Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry today has Elon Musk’s Grok bots. Developers are now able to create, evaluation, and install software powered by Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini within the AI development program.
Microsoft will use the Grok models on its Azure cloud infrastructure and bill customers for their usage, with prices starting at$ 3 per million input tokens and$ 15 per million output tokens. The Grok designs will be accessible for free to try up until the beginning of June, though.
The announcement was made at Microsoft’s Build designer conference on Monday, and it stands out given Microsoft’s collaboration with OpenAI. Musk founded xAI, the company that preceded Grok, but he has also been at odds with OpenAI since stepping down from its table in the late 2010s, citing disputes over its management course.
Microsoft’s working relationship with Musk may stress its working partnership with OpenAI.
In February of this year, Musk and OpenAI engaged in legitimate action after the billionaire claimed the business had abandoned its original purpose as a volunteer. In August 2024, Musk filed a modified grievance that reiterated the same fundamental claims.
An investment consortium led by Musk submitted a bid for a$ 97.4 billion acquisition offer for OpenAI in February 2025. The board of directors of OpenAI swiftly rejected the merger, which countersued in April, alleging that Musk’s request was a part of a wider campaign of intimidation to destroy the organization.
Notice: Nonprofit Retain Controls, OpenAI Backtracks,
Microsoft has also increased its partnership with OpenAI, beginning in 2019 with a$ 1 billion investment in exchange for an exclusive license to market the core GPT models. With a multibillion dollar funding in OpenAI, which made Azure its unique cloud provider, this was extended in January 2023.
For its Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft is collecting AI alliances.
Redmond has been forging partnerships with many rivals, despite the fact that OpenAI may work specifically with Microsoft for sky hosting and design licensing. Azure AI Foundry features plenty of base designs from companies like Meta, DeepSeek, NVIDIA, Cohere, and Hugging Face, and it has entered non-exclusive licensing agreements with Tone AI and Mistral AI. The more diverse the concept options, the more appealing the system becomes to developers and businesses.
Vaidyaraman Sambasivam, Azure AI’s spouse head of goods, stated in a blog post that the addition of xAI’s Grok 3 “underlines Microsoft’s commitment to help an empty, different AI habitat, rather than relying on a single unit provider. The release of Grok 3 on Azure AI Foundry Models, which introduces a brand-new type into the market and expands the kit for designers, is a testament to that perspective.
Microsoft also announced at the Build meeting that Windows 11 will now be able to use Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, an open-source regular for supporting AI programs to data repositories. Microsoft aims to transform the operating system into an “agentic” software, one where AI agents can assist people in carrying out tasks across programs, files, and services without needing human inputs.
Grok’s weak standing might cause Microsoft to regret the partnership.
Not just for the sake of it, OpenAI and Musk compete against one another in the OpenAI and Grok types. Greco’s effectiveness has drawn criticism, which raises questions about its suitability for business use. In 94 % of circumstances, Grok 3 was found to be false, according to the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. It frequently gets itself into social hot water because it frequently refers to J.D. Vance, Vice President of the United States, and US President Donald Trump as misconceptions peddlers.
Last year, Grok uninvited links to” white murder” in South Africa, which xAI attributed to an “unauthorized changes” of its system fast. According to the Associated Press, Trump authorized the admission of dozens of white South African refugees after they were accused of racial discrimination and violence, which the president of rejecting as based on a” completely false narrative.”
