Elon Musk’s Grok chatbots are now available in Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry. This means that developers can now build, test, and deploy applications powered by Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini within the AI development platform.
Microsoft will run the Grok models on its Azure cloud infrastructure and will bill customers for their usage, with pricing starting at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. However, the Grok models will be available to try for free until early June.
The announcement was made at Microsoft’s Build developer conference on Monday, and was notable given Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. Musk founded xAI, the startup behind Grok, but he has also been locked in a feud with OpenAI since stepping down from its board in the late 2010s, citing disagreements over its leadership direction.
Microsoft’s association with Musk might strain its relationship with OpenAI
A legal battle between Musk and OpenAI began in February 2024 when the billionaire alleged the company had strayed from its founding mission as a nonprofit. While that lawsuit was later withdrawn, Musk filed a revised complaint reiterating the same core allegations in August 2024.
In February 2025, an investment consortium led by Musk placed a bid of $97.4 billion acquisition offer for OpenAI. The buyout was expeditiously rejected by OpenAI’s board of directors, which countersued in April, alleging that Musk’s proposal was part of a broader campaign of harassment to undermine the organisation.
SEE: OpenAI Backtracks, Says Nonprofit Will Retain Control
Meanwhile, Microsoft has continued strengthening its partnership with OpenAI, beginning in 2019 with a $1 billion investment in exchange for an exclusive license to commercialise the core GPT models. This was extended in January 2023 with a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI which made Azure its exclusive cloud provider.
Microsoft is collecting AI partnerships for its Azure AI Foundry
While OpenAI must work exclusively with Microsoft when it comes to cloud hosting and model licensing, Redmond has been forging partnerships with several competitors. It has struck non-exclusive licensing deals with Inflection AI and Mistral AI, and Azure AI Foundry features hundreds of foundation models from the likes of Meta, DeepSeek, NVIDIA, Cohere, and Hugging Face. The broader the model selection, the more attractive the platform becomes to businesses and developers.
“The addition of xAI’s Grok 3 underscores Microsoft’s commitment to support an open, diverse AI ecosystem, rather than relying on a single model provider,” Vaidyaraman Sambasivam, Azure AI’s partner head of product, said in a blog post. “Grok 3’s arrival on Azure AI Foundry Models is a testament to that vision, bringing a fresh new model into the fold and expanding the toolkit available to developers.”
At the Build conference, Microsoft also announced that Windows 11 will now natively support Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to data repositories. Microsoft aims to turn the operating system into what it calls an “agentic” platform, one where AI agents can help users carry out tasks across apps, files, and services without needing manual inputs.
Grok’s shaky reputation could leave Microsoft regretting the partnership
The rivalry between OpenAI and Musk isn’t the only reason Microsoft’s association with the Grok models is surprising. Grok has faced criticism for its mixed performance, raising questions about its readiness for enterprise use. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism recently found that Grok 3 generated inaccurate news citations in 94% of cases. It also often gets itself into political hot water, repeatedly referred to Musk, as well as US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, as misinformation spreaders.
Last week, Grok made unsolicited references to “white genocide” in South Africa, which xAI attributed to an “unauthorized modification” to its system prompt. The incident occurred after Trump authorised the admission of dozens of white South African refugees following claims of racial discrimination and violence, a move the South African president dismissed as based on a “completely false narrative,” according to the Associated Press.
