Elon Musk’s Grok chatbots are actually accessible in Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry. Which means that builders can now construct, take a look at, and deploy purposes powered by Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini inside the AI growth platform.
Microsoft will run the Grok fashions on its Azure cloud infrastructure and can invoice clients for his or her utilization, with pricing beginning at $3 per million enter tokens and $15 per million output tokens. Nevertheless, the Grok fashions can be accessible to strive free of charge till early June.
The announcement was made at Microsoft’s Construct developer convention on Monday, and was notable given Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. Musk based xAI, the startup behind Grok, however he has additionally been locked in a feud with OpenAI since stepping down from its board within the late 2010s, citing disagreements over its management route.
Microsoft’s affiliation with Musk would possibly pressure its relationship with OpenAI
A authorized battle between Musk and OpenAI started in February 2024 when the billionaire alleged the corporate had strayed from its founding mission as a nonprofit. Whereas that lawsuit was later withdrawn, Musk filed a revised grievance reiterating the identical core allegations in August 2024.
In February 2025, an funding consortium led by Musk positioned a bid of $97.4 billion acquisition supply for OpenAI. The buyout was expeditiously rejected by OpenAI’s board of administrators, which countersued in April, alleging that Musk’s proposal was a part of a broader marketing campaign of harassment to undermine the organisation.
SEE: OpenAI Backtracks, Says Nonprofit Will Retain Management
In the meantime, Microsoft has continued strengthening its partnership with OpenAI, starting in 2019 with a $1 billion funding in trade for an unique license to commercialise the core GPT fashions. This was prolonged in January 2023 with a multibillion-dollar funding in OpenAI which made Azure its unique cloud supplier.
Microsoft is amassing AI partnerships for its Azure AI Foundry
Whereas OpenAI should work solely with Microsoft in terms of cloud internet hosting and mannequin licensing, Redmond has been forging partnerships with a number of opponents. It has struck non-exclusive licensing offers with Inflection AI and Mistral AI, and Azure AI Foundry options lots of of basis fashions from the likes of Meta, DeepSeek, NVIDIA, Cohere, and Hugging Face. The broader the mannequin choice, the extra enticing the platform turns into to companies and builders.
“The addition of xAI’s Grok 3 underscores Microsoft’s dedication to assist an open, numerous AI ecosystem, fairly than counting on a single mannequin supplier,” Vaidyaraman Sambasivam, Azure AI’s associate head of product, stated in a weblog submit. “Grok 3’s arrival on Azure AI Foundry Fashions is a testomony to that imaginative and prescient, bringing a recent new mannequin into the fold and increasing the toolkit accessible to builders.”
On the Construct convention, Microsoft additionally introduced that Home windows 11 will now natively assist Anthropic’s Mannequin Context Protocol, an open-source commonplace for connecting AI purposes to information repositories. Microsoft goals to show the working system into what it calls an “agentic” platform, one the place AI brokers may also help customers perform duties throughout apps, recordsdata, and providers with no need handbook inputs.
Grok’s shaky status may depart Microsoft regretting the partnership
The rivalry between OpenAI and Musk isn’t the one motive Microsoft’s affiliation with the Grok fashions is stunning. Grok has confronted criticism for its blended efficiency, elevating questions on its readiness for enterprise use. The Tow Middle for Digital Journalism just lately discovered that Grok 3 generated inaccurate information citations in 94% of circumstances. It additionally usually will get itself into political scorching water, repeatedly referred to Musk, in addition to US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, as misinformation spreaders.
Final week, Grok made unsolicited references to “white genocide” in South Africa, which xAI attributed to an “unauthorized modification” to its system immediate. The incident occurred after Trump authorised the admission of dozens of white South African refugees following claims of racial discrimination and violence, a transfer the South African president dismissed as based mostly on a “fully false narrative,” in accordance with the Related Press.