The AI War You’re Not Hearing About

OpenAI and Microsoft are supposed to be partners. Behind closed doors? It's getting ugly.

We obtained internal emails from Microsoft's sales leadership instructing staff to pitch directly against OpenAI's new Frontier product, a platform that allows businesses to manage AI "digital coworkers." Microsoft is trying to relegate OpenAI to the role of a model provider, not a platform competitor.

This isn't speculation. These are primary sources telling a story that reshapes how you should think about the AI stack.

Meanwhile, the agent startup wave is accelerating:

• Applied Compute, founded by former OpenAI researchers, is raising at a $1.3 billion valuation, building reinforcement-learning agents for tasks like legal contract correction.
• Elorian, from ex-Google DeepMind and Apple researchers, is raising $50 million for "visual reasoning" agents that can interpret images and video.
• OpenHands, an open-source coding agent, raised $19 million to take on Cursor and the closed-source establishment.

If you're making decisions about AI — where to invest time, money, or your career — you need reporting built on primary sources, not headlines. You need The Information.

P.S. Our coverage of Microsoft vs. OpenAI has been cited by every major news organization—weeks after we published it. Be the person who reads it first.