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.com 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.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud service customers can tap into more than 1,900 variants of AI models, including those from the company’s close partner, OpenAI, as well as Meta Platforms, and DeepSeek, Microsoft said. The addition of Musk’s models increases the selection, but there remain notable absences, including models from Alphabet’s Google and hot AI startup Anthropic.
Many of announcements at Monday’s start of Build, Microsoft’s annual developer conference, centered on products the company 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 said Sunday during a presentation at its Redmond, Washington-based headquarters. 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 also introduced a variety of products designed to give developers and businesses additional insight and building blocks for generative AI. That includes a leader board 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.
xAI’s 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.
Musk appeared virtually during Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella’s keynote speech at the conference. Musk said he is hoping for developer feedback on Grok AI models. “We have and will make mistakes, and aspire to correct them very quickly,” Musk said.
Nadella’s speech was also interrupted by protesters within the first few minutes. Last month, the company fired two employees for disrupting an event to protest Microsoft’s work with the Israeli government.
Microsoft said in January that its AI suite — including cloud infrastructure and AI applications — was on pace to bring in at least $13 billion (roughly Rs. 1,11,243 crore) in annual revenue.
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