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Microsoft has sent the clearest signal to date about its intention to build its own AI empire independent of OpenAI. Six months after revising the contract that previously prohibited the corporation from developing advanced artificial intelligence on its own, Microsoft presented three of its own models that are direct competitors to the products of a partner that has invested $13 billion in its development.
The new products, called MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2, are already available on the Microsoft Foundry platform, and their labeling does not mention the OpenAI name at all. These tools are the debut products of the MAI Superintelligence team formed in November 2025 under the leadership of Mustafa Suleiman, CEO of Microsoft AI. His ambitious goal is to create “humanistic superintelligence” and develop world-class models over the next five years, as he stated in a March internal memo.
The most revolutionary among the new products is MAI-Transcribe-1, a model for converting speech into text. It demonstrates a record low error rate in 25 languages on the FLEURS benchmark (3.8% on average). According to the developers, the tool outperforms Whisper-large-v3 by OpenAI in all tested languages, outperforms Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash in 22 cases and ElevenLabs’ Scribe v2 in 15. The model is 2.5 times faster than the previous Azure Fast service, costs $0.36 per hour of audio, and was created by a team of only 10 specialists. Complementing this cycle is MAI-Voice-1, a speech generation system that can create a minute of realistic audio in less than a second on a single GPU, supporting voice cloning from a short sample.
Together, these technologies allow customers to build complete voice pipelines exclusively on Microsoft infrastructure without any dependence on OpenAI developments. In March, the third model, MAI-Image-2, was already ranked third in Arena.ai’s ranking of image generators, behind only Google and OpenAI products. It was created with the participation of professional visualizers, and one of the first major partners was the WPP marketing group.
The strategic implications of these releases are much more important than technical indicators. Until September 2025, the partnership agreement effectively tied Microsoft’s hands in the development of general AI, but the new memorandum changed the situation dramatically. Although Microsoft retained the rights to license OpenAI developments until 2032 and received new cloud contracts worth $250 billion, the main achievement was the freedom to create its own competitive models. Personnel changes also confirm this course: in March, Jacob Andreu took over as head of Copilot, freeing Suleiman from day-to-day product management to focus on superintelligence. In addition, Ali Farhadi, the former head of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, joined the team.
For OpenAI, such investor activity creates a challenging situation. Although the companies remain closely connected through cloud infrastructure and the shared Foundry platform, their paths are increasingly crossing in the fight for the same commercial customers.
OpenAI’s fierce $110 billion fundraising from SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Amazon confirms its desire for independence. The AI market is rapidly fragmenting: Anthropic, valued at $380billion, is becoming the third powerful force, and Google is constantly updating Gemini. The days when Microsoft was just a distribution channel for OpenAI are over.
With a base of more than 80 thousand corporate customers, Microsoft Foundry allows the company to offer integrated proprietary solutions instead of third-party products. Mustafa Suleyman predicts the emergence of full-fledged, advanced language models within two years, but Microsoft has already laid the foundation for a multimodal toolkit. Although the $13billion partnership is not terminated, its initial logic about the indispensability of OpenAI for Microsoft is consistently destroyed by each new release of the corporation’s own models.
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