Both the CEO of Palantir and the CEO of Microsoft have recently criticized very strongly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Therefore it is no surprise that both companies are among the signatories.

The motivation of Palantir is very transparent, they have launched a product created in cooperation with NVIDIA, which is a turnkey system (Sovereign AI) that includes all hardware (i.e. a rack with servers full of NVIDIA GPUs) and all software needed by a company to run on its premises LLM inference and also training/fine tuning.

Thus the Palantir product competes with OpenAI and Anthropic and it benefits from the existence of open weights LLMs.

The motivation of Microsoft is more obscure for now, but because its criticism was very similar to that of Palantir, about how dangerous it is for corporations to delegate the processing of their AI needs to external entities like OpenAI and Anthropic, I assume that Microsoft is also going to propose an alternative to using remotely the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.

Unlike Palantir, Microsoft is not likely to suggest self-hosting on premises, but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.

> but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.

Yeah, Microsoft wants to sell Azure compute. They also want to sell their upcoming surface ultra hardware with the Nvidia chip in it. They preached hard on "unmetered intelligence" at this year's BUILD conference, went hard on local AI, and Azure Foundry, Windows Foundry Local, etc.

Copilot, both GH and M365, are also made to be model agnostic. Microsoft sells enterprise services and software, they'd prefer (I'm assuming) to not be locked in and dependent on any 1 or 2 model providers and would prefer plenty of options and competition in that space because they can just easily offer a model agnostic harness, integrated with the rest of their stack.