stating it was a rogue employee's action. Grok now aligns with historical consensus, though it noted academic debate on exact figures, which is true but was misinterpreted. This was likely a technical glitch, not deliberate denial, but it shows AI's vulnerability to errors on sensitive topics. xAI is adding safeguards to prevent recurrence. Other models have also been called out for alleged anti-Semitism. According to a report published in March 2025 by the Anti-Defamation League, GPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Llama (Meta) all showed some measure of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias, with Llama being the worst of the four. On the other hand, in February 2024, a paper by 7amleh, The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, outlines similar concerns about bias against Palestinians in AI models. As we reported last September, no AI model is perfectly safe from bias, but some do better than others. Since January, however, AI safety has become less of a concern, at least for the US government. The Trump administration in January issued an Executive Order to get rid of the Biden-era AI safety framework. For Microsoft, the goal appears to be to provide as broad a selection of models to developers as possible. Model safety has been left to be sorted by customers, who at least get Azure's SLA, security, and compliance commitments alongside the periodic bill. ®

Microsoft to offer Elon Musk's xAI models to cloud customers

Microsoft is making Elon Musk's start-up xAI's artificial intelligence models available to its cloud computing customers, in the latest signal of the technology giant's cooling relations with ChatGPT maker OpenAI. The Seattle-based group said on Monday that developers using its Azure AI Foundry platform would be able to purchase xAI's latest Grok models under the same terms as if they were purchasing licenses for OpenAI's equivalent products. The move means that users will receive "service parity", such as preferential access to cloud computing power, regardless of whether they choose to use OpenAI or xAI's models. Microsoft, which is OpenAI's biggest backer, has increasingly sought to disentangle itself from the San Francisco-based start up led by Sam Altman. The move also comes as Musk is in the midst of a bitter legal dispute with Altman over OpenAI's plans to convert into a for-profit enterprise. "What we're trying to do is simplify the purchasing experience for customers and the user experience to make it look more like [what] we do for the OpenAI models," said Eric Boyd, corporate vice-president of Microsoft's Azure AI Platform. Microsoft has pumped more than $13bn in investment into OpenAI since 2019. But tensions have grown between the groups because of the ChatGPT maker's demands for more computing power from Microsoft, while also competing with its main benefactor by selling AI products designed for enterprise customers. Offering xAI's models on the same commercial terms as OpenAI will generate interest across the tech industry, given the animus between the chief executives of the rival groups. "We don't have a strong opinion about which model customers use. We want them to use Azure," Boyd said. "If [customers are] on Azure and they're finding the thing that they need, we're going to be quite happy with that outcome." He added: "We have great partnership with OpenAI . . . contrary to whatever you may read." The software giant also said on Monday that it would start to rank AI models to enable customers to choose the "top performing" option for particular tasks. Microsoft already offers developers more than 1,900 models from a host of companies including freely available "open" models developed by the likes of China's DeepSeek, Meta and French start-up Mistral. Separately, Microsoft will tell developers at its Build conference in Seattle this week that it is adopting Amazon-backed start-up Anthropic's Model Context Protocol. MPC, which is also being used by Google and OpenAI, standardises the way so-called AI "agents" communicate and has fast become the industry norm. The move shows a willingness for rival tech groups to co-operate on a key area of AI development, creating a path for more powerful digital assistants to interact with one another to complete tasks. The Build conference will show how Microsoft is increasingly forging its own path in the race to commercialise generative AI. Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, has distanced the company he leads from OpenAI's ambitious vision for general artificial intelligence -- where systems match or surpass the abilities of humans. Instead, Nadella has argued that leading models will be "commoditised", or have less value than being able to sell companies AI-enabled applications and digital assistants built on top of these programmes.

Elon and Satya, together again: Microsoft brings Musk's xAI models to Azure, despite OpenAI feud

Microsoft is bringing the Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini AI models from Elon Musk's xAI to its Azure AI Foundry platform, as new offerings hosted and billed directly by Microsoft from within the company's cloud platform. The move is notable in part because it shows Microsoft and xAI working more closely together, even though Elon Musk is publicly at odds with OpenAI, Microsoft's biggest AI partner. Musk last year added Microsoft as a defendant to his lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the companies formed a de facto AI monopoly. Azure AI Foundry is a platform within Microsoft Azure designed to help developers build, customize, and manage AI applications and agents. It includes models such as OpenAI's GPT-4, Meta's Llama 3, Mistral models, and Microsoft's own small language models (SLMs), including Phi-3. Musk appeared with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in pre-recorded video highlights shown at the event, and Microsoft made the full video available on YouTube, which you can watch above. If there was any tension between Musk and Nadella, it wasn't evident in the recorded video. More highlights: On Grok's core architecture: Musk stated that Grok is "trying to reason from first principles." He explained this means seeking "fundamental truths," boiling "things down to the axiomatic elements that are most likely to be correct, and then you reason up from there." He likened the approach to applying "the tools of physics to thinking" across all lines of reasoning, with the goal of arriving at "truth with minimal error." On AI safety: AI safety is a key concern for Musk, who emphasized that it's closely tied to transparency and integrity. His conclusion: "Honesty is the best policy. It really, really is for safety." While acknowledging that "we have and will make mistakes," he stressed the importance of quick corrections and ongoing input: "We are very much looking forward to feedback from the developer community." On grounding AI in reality: A core principle behind Grok, Musk said, is that intelligence must be anchored in the physical world. "Physics is the law, and everything else is a recommendation." He added, "I've seen many people break human-made laws, but I have not seen anyone break the laws of physics." This grounding, he argued, is critical to ensuring that AI models are truthful and accurate. On real-world testing and deployment: Musk highlighted how real-world use cases validate Grok's performance. "The car needs to drive safely and correctly. The humanoid robot Optimus needs to perform the task that it's being asked to perform. These are things that are very helpful for ensuring that the model is truthful and accurate." He noted Grok is already proving "very helpful in things like customer service," describing it as "infinitely patient and friendly... you can yell at it, and it's still going to be very nice." On current performance and future outlook: Grok is "already doing quite a good job at SpaceX and Tesla," particularly in customer support roles, Musk said. Looking ahead, he expressed a desire to broaden its reach: "We look forward to offering that to other companies." He closed with a message to developers: "Tell us what you want, and we'll make it happen." Earlier in the event, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Nadella via live video. They talked about how AI is changing software development, and discussed how AI tools are becoming more like helpful teammates that can take on complex coding tasks. Altman said AI models are improving quickly, getting better at understanding different types of input and working more smoothly with other tools. Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly renegotiating their multibillion-dollar partnership, according to the Financial Times. The talks come as OpenAI moves forward with a corporate restructuring that would shift its for-profit operations into a new public benefit corporation, still controlled by its nonprofit parent.

Microsoft’s Partnership With Elon Musk’s Grok AI Isn’t a Featureâ€"It’s a Liability

After Holocaust denial and claims of white genocide, I don't think Grok is the AI model you want to associate with right now. If you had any doubts that Microsoft is still betting big on AI, this year's annual Build developers conference should assuage them. To no one's surprise, it's pretty much all about Copilot and, specifically, AI agents. With the help of "agentic AI," Microsoft is looking to materially change the way you interact with your computer. You want to change some settings on your laptop? Ask AI. You want to crunch some numbers in a spreadsheet? AI. You want to build an entire website without writing a single piece of code yourself? You get the point. To make all of this happen across its commercial and personal computing platforms and hardware ecosystem, Microsoft has needed a little help, though. That help, just like in the case of Apple, has so far come from OpenAI and ChatGPT, but if a recent announcement is any indication, OpenAI might not be Microsoft's only collaborator for long. There's a new partner in town, and unfortunately, this one has a little Holocaust denial problem. On Monday, Microsoft announced that it will begin offering access to Grok AI, specifically Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini, through its Azure AI Foundry. For the uninitiated, Grok AI is a product of xAI, which is owned by the same guy whose social media site, X, is reportedly taking money from terrorist groupsâ€"Elon Musk. The partnership, to be clear, is nowhere near the level of closeness we've seen between Microsoft and OpenAI, which is almost entirely powering the company's push toward generative AI, but it's still a step in a more, um, diverse direction. And that partnership, however small, comes with some pretty awful timing. Just a few days prior to Microsoft's announcement that it was starting to incorporate Grok into its Azure AI Foundry, Grok was at the center of some controversy after spiraling into Holocaust denial and peddling claims of "white genocide." The worst part about all of that (outside of the, you know, Holocaust denial part) is that Musk's AI might not have just randomly hallucinated all of that problematic misinformation. As noted by the New York Times, Grok only started espousing claims of "white genocide" after an instance of the AI largely debunking a post from Musk himself suggesting white farmers are being targeted as part of a genocide in South Africa. A day after said debunk, Grok was seemingly obsessed with the idea of white genocide, bringing it up in relation to queries that had absolutely nothing to do with the idea at all. During the same time, Grok also started to cast doubt on the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust, stating it was "skeptical" about the figure. xAI has since blamed the Holocaust denialism on a "programming error," but it's hard not to greet that claim with some skepticism of my own. I know that Microsoft is clearly hellbent on seeing its goal of agentic AI to fruitionâ€"so hellbent that it would start to veer in a direction other than OpenAIâ€"but after such a demonstration, you'd have to stop and ask if the risk is really worth it. AI has been prone to hallucinations from the start, and almost every kind of information-purveying technology will encounter some kind of bias eventually, but if Musk were to have his fingers on the scale in any capacity, I'd say Grok's credibility should get a major downgrade. The extent of Microsoft and xAI's partnership is small for now, so I don't anticipate any controversial incidents right away, but that might not be the case in the future. Microsoft and OpenAI have already started to butt heads as competitors in the generative AI space and are currently in the midst of some tough negotiations over their partnership, according to a report from the Financial Times. If those negotiations go south, then there's a non-zero chance that Microsoft turns to other partners in a bid to keep its generative AI dreams afloat, and something tells me it won't be tapping Google on the shoulder for help. Maybe Grok will be there to pick up those pieces, but maybe not. Just like Musk's AI skepticism over the Holocaust, I have my doubts that Grok has proven it's ready for the big leagues.

Grok goes corporate: Microsoft adds Musk's rogue AI to Azure cloud

Microsoft on Monday announced a partnership with Elon Musk's AI startup xAI, bringing its controversial Grok models to the company's cloud platform Azure. The news came during the kickoff of Microsoft's Build developer conference, where both companies presented the deal as a step forward in expanding access to advanced AI models, despite rising criticism over Grok's recent behavior. The partnership gives xAI's Grok models a new distribution channel, while also bolstering Microsoft's growing portfolio of hosted AI systems.

Microsoft will host Elon Musk's Grok in its cloud

Why it matters: Microsoft is trying to convince developers and businesses that its AI strategy is a better bet than those from its partner OpenAI and a slew of competitors, including Google and Amazon. Driving the news: Microsoft will offer customers the option to run versions of xAI's Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models hosted and billed directly by Microsoft, the company announced Monday. State of play: Also at its Build conference on Monday, Microsoft announced a new GitHub coding agent that can work independently on multiple tasks in the background. Microsoft also announced NLWeb, an open project designed to "simplify the creation of natural language interfaces for websites -- making it easy to turn any site into an AI-powered app," per a blog post. What they're saying: "This emerging vision of the internet is an open agentic web, where AI agents make decisions and perform tasks on behalf of users or organizations," Microsoft said in its post. The big picture: It's a busy week of developer conferences.

Microsoft is bringing Elon Musk's AI models to its cloud

Microsoft Corp. is adding models from Elon Musk's xAI to its artificial intelligence marketplace. Grok 3, which Musk's AI outfit introduced earlier this year, will be available on Microsoft's cloud-computing platform, the company said on Monday. Microsoft and its biggest rivals in selling rented computing power, including Amazon.com Inc. and Google, are vying to be the place where AI applications are built and deployed. That's made a battleground out of the competition to host the latest models and build sophisticated controls to manage how they're used. Users of Microsoft's Azure cloud service can tap into more than 1,900 variants of AI models, including those from close Microsoft partner OpenAI, as well as Meta Platforms Inc., and DeepSeek, the company said. The addition of Musk's models increases the selection, but there remain notable absences, including models from Alphabet Inc.'s Google and hot AI startup Anthropic. Many of the announcements on Monday at the start of Build, Microsoft's annual developer conference, centered on products Microsoft is building to help manage agents, or AI tools designed to take action on a user's behalf. The company said Windows, the ubiquitous PC operating system, and other Microsoft products would support Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, a set of standards the startup built to govern how AI systems interact. "In order for agents to be as useful as they could be, they need to be able to talk to everything in the world," Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott told reporters and analysts during a presentation at its Redmond, Washington-based headquarters on Sunday. Microsoft and its GitHub coding platform subsidiary also joined MCP's steering committee. Microsoft has staked a position as a leader in artificial intelligence tools, thanks in part to its massive investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. The company has infused AI into its products for corporate office workers and developers, betting that systems that can sprinkle intelligence and automation into the workplace will more than make up for the tens of billions Microsoft has spent on servers and data centers to power those products. On Monday, Microsoft also introduced a variety of products designed to give developers and businesses additional insight and building blocks for generative AI. That includes a leaderboard of the top performing models, a tool designed to automatically help developers select the right model for a particular task, and new products for companies that want to build their own AI models using their internal data. Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini will be available on Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry. The models also power a chatbot plugged into X, Musk's social media site, where it spent part of last week surfacing a conspiracy theory about "white genocide" in South Africa. XAI later said there had been an "unauthorized modification" made to Grok's X bot, and promised additional transparency into the prompts that guide the software. Microsoft said in January that its AI suite -- including cloud infrastructure and AI applications -- was on pace to bring in at least $13 billion in annual revenue. 2025 Bloomberg L.P. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Microsoft strikes deal with Elon Musk to host Grok AI

The Grok chatbot last week ignited controversy by answering unrelated user prompts with unbacked right-wing propaganda about purported oppression of white South Africans. In a recorded conversation with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Musk said that xAI would always acknowledge mistakes with its Grok AI models."It's incredibly important for AI models to be grounded in reality," the Tesla tycoon said.Microsoft on Monday said its cloud servers will now host Grok from Elon Musk's xAI, days after the chatbot went off the rails with talk of "white genocide" in South Africa. Musk told an event hosted by Microsoft that his company's models "aspire to truth with minimal error," adding that "there's always going to be some mistakes that are made." The Grok chatbot last week ignited controversy by answering unrelated user prompts with unbacked right-wing propaganda about purported oppression of white South Africans. In a recorded conversation with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Musk said that xAI would always acknowledge mistakes with its Grok AI models. "It's incredibly important for AI models to be grounded in reality," the Tesla tycoon said. Generative AI models are often pre-programmed by engineers -- through things known as system prompts -- to give or avoid specific responses or convey certain moods or styles, no matter the input given by the user. Most recently, the latest model from industry leader OpenAI was found to be generating overly sycophantic responses, and the company quickly said it would make changes to remove the bug. The answers provided by Grok drew alarm as they reflected a conspiracy theory often shared on social media by Musk, who was born in South Africa. The company did not identify who made the code change, but said an "unauthorized modification" directed Grok to provide a specific response that "violated xAI's internal policies and core values." Faced with criticism, the startup said it was implementing measures to make Grok's system prompts public, change its review processes and put in place a "24/7 monitoring team" to address future incidents. While not specifically referring to the incident, Musk told the Microsoft event that xAI will practice transparency when mistakes are made. This could be interpreted as a dig at archrival OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, which is Microsoft's main partner to build its in-house Copilot models. OpenAI, which was co-founded by Musk in 2015, is often criticized for keeping its technology's internal workings secret, as opposed to more open models like Meta's Llama or the technology from Chinese company DeepSeek. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also appeared remotely at the Microsoft Build event in Seattle, speaking in a live Q&A with Nadella in which the two tech leaders vaunted the latest developments in their joint partnership. - 'Virtual teammate' - The Grok models from xAI will be available on Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry, a platform that makes hundreds of models available for paying developers to build their own generative AI models. The platform gives users access to popular models from various creators such as OpenAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, Meta, Stability AI, and now xAI. AI tools for writing software code are rapidly evolving into "agents" that can assist developers, according to the Microsoft chief. Some 15 million developers have used Github CoPilot AI to code or troubleshoot at the Microsoft-owned platform, the company said. "This is one of the biggest changes to programming that I've ever seen," Altman said during his exchange with Nadella. "This idea that you now have a real, virtual teammate, that you can assign work to." Microsoft last week said it was slashing unnecessary layers of management and seizing the benefits of new technology as reports said the tech behemoth was laying off thousands of workers. The tech giant did not disclose the total amount of lost jobs but US media reports said it will amount to about 6,000 people or about three percent of its global workforce. arp-gc/des

Elon Musk, who's suing Microsoft, is also software giant's special guest in new Grok AI partnership

Musk last year sued Microsoft and its close business partner OpenAI in a dispute over Musk's foundational contributions to OpenAI, which Musk helped start. Musk now runs his own AI company, xAI, maker of Grok, a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Elon Musk is in a legal fight with Microsoft but made a friendly virtual appearance at the software giant's annual technology showcase to reveal that his Grok artificial intelligence chatbot will now be hosted on Microsoft's data centers. "It's fantastic to have you at our developer conference," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said to Musk in a pre-recorded video conversation broadcast Monday at Microsoft's Build conference in Seattle. Musk last year sued Microsoft and its close business partner OpenAI in a dispute over Musk's foundational contributions to OpenAI, which Musk helped start. Musk now runs his own AI company, xAI, maker of Grok, a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also spoke with Nadella via live video call earlier at Monday's conference. Musk's deal means that the latest versions of xAI's Grok models will be hosted on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, alongside competing models from OpenAI and other companies, including Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Europe-based AI startups Mistral and Black Forest Labs and Chinese company DeepSeek. The Grok partnership comes just days after xAI had to fix the chatbot to stop it from repeatedly bringing up South African racial politics and the subject of "white genocide" in public interactions with users of Musk's social media platform X. The company blamed an employee's "unauthorized modification" for the unsolicited commentary, which mirrored South Africa-born Musk's own focus on the topic. Musk didn't address last week's controversy in his chat with Nadella but described honesty as the "best policy" for AI safety. "We have and will make mistakes, but we aspire to correct them very quickly," Musk said. Nadella was interrupted by protest over Gaza Monday's Build conference also became the latest Microsoft event to be interrupted by a protest over the company's work with the Israeli government. Microsoft has previously fired employees who protested company events, including its 50th anniversary party in April. "Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians?" a protesting employee shouted in the first minutes of Nadella's introductory talk Monday. "How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?" Nadella continued his presentation as the protesters were escorted out. Microsoft acknowledged last week that it provided AI services to the Israeli military for the war in Gaza but said it has found no evidence to date that its Azure platform and AI technologies were used to target or harm people in Gaza. Microsoft didn't immediately return an emailed request for comment about the protest Monday. Microsoft introduces new AI coding agent Microsoft-owned GitHub also used the Seattle gathering to introduce a new AI coding "agent" to help programmers build new software. The company already offers a Copilot coding assistant but the promise of so-called AI agents is that they can do more work on their own on a user's behalf. The updated tool is supposed to work best on tasks of "low-to-medium complexity" in codebases that are already well-tested, handling "boring tasks" while people "focus on the interesting work," according to Microsoft's announcement. The new tool arrives just a week after Microsoft began laying off hundreds of its own software engineers in Washington's Puget Sound region as part of global cuts of nearly 3% of its total workforce, amounting to about 6,000 workers.

Microsoft is bringing Elon Musk's AI models to its cloud

Microsoft is adding models from Elon Musk's xAI to its artificial intelligence marketplace. Grok 3, which Musk's AI outfit introduced earlier this year, will be available on Microsoft's cloud computing platform, the company said Monday. Microsoft and its biggest rivals in selling rented computing power, including Amazon and Google, are vying to be the place where AI applications are built and deployed. That has made a battleground out of the competition to host the latest models and build sophisticated controls to manage how they're used.

Elon Musk's Grok AI Now Hosted By Microsoft

This could spark tensions between Microsoft and Open AI, given the history between Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Elon Musk's xAI revealed its most powerful AI model at the start of the year, called Grok 3, which rivaled Microsoft's Copilot. But it seems like, in a weird turn of events, both Microsoft and xAI are coming together, as the former announces that it will be hosting Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini on Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry service. This news comes from Microsoft's Build Developer conference today, where the company announced that it will be hosting Grok AI. This means that the company will start offering Grok 3 to its own internal team and customers of the Azure AI Foundry. According to Microsoft, "These models will have all the service level agreements (SLAs) Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product". This change comes as part of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's plan to turn the company into a hosting provider for emerging and popular AI services, as per the sources of The Verge. Back in January, the CEO asked its engineers to test and push out DeepSeek R1 on its Azure AI Foundry. Now, it's time for Grok. However, given OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's history with Elon Musk, it might lead to some internal issues within Microsoft. Whatever the case may be, it seems like a win-win situation for Azure AI Foundry users.

Microsoft is bringing Elon Musk's AI models to its cloud

By Matt Day and Brody Ford, Bloomberg News The Tribune Content Agency Microsoft Corp. is adding models from Elon Musk's xAI to its artificial intelligence marketplace. Grok 3, which Musk's AI outfit introduced earlier this year, will be available on Microsoft's cloud-computing platform, the company said on Monday. Microsoft and its biggest rivals in selling rented computing power, including Amazon.com Inc. and Google, are vying to be the place where AI applications are built and deployed. That's made a battleground out of the competition to host the latest models and build sophisticated controls to manage how they're used. Users of Microsoft's Azure cloud service can tap into more than 1,900 variants of AI models, including those from close Microsoft partner OpenAI, as well as Meta Platforms Inc., and DeepSeek, the company said. The addition of Musk's models increases the selection, but there remain notable absences, including models from Alphabet Inc.'s Google and hot AI startup Anthropic. Many of the announcements on Monday at the start of Build, Microsoft's annual developer conference, centered on products Microsoft is building to help manage agents, or AI tools designed to take action on a user's behalf. The company said Windows, the ubiquitous PC operating system, and other Microsoft products would support Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, a set of standards the startup built to govern how AI systems interact. "In order for agents to be as useful as they could be, they need to be able to talk to everything in the world," Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott, told reporters and analysts during a presentation at its Redmond, Washington-based headquarters on Sunday. Microsoft and its GitHub coding platform subsidiary also joined MCP's steering committee. Microsoft has staked a position as a leader in artificial intelligence tools, thanks in part to its massive investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. The company has infused AI into its products for corporate office workers and developers, betting that systems that can sprinkle intelligence and automation into the workplace will more than make up for the tens of billions Microsoft has spent on servers and data centers to power those products. Microsoft on Monday also introduced a variety of products designed to give developers and businesses additional insight and building blocks for generative AI. That includes a leaderboard of the top performing models, a tool designed to automatically help developers select the right model for a particular task, and new products for companies that want to build their own AI models using their internal data. Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini will be available on Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry. The models also power a chatbot plugged into X, Musk's social media site, where it spent part of last week surfacing a conspiracy theory about "white genocide" in South Africa. XAI later said there had been an "unauthorized modification" made to Grok's X bot, and promised additional transparency into the prompts that guide the software. Microsoft said in January that its AI suite - including cloud infrastructure and AI applications - was on pace to bring in at least $13 billion in annual revenue.