Microsoft is developing internal artificial intelligence reasoning models to rival OpenAI and potentially offer them to developers, as reported by The Information on Friday. The Redmond, Washington-based company, known for backing OpenAI, has started testing models from xAI, Meta, and DeepSeek as potential alternatives in Copilot. Microsoft aims to lessen its reliance on ChatGPT, diversify their technology, and lower costs. Their new models, referred to as MAI, are performing impressively on benchmarks, rivaling those from OpenAI and Anthropic. The team is also training reasoning models using chain-of-thought techniques to compete directly with OpenAI. They are considering releasing the MAI models as an API later this year for developers to incorporate into their applications. Microsoft and OpenAI have not yet commented on the matter.