UK CMA Probes Microsoft’s Grip on 20M Copilot Users [2026]

The UK’s top competition watchdog moved this week to put Microsoft’s business software empire under formal scrutiny, proposing to designate the company with strategic market status (SMS) across the suite of tools that run most of Britain’s offices. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced the proposed decision on October 16, 2026, five months after opening its investigation, and the move could reshape how companies license, bundle and sell everything from Word and Excel to Copilot, the AI assistant Microsoft has wired into nearly every corner of its product line.