I don't think Microsoft ever had that restriction. They partnered with everyone already.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/18/microsoft-nvidia...
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deepseek-r1-is-now-av...
They had it till October: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter...
Yeah my bad, I was misremembering, it was about investing in others and pursuing its own "AGI" efforts. But even those conditions were updated over the last two years, hence the small investment in Anthropic last year.
Also Mistral e.g. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-and-mistral...
AFAICT they are just hedging their bets left and right still. Also feels like they are winning in the sense that despite pretty much all those products being roughly equivalent... they are still running on their cloud, Azure. So even though they seem unable to capture IP anymore, they are still managing to get paid for managing the infrastructure.