Microsoft appears to be preparing its sales team to be more competitive with the other major players in the artificial intelligence industry.

In an internal meeting on Tuesday, company executives outlined a plan for vendors to negatively compare artificial intelligence products from companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic to their own, according to a new Bloomberg report. The meeting, billed as a strategy session for the new fiscal year, reportedly relied heavily on comparing the efficiency and profitability of Microsoft’s internal models with those of its rivals.

“Everyone else is selling parts; we’re selling the entire end-to-end system. That’s the story we all need to go out and tell in FY27,” executive vice president Jay Parikh reportedly told the room.

Executive VP Jacob Andreou reportedly went further and gave a presentation comparing Copilot directly to Anthropic’s chatbot Claude. According to Bloomberg, Andreou noted that when it came to performance within Microsoft’s office applications, Anthropic’s model was “slower and less accurate, and lacked proper security integrations,” Bloomberg writes.

TechCrunch has reached out to Microsoft and Anthropic for comment and will update this story if we hear back from either team.

For a company to train its sales team on how to criticize its competitors is not particularly surprising. What’s more notable is who Microsoft is targeting now: the same companies it has long relied on for the AI ​​models that power its own products.

It’s just the latest step in that direction. A report earlier this month found that Microsoft has been shifting the OpenAI and Anthropic models of flagship apps like Word and Excel in favor of its own, a cost-cutting measure, according to that report.

There was a time when Microsoft and OpenAI were joined at the hip. The two companies signed a unique agreement years ago in which Microsoft provided capital and computing to OpenAI while allowing Microsoft to enjoy exclusive access to OpenAI’s API and models. The companies amended the partnership in April, removing the exclusivity clause and authorizing OpenAI to sell to Microsoft’s competitors.

That revised relationship can help explain the sales team’s new pitch. Microsoft has been battling a suboptimal stock outlook for the past year, as investors question the company’s huge spending on developing its artificial intelligence business. Talking about how competitive those products really are is probably an attempt to calm those waters and build confidence in Microsoft’s long-term AI plan.