I don't think Microsoft ever had that restriction. They partnered with everyone already.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/18/microsoft-nvidia...

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deepseek-r1-is-now-av...

https://ai.azure.com/

Also Mistral e.g. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-and-mistral...

AFAICT they are just hedging their bets left and right still. Also feels like they are winning in the sense that despite pretty much all those products being roughly equivalent... they are still running on their cloud, Azure. So even though they seem unable to capture IP anymore, they are still managing to get paid for managing the infrastructure.

Are they getting paid in actual money? Or are the AI companies "paying" their infrastructure bills with IOU/equity.

Those companies are so advanced they get paid in the promise of future tokens. /$

They had it till October: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter...

Yeah my bad, I was misremembering, it was about investing in others and pursuing its own "AGI" efforts. But even those conditions were updated over the last two years, hence the small investment in Anthropic last year.

I think it was a lot less restrictive, as far as I understood, the only limit was Microsoft not being allowed to launch competing Microsoft-developed LLMs.