The Information: Microsoft is on track to pay Anthropic more than $2B a year for Claude in Copilot; profile of Office chief Charles Lamanna
Partly confirmed
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 12 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra165 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5104 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash195 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7134 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 104 days before it.
Key facts
- Source: The Information (Aaron Holmes), Oct 12, 2026, paywalled; this entry is written from the Techmeme headline and AI Weekly’s summary
- A source said Microsoft is ‘on track to pay Anthropic more than $2B per year’; one outlet, one anonymous source
- In January 2026 The Information put the same spending at about $500M a year (per PYMNTS)
- Lamanna made the case while customers complained that Copilot was, in the outlet’s words, ‘buggy and not good enough at automating work in Excel or PowerPoint’
- Anthropic’s models did better at tasks such as automating financial functions in Excel and generating PowerPoint decks; Claude is blended with OpenAI models in Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint
- Lamanna is still ‘weighing Anthropic and OpenAI models to improve capabilities and margins’
- Lamanna took over the Office teams on Oct 1, 2026, when Microsoft announced that LinkedIn and Microsoft 365 chief Ryan Roslansky is leaving (Microsoft blog)
- Several senior Microsoft executives name Lamanna as a potential successor to CEO Satya Nadella
Show 1 more
- Not stated in the summaries: what Microsoft buys (API inference or reserved capacity) and how the cost is shared
What happened
The Information published a profile of Charles Lamanna, who already led Copilot and took over the Office teams on Oct 1, 2026, when Microsoft announced that Ryan Roslansky is leaving (Nadella’s memo: “Sumit Chauhan and Lan Ye will report to Charles Lamanna”). The article is paywalled and was not read directly. According to summaries of it, Lamanna persuaded Nadella to pay for Anthropic’s models when customers were unhappy with Copilot’s work in Excel and PowerPoint, over internal objections about cost. A source told the outlet that Microsoft’s payments to Anthropic are now on track to exceed $2 billion a year.
Why it matters
Microsoft is OpenAI’s long-time investor and primary cloud partner, yet its main productivity product now depends in part on OpenAI’s closest rival, and the spending has grown about fourfold in nine months if both reports are right. A week earlier The Information reported that Microsoft had cut its employees’ own Claude use by more than a third, so the company is both a growing customer of Anthropic and one trying to limit that bill.
Sources
5 sources from 5 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
5 sources: 1 primary, 4 press
Primary
- Official Microsoft Blog: Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn leadership update (Oct 1, 2026)blogs.microsoft.com, official
Press
- The Information: How Microsoft’s New Office Chief Fixed Copilot and Won Over Nadellatheinformation.com, press
- Techmeme headline (Oct 12, 2026)techmeme.com, press
- AI Weekly: Microsoft on Track to Pay Anthropic $2B+ a Year for Copilotaiweekly.co, press
- PYMNTS (Jan 2026): Microsoft Spending on Anthropic Approaches $500 Million a Yearpymnts.com, press
Changes
- Filed (evening). Written from summaries; the original is paywalled