NEW YORK, March 3, 2026, 16:22 EST — After-hours
- Microsoft shares were last up about 1.3% after the close, bucking a weak tape.
- OpenAI’s Pentagon contract changes and U.S. agencies’ shift away from Anthropic kept attention on AI adoption and guardrails.
- Traders are watching a Morgan Stanley conference appearance and Friday’s U.S. jobs report for the next push.
Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) shares were up about 1.3% at $403.82 in after-hours trading on Tuesday, after a volatile day that took the stock as low as $389.70 and as high as $406.66. That values the software maker at roughly $3.6 trillion.
The bounce mattered because the broader market was still digesting a fresh jolt of geopolitical risk and what it can do to inflation. “Investors are growing anxious about the duration of the war and its impact on energy prices,” Joseph Tanious, chief investment strategist at Northern Trust Asset Management, said. 1
Oil is the problem. U.S. crude settled up 4.7% at $74.56 a barrel and Brent ended at $81.40, Reuters reported, the kind of move that can spill into rate expectations and valuation math for big tech. 2
AI headlines also landed in the middle of it. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said the company is “working” with the U.S. Department of Defense to amend their agreement and “make our principles very clear,” including language around limits on use by intelligence agencies. 3
A day earlier, three U.S. cabinet agencies moved to stop using Anthropic’s products, with the State Department switching the model behind its StateChat bot to OpenAI. “For now, StateChat will use GPT4.1 from OpenAI,” a memo seen by Reuters said. 4
For Microsoft, a major backer of OpenAI, government adoption is a reminder that the AI race is not just product demos. It is contracts, compute and who gets picked when agencies standardize on a model. Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com back Anthropic, and both also compete with Microsoft in cloud infrastructure.
The market still has a second, quieter debate running underneath: how fast the spending line is rising. On Microsoft’s Jan. 28 earnings call, Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss told executives investors were worried that “CapEx is growing faster than we expected,” and questioned the “ROI” — return on investment — from that buildout. (Capex is capital spending on long-lived assets such as data centers.) 5
But there is a downside path. If oil stays high and rate-cut hopes get pushed out, rich valuations can compress fast, even for cash-heavy mega-caps. And tougher guardrails around military AI use could mean slower rollouts, smaller projects, or more political noise around what “allowed” use looks like.
Investors will also be listening for any AI and cloud demand cues when Microsoft is slated to appear at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Wednesday, March 4 (9:15 a.m. PT), according to Microsoft’s investor site. 6
Beyond the company-specific calendar, Friday brings a macro test: the U.S. Employment Situation report for February is due March 6 at 8:30 a.m. ET, a release that can swing Treasury yields — and tech multiples — in a hurry. 7
