Microsoft Launches Copilot Cowork Built on Anthropic's Tech and New E7 Bundle for Enterprise AI Agents

Summary

Microsoft announced "Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot," a set of new products and capabilities aimed at enterprise AI agents. The announcement centers on three main elements: Copilot Cowork, built in close collaboration with Anthropic on top of the Claude Cowork technology; Agent 365, an orchestration and governance platform for agents; and the new Microsoft 365 E7 Frontier Worker Suite.

The initiative comes amid mounting competitive pressure — from companies like Salesforce, from OpenAI, and from Anthropic itself, a strategic Microsoft investment — as well as investor concerns about the impact of AI agents on traditional SaaS software revenues. Microsoft's shares have fallen more than 14% since Anthropic launched Claude Cowork in mid-January.

In practice

Copilot Cowork is the centerpiece of the announcement. It is a feature designed to handle long-running, multi-step tasks autonomously — for example, preparing for a customer meeting from a single request, which could include assembling a presentation, pulling together financials, emailing the team, and scheduling prep time.

According to Jared Spataro, Microsoft's CMO for AI at Work, Copilot Cowork uses Anthropic's Claude model for reasoning and the same "agentic harness" — the system that allows the AI model to use other software tools and the guardrails around how it functions — as Anthropic's Claude Cowork. The key difference lies in deployment: Copilot Cowork runs in the cloud within the customer's Microsoft 365 tenant, placing it under Microsoft's enterprise data protection and integrating it with what Microsoft calls "Work IQ" — an intelligence layer drawn from a user's emails, files, documents, meetings, and chats.

Anthropic's Claude Cowork, by contrast, runs locally on the user's device. Spataro described Anthropic's offering as "a fantastic tool" but one with "limitations" in a corporate environment, noting it lacks access to cloud-based enterprise data and raises security concerns when deployed at scale.

Copilot Cowork is currently being piloted with select customers and will become available as a research preview in March through the new Frontier Worker product suite.

Agent 365 — the control plane and orchestration platform for AI agents — will be generally available from May 1, priced at $15 per user per month. Microsoft revealed that in just two months of preview, tens of millions of agents had already appeared in the Agent 365 registry, and that internally the company has visibility into more than 500,000 agents, with usage concentrated in research, coding, sales intelligence, customer triage, and HR self-service. Spataro noted that the same management infrastructure used for human employees — tools like Entra, Defender, Purview, and Intune — is now being extended to manage AI agents as well.

The Microsoft 365 E7 Frontier Worker Suite, also available from May 1, is priced at $99 per user per month. The bundle combines Microsoft 365 E5 ($60), the Entra Suite ($12), Copilot ($30), and Agent 365 ($15) — components that would cost $117 if purchased separately.

Microsoft also announced that Anthropic's Claude model is now available across the full Copilot Chat experience, not just in the Researcher and Excel features where it was previously offered.

Context

Microsoft's relationship with Anthropic is simultaneously strategic and competitive: Microsoft is an investor in Anthropic, yet the company competes directly for the same enterprise customer base. The same dynamic applies to OpenAI, Microsoft's long-standing partner. Spataro summarized Microsoft's stance on model proliferation: "Every 60 days at least, there's a new king of the hill. There's so much demand for a platform that doesn't feel like I have to skip over to the next vendor."

On pricing models, many analysts have speculated that AI agents will eventually force software companies to abandon per-user billing in favor of consumption-based models. Microsoft is, for now, sticking with per-user pricing: according to Spataro, "customers want per user right now. Doesn't mean they always will, but that's what they want currently."

The figures presented by the company point to significant growth: Copilot paid seats have grown more than 160% year over year, daily active usage is up tenfold, and the number of customers deploying Copilot at significant scale — more than 35,000 seats — has tripled. 90% of the Fortune 500 now use Copilot, and 80% are using Microsoft AI agents in some capacity.

Why it matters

• Copilot Cowork marks a declared shift for Microsoft: from assistance to "real doing," with autonomous agents embedded in the existing enterprise ecosystem.
• Integrating Anthropic's Claude across the full Copilot Chat experience reinforces Microsoft's multi-model approach, moving away from exclusive dependence on OpenAI.
• Agent 365 introduces governance infrastructure for AI agents — with security, monitoring, and management — in a market that still lacks consolidated standards.
• The E7 at $99 signals how Microsoft intends to capture value in the agent era: not by cannibalizing existing SaaS, but by bundling it with new agentic capabilities.