Microsoft considers DeepSeek to cut enterprise AI costs

Microsoft is changing how it charges for Copilot Cowork, moving from a fixed fee to pay-as-you-go based on compute usage. This lets companies pay only for what they use. Microsoft is also looking at using a fine-tuned version of DeepSeek V4 or another open-source model to replace current models from Anthropic and OpenAI. This could lower costs a lot. For example, Anthropic's Fable 5 charges $50 per million tokens, while DeepSeek V4 Pro charges just $0.87 per million tokens (with a permanent 75% discount). Microsoft says the new model will run fully on Azure, keeping customer data secure and compliant.