Microsoft's Copilot Cowork shifts to usage-based billing, may add DeepSeek

Microsoft is moving Copilot Cowork off flat-rate pricing to usage-based billing, Copilot EVP Charles Lamanna told Axios, citing power users running hundreds of tasks weekly. Cowork is built on Anthropic's Claude technology, which burns tokens fast through agentic reasoning. Microsoft is also evaluating a self-hosted, fine-tuned version of DeepSeek V4 as a cheaper option. The model would run entirely on Azure with safeguards against bias and would keep customer data inside Microsoft's cloud. A final decision is due in coming weeks, mirroring Microsoft's recent shift of GitHub Copilot to token billing.

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