Microsoft Favors Anthropic over OpenAI for Visual Studio Code

https://www.theverge.com/report/778641/microsoft-visual-studio-code-anthropic-claude-4

by corvad • 10 months ago

213 99 10 months ago

verdverm• 10 months ago

Anthropic didn't make the cut in our evaluation (data usage concerns). They have also been the shadiest of the companies

They lost me when they expired my money and then tried to take more without asking

gigel82• 10 months ago

I don't think it's Microsoft that favors it. It's likely customers. Claude wipes the floor with all the GPTs in GitHub Copilot (in my experience).

piker• 10 months ago

In some ways it makes sense to pave the way for Claude to protect the brand of VS Code. On the other hand, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher since it seems like VS code was built as a loss-leader to sell Microsoft cloud products. Perhaps enterprise ChatGPT, co-pilot and GitHub can make up the difference even if the community tier favors Claude.

Edit: maybe Cursor forced this and Microsoft is taking its choice to open license VS code on the chin. Will be interesting to see the strategy with Visual Studio going forward.

paxys• 10 months ago

Claude was the gold standard for coding but I have had a lot of success with GPT-5. Nowadays I pretty much always default to GPT-5.

bwat49• 10 months ago

yeah I've been getting better results with codex (gpt5) vs claude

jbm• 10 months ago

Yeah, likewise. Claude has been going downhill recently for me, while Codex works great. I nearly cancelled my ChatGPT membership until they started providing codex, and now I'm considering if I want to use Pro again.

It's weird though because ChatGPT itself is not particularly better than it was before. Bringing down costs per token probably means they can do more reasoning before coding than Codex does.

Alifatisk• 10 months ago

Yup, GPT-5 took the throne of Sonnet

breakingcups• 10 months ago

How do you use GPT-5? I've wanted to try it from Cline, but to be allowed to use GPT-5 through the API I need to submit my biometrics to OpenAI and that's not happening.

kerpal2• 10 months ago

Claude/Anthropic is more focused on productivity (Coding, Spreadsheets, Reports). ChatGPT seems more focused on general-purpose LLM (Research, Cooking, Writing, Image Generation).

Makes sense that MS would partner with Anthropic since their tool-use for productivity (Claude Code) seems superior. I personally rarely code with ChatGPT, almost strictly Claude.

m_mueller2• 10 months ago

GPT-5 is pretty decent nowadays, but Claude 4 Sonnet is superior in most cases. GPT beats it in cost and usable context window when something quite complex comes up to plan top-down.

boredtofears2• 10 months ago

What I find interesting is how much opinions vary on this. Open a different thread and people will seem to have consensus on GPT or Gemini being superior.

Even the bench marks don’t seem all that helpful.

CharlieIsAHero• 10 months ago

What do you mean by usable context window? Sonnet 4 is 968k and gpt5 is 368k. Are you saying the context window on sonnet is useless?

pnathan• 10 months ago

I've been happy with Anthropic models. I also have been using the Google models more, with decent results. The Copilot/OpenAI models don't seem to be as good as a rule of thumb, can't explain exactly why.

Overall, I think Google has a better breadth of knowledge encoded, but Anthropic gets work done better.

dmurray• 10 months ago

Some people might be surprised that MS would pick the product with the best technological fit rather than the one they already have a deep business and financial relationship with.

Surely Microsoft's expertise these days is in cross-selling passable but not best-in-class products to enterprises who already pay for Microsoft products.

It says something about how they view the AI coding market, or perhaps the level of the gap between Anthropic and OpenAI here, that they've gone the other way.

dijit2• 10 months ago

They are right to be surprised.

Why is Azure popular? Not on its own merits, it's because there is a pre-existing relationship with Microsoft.

Why is Teams the most widely used chat tool? Certainly not because it's good.. it is, again, pre-existing business relationships.

Seems odd for a company that survives (perhaps even thrives) on these kinds of intertwined business reasons to, themselves, understand that they should go for merit instead.

thewebguyd• 10 months ago

It says something about how they view the AI coding market

I think Microsoft views models as a commodity and they'd rather lean into their strengths as a tool maker, so this is Microsoft putting themselves into a position to make tools around/for any AI/LLM model, not just ones they have a partnership with.

Honestly I think this sort of agnosticism around AI will work out well for them.

_fat_santa• 10 months ago

This has been largely my experience as well. Claude does way better with coding while ChatGPT does better with general questions.

bobbylarrybobby• 10 months ago

The new gpt-codex-* models are giving Claude Code a serious run for its money IMO. If OpenAI can figure out the Codex CLI UI (better permissions, more back and forth before executing) then I think they will have the better agentic coder.

airstrike• 10 months ago

Are there any open models that compete with Claude in its tool use capabilities for complex tasks?

Feels like an area where we could use more competition...

mnky9800n• 10 months ago

I like perplexity's deep research model which is based on deepseek i think. i use that for most kind of writing, discussion, research, etc. where I need some kind of feedback. Claude seems to go crazy sometimes when you ask it to do the same task. Whereas for coding, Claude Code is obviously better than everything else under the sun.

SparkyMcUnicorn• 10 months ago

I decided to give perplexity another try a few days ago, and it still seems to hallucinate things. Given the same exact tasks/prompts both Claude and Chatgpt got the facts correct.

jakderrida• 10 months ago

I'd argue that Anthropic still has a hard edge on creativity for things like emulating people's comments.

I've fed into several models my past reddit comments (with the comments it's responding to) and asked it to duplicate the style. Claude has always been the only thing that comes even close to original responses that even I think would be exactly my response, wording and all.

GPT or Gemini will just borrow snippets from the example text and just smoosh it together to make semi-coherent points. Scratch that. They're coherent, but they're just unmistakably not from me.

daft_pink2• 10 months ago

This needs that archive link that bypasses the paywall. I had to read it on my Apple News+ subscription to avoid the paywall.

bgarbiak• 10 months ago

https://archive.is/hO6YV

daft_pink2• 10 months ago

Thanks. Do I just enter the url into the top in this website to generate myself for future items?

glimshe2• 10 months ago

Anthropic doesn't allow me to use my phone number across my personal and business logins. I simply can't use Claude where I need it, even if I'm willing to pay. I don't understand why they add so much friction when everyone else just allows me to do work.

raldi• 10 months ago

When was the last time you tried?

glimshe2• 10 months ago

A month or so ago.

electric_muse• 10 months ago

This whole “real phone number is your access code to every service” trend is really frustrating.

I had the same experience recently with: - Ticketmaster - Docusign - Vercel

Probably a handful more I forgot.

I believe the main reason is because it prevents fraud.

But I see a deeper motive that phone numbers are more friction to change and therefore our “real” numbers become hard-to-change identity codes that can easily be used to pull tons of info about you.

You give them that number and they immediately can look up your name, addresses, age, and tons of other mined info that was connected to you. Probably credit score, household income, etc.

Phone numbers have tons of “metadata” you provide without really knowing it. Like how the Exif data in a photo may reveal a lot about your location and device.

derekdahmer3• 10 months ago

As someone who implemented phone verification at a company I worked for, it’s 100% for preventing spam signups intending to abuse free tiers. API companies can get huge volumes of fake signups from “multiplexers” who get around free tier limits by spreading their requests across multiple accounts.

anonym294• 10 months ago

Mandatory phone number registration does not and never has prevented fraud.

Plenty of free VOIP services exist, including SMS reception.

Even when the free service providers are manually blocklisted, one-time validations can be defeated with private numbers on real networks / providers for under a dollar per validation, and repeated ongoing validations can be performed with rented private numbers on real networks / providers for under ten dollars per month.

The rent-an-SMS services that enable this are accessible through a web interface that allows connections from tor, vpns, etc - there is no guarantee that the telecom provider's location records of the IMEI tied to that phone number is anywhere close to the end user's real geographic location, so this isn't even helpful for law enforcement purposes where they can subpoena telecom provider records.

This "phone number required" practice exists for one primary reason: for businesses to track non-fraudulent users, data mine their non-fraudulent users, and monetize the correlated personal information of non-fraudulent users without true informed consent (almost nobody reads ToS's, but many would object to these invasive practices if given a dialogue box that let them accept or decline the privacy infringements but still allowed the user to use the business' service either way).

Sometimes, they are also used for a secondary reason: to allow the business to cheap out on developer costs by cutting corners on proper, secure MFA validation. No need to implement modern, secure passkeys or RFC-compliant TOTP MFA, FIDO2, U2F when you can just put your users in harm's way by pretending that SMS is a secure channel, rather than easily compromised by even common criminals with SS7 attacks, which are not relegated to nation-state actors like they once were.

giancarlostoro4• 10 months ago

Sounds like you want a Google Voice Number or similar service, but now you're spending money for someone else's awful software, and in some cases, some places will flag your number if its google voice and outright refuse to let you in.

rs186• 10 months ago

...Like Claude. They don't allow you to use Google voice numbers for verification.

dathinab• 10 months ago

wait what do they need a phone number for???

criddell• 10 months ago

I think they do that to make it more difficult for one person to open multiple accounts. You can still do it, you just need another phone.

jiveturkey2• 10 months ago

get the cheapest possible business phone#. another line on your existing service is generally very cheap, and you can just cancel it after registration.

ChrisArchitect• 10 months ago

Actual post: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/09/15/autoModelSele...

bartalama• 10 months ago

Claude Sonnet 4 is the best for generating code for me so far, albeit needing some investment in instruction files and prompt files when using GitHub Copilot.

typpilol4• 10 months ago

Use the beast mode chat mode. I use it and it makes a world of difference

I tweaked mine a bit but still.

syspec• 10 months ago

What's beast mide, and how do I trigger it?

dawnerd• 10 months ago

Auto feels like a way for them to slightly push people towards paid models more. If they really favored Anthropic, claude would be the included free model, right?

mynameisvlad• 10 months ago

On their roadmap (it's in the linked blog post https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/09/15/autoModelSele...):

Let users on a free plan take advantage of the latest models through auto

It also describes how the auto selector works in more detail:

When using auto model selection, VS Code uses a variable model multiplier based on the automatically selected model. If you are a paid user, auto applies a 10% request discount. For example, if auto selects Sonnet 4, it will be counted as 0.9x of a premium request; if auto selects GPT-5-mini, this counts as 0x because the model is included for paid users. You can see which model and model multiplier are used by hovering over the chat response.

YmiYugy• 10 months ago

Personally I found gpt-5 to be a bit better than sonnet-4. At least in cursor. Claude is still more reliable and competent at tool calling, but I found gpt-5 to be better in token efficiency and a lot better at instruction following.

kranke155• 10 months ago

This seems to change every 6 months? Just my impression.

compacct27• 10 months ago

Or less!

cwyers2• 10 months ago

This is Microsoft subsidizing Claude inference costs -- if you look at how they charge models against your allotment, Gemini, GPT-5 and Claude 4 Sonnet all cost the same, despite Claude 4 Sonnet being more expensive than the other two. Not really sure I understand the economics here, especially since there's not really a clear winner between GPT-5 and Claude 4 Sonnet for coding (if anything I think GPT-5 puts up a better showing).

mattalex• 10 months ago

It might be that they pay less for anthropic depending how many tokens are generated by each model: total cost is token cost times number of tokens. I haven't checked gpt5, but it is not impossible that price wise they might be very comparable if you account for reasoning tokens used.

poslathian• 10 months ago

Is it possible that regardless of what they pay they think Anthropic is negative margin on it?

martinald• 10 months ago

"Sonnet being more expensive than the other two" -> you mean based on public pricing? Microsoft will not be paying retail prices for this.

cwyers2• 10 months ago

I'm sure they don't pay retail on GPT-5 either.

drewbitt• 10 months ago

I think GPT-5 puts up a better showing

Would the more casual Copilot audience be OK with gpt-5-high - the model that many say is better than Sonnet - taking significantly longer to respond? Potentially minutes longer. A faster model can make sense as a default

adonese• 10 months ago

I think copilot is very aggressive on tokens and context size. That is how I guess the economy works for them.

PhantomHour• 10 months ago

Not really sure I understand the economics here

There is nothing to understand. The point of such subsidies is to turn OPEX into a green line on the stock market.

Especially as Microsoft is currently also in a fight with OpenAI.

dev1ycan• 10 months ago

I use deepseek on the daily, the other day I tried to use claude and was surprised when after like 5 messages (had decent amount of code though) I got "limited"

alberth• 10 months ago

Embarrassingly dumb question ...

is Claude Code just a plug-in for an existing editor. Or it is the entire editor itself?

never_inline• 10 months ago

www.google.com

theshrike79• 10 months ago

Claude Code is a CLI tool with light integration with VS Code

andrewstuart• 10 months ago

ChatGPT seems to be really good at analysis but continues to be bad at coding.

It constantly loses existing code. It the end of an intense coding session you’ll find your 20 feature application now has 3 features. That alone makes it not worth using. I can’t be bothered constantly working to identify and prevent losing existing features.

It is however very powerful for doing debugging and diagnostics with throwaway code.

It’s also useful to analyse stuff with ChatGPT and give that to Gemini or Claude to do the coding.

starstripe• 10 months ago

Doesn't Microsoft own a lot of OpenAI? Did they sell?

aksss• 10 months ago

I have to say I prefer Claude for code and diagnosis. ChatGPT in CoPilot often replies with essentially, "these are the things I would be looking at if I wanted to troubleshoot this", to which my muttering frustration is, "yeah obviously - no sht - now do it.", whereas Claude just does it (e.g. looks through the code, provides analysis as to where the problem is or the nature of the problem, and returns a practical and immediately useful response). You could say that's a prompting problem (and you'd be right) but if Claude is lower drag than ChatGPT in this context and others, that's a value proposition.

However, I really do* prefer ChatGPT for generalized but as-applied conversation about architecture decisions, pros/cons of different approaches, patterns. Claude can do this too, but I do prefer ChatGPT for this.

frabonacci• 10 months ago

Microsoft has a dozen vertical Copilots to build, so picking the model with the best capability today makes sense. If Claude Code is stronger for dev productivity, using it in VS Code just raises the bar for everything else they ship

Fairburn• 10 months ago

o.0 interesting.

Microsoft Favors Anthropic over OpenAI for Visual Studio Code

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