Microsoft picks Claude's models for its Office AI

PLUS: Apple's new live translation AirPods and OpenAI backing 'Critterz'

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Gen AI Art
September 11, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

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Microsoft is making a major move by diversifying its AI providers, reportedly integrating Anthropic's Claude models into its Office 365 suite. This marks a notable shift from the company's heavy reliance on OpenAI.

The decision comes as internal tests reportedly showed Claude outperforming GPT models for specific productivity functions. With the AI battleground shifting from chatbots to tangible workflow gains, is this the start of a new 'best-tool-for-the-job' era in enterprise AI?

Today in AI:

  • Microsoft bets on Claude for Office AI

  • Apple’s live translation AirPods

  • OpenAI’s push into Hollywood filmmaking

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What’s new? Microsoft is reportedly integrating Anthropic's Claude models into Office 365, marking a significant move to diversify its AI providers beyond OpenAI.

What matters?

  • The shift comes as Microsoft found Claude’s models to perform better than GPT-5 for specific productivity tasks like financial functions and creating presentations.

  • Coinciding with this news, Anthropic announced a major update allowing users to directly create and edit files like Excel sheets, PowerPoints, and PDFs inside its chat interface.

  • This development intensifies the competition in the AI productivity space, putting direct pressure on OpenAI's own agent-like features and creating a more integrated workflow for professionals.

Why it matters?

This signals a shift from standalone chatbots to deeply integrated AI assistants that can manipulate the files you use daily. The battle for AI supremacy is moving from conversational ability to tangible productivity gains inside the apps you already use.

What’s new? At its latest hardware event, Apple announced its new AirPods Pro 3, which will use on-device AI to provide real-time translation for conversations in different languages.

What matters?

  • The new feature leverages on-device processing, which means translations happen directly on the earbuds for improved privacy and speed.

  • Beyond translation, the $249 earbuds also add new health capabilities like heart rate tracking and feature improved noise cancellation.

  • This announcement stood out as the most significant AI update from Apple's event, with other product reveals featuring only minor AI-powered tweaks.

Why it matters?

This move brings a long-imagined sci-fi concept into a mainstream consumer product, setting a new standard for personal AI assistants. Integrating powerful AI into everyday wearables signals a major shift in how we will interact with technology and each other.

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What’s new? OpenAI is backing 'Critterz,' a feature-length animated film made with its own AI tools, to demonstrate that AI can produce movies faster and cheaper than traditional studios.

What matters?

  • The project aims to finish in just nine months with a $30M budget, a stark contrast to traditional animations like Disney's "Tangled," which took multiple years and over $200M.

  • It's not purely AI; the process involves human artists creating sketches that are then animated using GPT-5 and DALL-E, positioning the film as a high-profile showcase for OpenAI's creative tools.

  • The team faces an uphill battle with critics, as the original 2023 Critterz short was poorly received, adding pressure for the feature film to impress at its 2026 Cannes debut.

Why it matters?

This project is a real-world test of AI’s role in large-scale creative productions, moving beyond simple generation tasks. Its success or failure will signal how ready generative AI is to become a core tool in Hollywood's pipeline.

Everything else in AI

NVIDIA unveiled Rubin CPX, a new GPU designed to boost performance for massive, million-token context workloads like video creation and software development, slated for a late 2026 release.

Mistral raised roughly $2 billion at a $13 billion valuation in a funding round led by chip-making supplier ASML to accelerate its technological progress.

Baidu launched ERNIE X1.1, a new reasoning model that it claims nears GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro performance on key benchmarks with a significant reduction in hallucinations.

Eli Lilly announced the release of TuneLab, an AI drug discovery platform trained on its proprietary research data that will be made available to other biotechnology companies.

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