Microsoft Favors Anthropic over OpenAI for Visual Studio Code

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anthropic didn't make the cut in our evaluation. 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

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

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

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).