Cloudcode suddenly became everywhere within Microsoft

Developers have been comparing the strengths and weaknesses of Anthropic’s Claude Code, Anysphere’s Cursor, and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot for months, searching for a winner. Although no single AI coding tool is capable of being the best at every task software developers do every day, Claude Code increasingly ranks first in terms of ease of use, both for developers and non-technical users.

Microsoft seems to agree, with sources telling me that the company is now encouraging thousands of its employees from some of its most productive teams to pick up Claude Code and get into coding, even if they’re not developers.

Microsoft first began adopting Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 model within its developer division in June of last year, by His preference is for paid users From GitHub Copilot several months later. Now, Microsoft has gone a step beyond using Anthropic’s AI models and adopted Claude Code more broadly across its largest engineering teams.

Microsoft’s CoreAI team, the new AI engineering group led by former Meta engineering head Jay Parikh, has been testing Claude Code in recent months, and last week Microsoft’s Experiences + Devices division was asked to install Claude Code. This department is responsible for Windows, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Bing, Edge, Surface, and more.

Even employees with no programming experience are encouraged to try Claude Code, to allow designers and project managers to prototype ideas. Microsoft has also approved the use of Claude Code across all of its code and repositories for business and industry Copilot teams.

I’m told that software engineers at Microsoft are now expected to use both Claude Code and GitHub Copilot and provide comparative feedback between the two. Microsoft GitHub sells Copilot as the AI ​​coding tool of choice for its customers, but if these extensive internal pilots are successful, the company could eventually sell Claude Code directly to its cloud customers.

Microsoft is now one of Anthropic’s top customers, according to a recent report from Information. The software maker also counts the sale of Anthropic AI models toward its Azure sales quotas, which is unusual since Microsoft typically only offers incentives to salespeople for on-premises products or models from OpenAI.

Microsoft’s decision to adopt Claude Code more widely among its engineering teams certainly seems like a vote of confidence in Anthropic’s AI tools compared to its own, especially as it encourages non-technical employees to try coding. But the reality is that Microsoft developers are likely to use a mix of AI tools, and adopting Claude Code is another part of that toolkit.

“Companies regularly test and pilot competing products to get a better understanding of the market landscape,” says Frank Shaw, head of communications at Microsoft, in a statement. Notepad. “OpenAI remains our primary partner and model provider on leading models, and we remain committed to our long-term partnership.”

While Microsoft remains committed to OpenAI, it is increasingly working with Anthropic to bring its models and tools to Microsoft’s own teams and the software it sells to customers. Microsoft and Anthropy I signed a deal in November that allows Microsoft Foundry customers to access Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5. The deal also includes Anthropic’s commitment to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity.

Microsoft has also begun to favor Anthropic’s Claude models Inside Microsoft 365 and Copilot apps Recently, its use in Specific applications Or features where Anthropic’s models have proven more capable than their OpenAI counterparts.

The big question here is, what does the increasing use of Claude Code at Microsoft mean for its 100,000+ code repositories? Microsoft told me this last year 91 percent of its engineering teams use GitHub Copilot A variety of teams are using the AI ​​tool to speed up mundane tasks. Microsoft’s use of AI tools has been largely limited to software engineers, but with CloudCode and… Claude CoworkAnthropic is increasingly focused on making programming and non-coding tasks easier, thanks to AI agent capabilities.

Microsoft is embracing the ease of use of Claude Code to allow more non-technical employees to execute code using AI, and this broad pilot program is sure to highlight the challenges and benefits of this shift. It also puts more pressure on junior developer roles, with concerns in the industry that these roles are increasingly disappearing due to AI. Microsoft has just taken another big step into a future where more independent AI agents create code, increasing control over software engineers.

Microsoft is preparing to showcase two of its biggest Xbox games this year. Forza Horizon 6 and mythlater today as part of Xbox Developer Live Stream. There will also be an in-depth first look Reincarnation monster And at least one other game has popped up, I hear. Double Fine is ready for it boast ovena team-based multiplayer brawler game. I know Double Fine has been holding playtests recently, where you play as a spirit that can inhabit pottery and carry water to douse an opponent’s kiln and extinguish a fire.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see that oven Appears as an early preview in the coming months, followed by Forza Horizon 6 In May and later Hala: The campaign has evolved. I keep hearing that it’s both myth and Gears of War: Electronic Day It is currently targeting a release in the second half of this year. Microsoft is keen to launch the new Forza, Gears, auraand myth Games in 2026 mark the 25th anniversary of Xbox.

I’m always keen to hear from my readers, so please leave a comment here, or you can contact me on notepad@theverge.com If you want to discuss anything else. If you hear about any secret Microsoft projects, you can contact me via email at notepad@theverge.com Or talk to me confidentially on the messaging app Signal, where I am tomwarren.01. I’m also Tomwarren on Telegram, if you’d prefer to chat there.

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