# AI News Digest - 2026-07-08

1. Microsoft replaced OpenAI and Anthropic models with its own MAI models in products including Excel and Outlook as part of a cost-cutting initiative, routing tens of thousands of weekly queries through MAI and with AI chief Mustafa Suleyman stating an aim to eliminate reliance on external models.

2. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was reported to have discussed giving the US government a 5% stake in OpenAI; based on the company's post‑March funding valuation that stake was estimated at about $42.6 billion, which equated to roughly $320 per American household if distributed equally.

3. Cohere released Transcribe Arabic, an open-source 2-billion-parameter speech-recognition model for Arabic that the company said outperformed Whisper and OmniASR on dialects, code-switching, and bilingual Arabic–English speech, and made the model available on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license.

4. Anthropic rolled out its Claude Cowork AI agent to mobile and web after it had been limited to the desktop app, enabling the agent to continue working in the background and notify users on their phones when decisions were required.

# References

1. [https://the-decoder.com/copilot-goes-cheap-as-microsoft-phases-out-openai-and-anthropic-models-to-cut-costs/](https://the-decoder.com/copilot-goes-cheap-as-microsoft-phases-out-openai-and-anthropic-models-to-cut-costs/)

[Copilot goes cheap as Microsoft phases out OpenAI and Anthropic models to cut costs](https://the-decoder.com/copilot-goes-cheap-as-microsoft-phases-out-openai-and-anthropic-models-to-cut-costs/)

1. [https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/06/1140176/your-familys-300-stake-in-openai/](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/06/1140176/your-familys-300-stake-in-openai/)

[Your family’s $300 stake in OpenAI](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/06/1140176/your-familys-300-stake-in-openai/)

1. [https://the-decoder.com/cohere-transcribe-arabic-is-an-open-source-model-built-for-arabics-toughest-transcription-problems/](https://the-decoder.com/cohere-transcribe-arabic-is-an-open-source-model-built-for-arabics-toughest-transcription-problems/)

[Cohere Transcribe Arabic is an open-source model built for Arabic's toughest transcription problems](https://the-decoder.com/cohere-transcribe-arabic-is-an-open-source-model-built-for-arabics-toughest-transcription-problems/)

1. [https://the-decoder.com/anthropics-claude-cowork-ai-agent-is-now-available-on-mobile-and-web/](https://the-decoder.com/anthropics-claude-cowork-ai-agent-is-now-available-on-mobile-and-web/)

[Anthropic's Claude Cowork AI agent is now available on mobile and web](https://the-decoder.com/anthropics-claude-cowork-ai-agent-is-now-available-on-mobile-and-web/)

For the site tree, see the [root Markdown](https://ixtj.dev/.md).