Microsoft has spent the past year watching Anthropic and OpenAI pull ahead in the race to make AI genuinely useful for corporate customers.
On September 25, the company tried to close that gap in one move. It folded years of separate AI products into a single app built to compete directly with Claude.
The timing is not incidental.
Microsoft’s stock has trailed most of its megacap peers this year. The redesign is a bet that a simpler, more unified product can finally turn Copilot adoption into the kind of growth investors have been waiting for.
Microsoft redesigned Copilot to challenge Anthropic’s Claude
The updated app is organized around three sections. Home combines conversational chat with a task-delegation feature called Cowork. It also embeds full versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint so users can create and edit documents without leaving the app.
The second section, called Code, lets users build apps, dashboards, and other software using natural language prompts, built on the same technology that powers GitHub Copilot, according to CNBC.
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The third piece is Autopilot, previously known as Scout. It lets users create always-on agents that run in the cloud, monitor email and Teams channels, and carry out recurring tasks without waiting for a new prompt each time.
Satya Nadella first promised this combined app at the Build conference in June. He told investors on a July 29 earnings call that it would arrive this quarter. The September 25 announcement met that deadline, as reported by GeekWire.
Why Microsoft is playing catch-up
Executives were candid about the motivation. Jacob Andreou, the executive vice president who leads Copilot, acknowledged that adding coding capability to the app is an instance of Microsoft playing catch-up rather than leading the market.
The competitive pressure is real. OpenAI and Anthropic have increasingly bundled chat, coding and agent capabilities together, while Meta’s Muse app has also shot to the top of Apple’s App Store since its launch earlier this month.
Microsoft is trying to differentiate on enterprise trust rather than raw capability. Andreou said sending sensitive company files to a local machine inside a virtual environment was a nonstarter for Microsoft’s customers. That was an apparent reference to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork’s original local-VM architecture, GeekWire reported.
That tension has shown up in less diplomatic ways too.
Nadella separately criticized Anthropic’s restrictions on its Claude Fable model as unusually constrained for a creative tool.
This is even as Microsoft continues integrating Anthropic’s models into Copilot and stands to collect billions in Azure revenue under Anthropic’s own $30 billion cloud computing commitment, TheStreet reported.
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The stock backdrop behind the redesign
Microsoft’s AI investments have taken longer to show up in results than the market wanted. Shares fell as much as 17% at one point this year, the company’s worst stretch since the 2008 financial crisis.
Paid Copilot seats represented just 3.3% of Microsoft’s roughly 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 user base at the time, according to TheStreet.
Copilot adoption has been the metric most closely watched as evidence of a turnaround. Daily active users had already grown nearly three times year over year before this redesign. More than 1,500 enterprise customers were using both Anthropic and OpenAI models side by side through Microsoft’s own platform.
The company ended one recent quarter with 30 million paid Copilot seats, up 10 million in a single quarter and the fastest seat growth since Copilot launched, while GitHub Copilot separately reached 50 million users.
That growth has started winning over skeptics. Stifel upgraded Microsoft from Hold to Buy in September, with analyst Brad Reback saying the company had clearly turned the corner following its June quarter results.
Goldman Sachs has maintained a constructive view as well, modeling that Microsoft’s Copilot and AI agent strategy could drive more than $35 in earnings per share by fiscal 2030, as reported by TheStreet.
What Microsoft’s moves mean for investors
The redesign puts Microsoft in an unusual position. Even inside the new unified Copilot app, the coding tool lets users choose between OpenAI’s GPT models and Anthropic’s Opus model.
Microsoft is incorporating technology from the very companies it is competing with.
That dependency has not stopped Wall Street from staying broadly optimistic about the stock. Thirty-three of 36 analysts covering Microsoft currently rate it a buy, with an average price target implying more than 50% upside from recent levels.
The pressure to move fast is real across the sector. Anthropic’s own Claude Cowork rollout has already sent a warning through software stocks broadly.
Investors are reassessing which companies can adapt their pricing models as agents begin replacing traditional workflows.
The redesigned Copilot app is less a guarantee of a turnaround and more a test.
Can Microsoft convert its massive existing customer base into paying AI users faster than Anthropic and OpenAI can convince those same customers to switch? How quickly seat growth accelerates from here may be the clearest signal of whether this bet pays off.
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