Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella confirmed Thursday that early customers had already begun using OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-6 Astra AI model through the Azure cloud platform.
“Excited to see early customers already using Astra on Azure,” Nadella said in an X post, shortly after Microsoft announced the model had begun rolling out through the Microsoft Foundry Limited Access Program.
Microsoft said availability will expand to additional participating customers over the coming days, signaling a controlled but accelerating rollout of the platform’s latest AI capabilities.
The announcement underscores Azure’s central role in distributing OpenAI’s most advanced models to enterprise customers at scale.
OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on Thursday, describing it as its most capable model for complex, end-to-end work, built to go well beyond conventional chatbot interactions.
Astra is designed to reason through multi-step problems, create plans, use tools, and execute tasks across software applications, including a notable computer-use capability that lets the model interact with browsers and professional software on a user’s behalf.
The model can also create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations based on templates and instructions, broadening its potential appeal for enterprise workflows.
OpenAI is initially making Astra available to a restricted group of organizations, with plans to expand access through its API and paid ChatGPT plans going forward.
The Astra news arrives as Microsoft stock heads for a weekly decline, with shares down approximately 0.7% for the week and off 0.2% in overnight trading ahead of Friday’s session.
Microsoft shares have largely moved sideways in recent weeks and have underperformed the broader market in 2026, gaining just 6.5% year to date compared with a 13% advance in the S&P 500.
Earlier this week, Nadella sold over $43 million worth of Microsoft stock under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 trading plan, marking his first sale of the year, with trades executed on September 1 at per-share prices ranging between $497.69 and $505.76.
Executives routinely use 10b5-1 plans to sell shares on a pre-scheduled basis, and Nadella had adopted his current plan back in March.
Microsoft also made a significant change to its financial reporting structure this week, disclosing Azure unit sales figures publicly for the first time across the last eight quarters.
Total annual sales for Azure topped $100 billion during the most recent fiscal year, up from $75 billion the prior year, with the unit generating $29.4 billion in the quarter ending June 30.
Retail sentiment for MSFT on Stocktwits was rated “bearish” as of early Friday, with one trader outlining a broader thesis: “Microsoft’s AI strategy isn’t ‘pick a winner.’ It’s three roads that all lead to the same place,” noting the company’s simultaneous investments in OpenAI and Anthropic, Azure compute fees, and its own MAI models, all layered on top of an existing enterprise customer base already using Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and GitHub.
