The U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) antitrust investigation into Microsoft has expanded to encompass how the company bundles its Copilot AI assistant with Microsoft 365 and GitHub, according to a June 2 report from The Verge. Investigators are gathering information on Microsoft’s commercial agreements, licensing arrangements, and product interoperability. Since its launch in late 2024, the investigation has evolved from initial inquiries into a formal probe with mandatory information disclosure requirements. The FTC has issued civil investigative demands to Microsoft and at least eight competitors—including AWS, Google Cloud, and Salesforce—requesting internal documents on Azure licensing fee structures, the technical integration of AI models with Windows 11 and Office 365, and how Microsoft uses bundled security software, Windows, and Office products to lock users into the Azure ecosystem. The core allegation is that Microsoft is leveraging its dominance in the enterprise productivity software market to create economic or technical barriers that make it difficult for businesses to choose competing cloud platforms, potentially violating the FTC Act.
The latest expansion of the probe follows a series of formal complaints from European cloud providers and U.S. software vendors, who accuse Microsoft of effectively imposing a “departure tax” on businesses seeking to migrate workloads out of Azure. During Salesforce’s fourth-quarter earnings call in 2026, co-CEO Marc Benioff specifically stated that enterprise customers reported Microsoft tying contract renewals to bundled Copilot purchases, calling the practice “not competition, but coercion.” Salesforce has since submitted testimony to the FTC. The FTC is also reviewing Microsoft’s strategic partnership with OpenAI: Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI, holds exclusive licensing rights to its flagship models, and exclusively hosts all of OpenAI’s compute workloads via Azure. Investigators believe this arrangement may deprive competing cloud providers of access to top-tier AI models. Sources say the FTC could file a formal complaint as early as mid-2026, and if the allegations are upheld, potential remedies could include forcing Microsoft to unbundle Copilot from Microsoft 365, prohibiting Windows from offering exclusive advantages to Azure, and requiring publicly auditable licensing rules applicable to all cloud vendors.