This is Microsoft subsidizing Claude inference costs -- if you look at how they charge models against your allotment, Gemini, GPT-5 and Claude 4 Sonnet all cost the same, despite Claude 4 Sonnet being more expensive than the other two. Not really sure I understand the economics here, especially since there's not really a clear winner between GPT-5 and Claude 4 Sonnet for coding (if anything I think GPT-5 puts up a better showing).

"Sonnet being more expensive than the other two" -> you mean based on public pricing? Microsoft will not be paying retail prices for this.

I think copilot is very aggressive on tokens and context size. That is how I guess the economy works for them.

It might be that they pay less for anthropic depending how many tokens are generated by each model: total cost is token cost times number of tokens. I haven't checked gpt5, but it is not impossible that price wise they might be very comparable if you account for reasoning tokens used.

> I think GPT-5 puts up a better showing

Would the more casual Copilot audience be OK with gpt-5-high - the model that many say is better than Sonnet - taking significantly longer to respond? Potentially minutes longer. A faster model can make sense as a default

> Not really sure I understand the economics here

There is nothing to understand. The point of such subsidies is to turn OPEX into a green line on the stock market.

Especially as Microsoft is currently also in a fight with OpenAI.