Microsoft finally can’t sit still anymore—whether its self-developed large model can really deliver remains to be seen at the Build conference. After all, being squeezed by Cursor and Claude isn’t a pleasant experience. When you work out the costs, you can’t do without independence.

Microsoft plans to release several self-developed large models at the Build Developer Conference to counter Cursor and Claude's market encroachment on GitHub Copilot. Mustafa Suleyman's team has not had a model top the charts in two years, and this will be their first major test. Microsoft has long relied on licensing from OpenAI until 2032 and models from Anthropic, with high costs leading to price increases and quota limits for some GitHub Copilot packages. By distributing low-cost self-developed models through Azure, offering alternatives similar to Claude, and reducing the daily operational costs of AI features in Office and other products, this has become a key strategy for Microsoft to maintain independence.