Tom Warren | The Verge

Windows is back on the Microsoft menu

2026-06-05T10:04:10-04:00

I can’t remember the last time Microsoft kicked off a Build keynote with Windows front and center, but that’s exactly what CEO Satya Nadella did this week. Nadella didn’t address the issues Microsoft is trying to fix in Windows 11 but chose to woo the audience with Microsoft’s slick Surface RTX Spark Dev Kit instead, calling it a “dream machine.”

Nadella unveiled the new Surface hardware just days after Nvidia officially returned to Windows on Arm with its new RTX Spark chips. Both companies are talking up these chips as some kind of new beginning for PCs, and it’s clear that RTX Spark will drive local AI workloads in a way that Microsoft’s previous Copilot Plus PCs haven’t yet managed.

Build really drove home that message this week, with Windows positioned as an all-important part of Microsoft’s AI agent efforts. Microsoft’s original mission under Bill Gates was a computer on every desk and in every home, and Nadella reframed that as “unmetered intelligence on every desk and in every home” within a few minutes of his keynote beginning.

It set the stage for Microsoft and Nvidia to position their new Windows PCs as a potential solution for costly, usage-based pricing of cloud-based AI models. As local compute grows in capability, there’s a clear gap that Microsoft and Nvidia can fill with powerful hardware you actually own.

“I think we, as Microsoft, have the responsibility for building the best possible AI stack that we can on [Windows], and obviously drive the best AI stack that we can in the cloud,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with Notepad. Davuluri thinks that Microsoft is in a good position to capitalize on hybrid compute, where chips like the RTX Spark will handle a lot of local workloads and intelligently hand off to the cloud when they need something more powerful.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is even more bullish about local AI compute. He wants to turn PCs into devices that work for you, eliminating that idle time when PCs are switched off or you’re not using them. “In the future, if I need my laptop to do something, I just text it with WhatsApp,” said Huang earlier this week. “You don’t want to necessarily run everything in the cloud, because if you can run it locally, it’s free.”

Nadella seems to agree. “The amount of compute that there is at the edge is astounding,” he said during his Build keynote. “Every PC, if you sort of aggregate that, that’s a lot of compute power.”

That power is really on display with Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chips, which will come to a variety of creator-focused laptops and miniature PCs later this year. RTX Spark is capable of running a 120 billion parameter large language model locally, allowing many AI workloads to run without ever touching the cloud. That’s an appealing concept during a continued AI money squeeze for developers and consumers.

Microsoft is targeting its own Surface Laptop Ultra at developers and creators and pairing it with ongoing improvements to Windows 11 performance and developer-friendly additions. While Microsoft’s deeper embrace of Linux utilities inside Windows this week didn’t generate the same gleeful audience reaction as the Windows Terminal announcement in 2019, developers I’ve spoken to are excited by the Coreutils and WSL containers additions.

The Surface Laptop Ultra has also been generating some buzz, particularly among developers and power users. Microsoft isn’t quite positioning this as a mainstream premium laptop, but there’s certainly room for it to appeal far beyond developers. “I think you’ll see us do well when it comes to STEM applications, and CAD apps running on the platform, because they take advantage of the same characteristic patterns of high-performance compute,” explains Davuluri.

All of this renewed focus on Windows at Microsoft seemed impossible only six months ago. Davuluri responded to the pressure on Microsoft to improve Windows 11 by laying out a plan to focus on performance, reliability, and overall experiences in the OS just a couple of months ago. I got to see some of the performance improvements at Build this week, with side-by-side comparisons of the Start menu and taskbar loading faster. Microsoft is putting in a lot of effort to turn Windows 11 around and listen to feedback from a variety of users.

But I’ve been wondering why Microsoft doesn’t just jump to Windows 12. It seems easier to just admit defeat on Windows 11 and then position Windows 12 as the remedy. Microsoft has done this many times in the past, particularly with the releases of Windows 7 and Windows 10.

“There are a lot of considerations when you think about the versioning of an operating system itself, and I think for us, a lot of the core proposition with Windows 11, or quite frankly, with Windows 12, or any label we use, has to do with end users and how they use the product and the workflow that they’re in,” says Davuluri. “I think we are more focused on having the product experience be better in the context they’re using it, and that I think is the most important thing for us.”

While we might not be getting a Windows 12 anytime soon, I’m curious how this Windows exists in a world of AI agents. Microsoft has been clear that it sees Windows as a home for AI agents and workloads, but it also unveiled Project Solara this week, a new platform for agent-first devices. Microsoft demonstrated a smart employee key card that could run an agent capable of transcribing and recognizing real world objects, and it also showed a reference design for an Amazon Echo Show–like device with an AI agent. It’s clear that Microsoft wants to offer up a platform for dedicated AI devices of the future.

The big surprise is that Project Solara devices are powered by a version of Android, not Windows. Despite this, Davuluri expects to see Project Solara running on Windows devices too. “We are not hard bound to a device specific operating system,” says Davuluri. “You should imagine a world where Solara will be great on a bunch of platforms, including Windows, both Windows 11 locally and Windows 365 instances in the cloud.”

Whether the future of AI agents runs on Windows, Android, or something else may not ultimately matter right now. For the first time in years, Microsoft seems determined to make Windows central to that conversation either way. Build 2026 wasn’t about fixing Windows’ past problems, it was about convincing developers that Windows still has a significant role to play in AI’s future.

The pad

Microsoft and OpenAI broke up — now they’re ready to fight. Microsoft announced a slew of new or expanded AI initiatives at Build this week. MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft’s first reasoning model, was the main addition, along with six other new models focused on image, voice, transcription, and coding. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told me these models are part of a bigger effort to prove that Microsoft can become a top AI model creator.
A first look at Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface Dev Box. I got a chance to take a closer look at both the Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at Build this week. Microsoft laid on a miniature showcase, demonstrating just how bright the Laptop Ultra screen is, as well as the power of Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip. As is tradition at any Surface event, there was also a full breakdown of the components inside the Laptop Ultra. It’s impressive how much attention to detail there is inside, alongside the focus on repairability.
Microsoft’s next-gen quantum chip cuts timeline to useful quantum computing. Microsoft unveiled its latest Majorana 2 chip this week, which uses a new material stack that promises quantum computing much sooner. Microsoft is claiming that by switching from aluminum to lead it has improved the performance of qubits, a unit of information in quantum computing much like the binary bits that computers use today. Physicists were skeptical of Microsoft’s first claims with Majorana 1, so some are once again questioning the company’s target of useful quantum computing by 2029.
Microsoft Scout is a new AI personal assistant built on OpenClaw. Much like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, allowing businesses to assign a virtual assistant to employees to help with organizing calendars, expense reporting, email drafts, and much more. Microsoft is releasing a preview version of Scout in the form of a desktop app, but eventually the plan is to have a full Scout cloud service.
Microsoft could be the next Big Tech antitrust target. Microsoft has escaped antitrust action in the US for 25 years, but that might change soon. New civil investigative demands reveal that the Federal Trade Commission is looking at potentially exclusionary behavior around Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, as well as its role in the AI industry. Customers have complained that Microsoft’s 2019 changes to its licensing terms made it significantly more costly to run Windows software on infrastructure outside of Microsoft’s own Azure cloud service. The US isn’t the only country probing this issue. The European Commission, UK Competition and Markets Authority, and Japan Fair Trade Commission have been investigating Microsoft’s cloud services within the last year.
This extravagant gaming laptop could ruin other screens for you. Asus’ Strix Scar 18 has a 4K 240Hz display that has impressed my colleague Antonio G. Di Benedetto. The Mini LED panel has over 2,000 dimming zones and up to 1,600 nits of peak brightness in HDR mode, but when you disable the HDR mode you get access to a special feature called Extreme Low Motion Blur (ELMB). This allows the dimming zones to automatically divide the display into smaller horizontal bands of pixels, refreshing them row by row very quickly — much like a traditional CRT. This dramatically reduces motion blur, a great benefit for fast-paced video games.
Microsoft makes it more secure to run OpenClaw on Windows. Microsoft launched Microsoft Execution Containers this week, a policy-driven layer to make its OS more secure for things like OpenClaw on Windows. It’s going a step further too, allowing a companion app for OpenClaw to run contained on Windows PCs. It should stop AI agents like OpenClaw from deleting all your files. “You can totally run OpenClaw inside your company now,” says OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger.
Call of Duty: Warzone is dropping PS4 and Xbox One support later this year. Activision is planning to drop support for PS4 and Xbox One consoles in Call of Duty: Warzone later this year. Players will need to upgrade to a PS5 or Xbox Series S / X console to continue playing Call of Duty: Warzone once season 6 of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 concludes later this year. Although the news isn’t too surprising, the timing couldn’t be worse for Warzone players still holding on to older consoles. Both Microsoft and Sony have increased the prices of their consoles over the past year, with the PS5 and Xbox Series X now $150 more than their original $499 launch prices.
Microsoft is threatening legal action for disclosing exploits. Microsoft is feuding with a security researcher publicly posting vulnerabilities. Someone going by the name Nightmare Eclipse has been posting proof-of-concept exploit code, with some posts suggesting that they’re a disgruntled former employee. Microsoft’s response has angered the cybersecurity community, after the company suggested it plans to bring a criminal case against Nightmare Eclipse for failing to follow “proper coordination” in disclosing vulnerabilities.
Microsoft 365 Copilot gets a speed boost and cleaner design. Microsoft launched a revamped version of Microsoft 365 Copilot last week, complete with a cleaner design that the company claims loads twice as fast. The redesign is rolling out across desktop and mobile and enables Copilot to present you with tools and controls based on your prompt, instead of showing a bunch of options at once. It’s part of a bigger effort to improve Copilot’s usefulness for businesses, while Microsoft continues to remove the AI assistant from parts of Windows.

I’m always keen to hear from readers, so please drop a comment here, or you can reach me at notepad@theverge.com if you want to discuss anything else. If you’ve heard about any of Microsoft’s secret projects, you can reach me via email at notepad@theverge.com or speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01. I’m also tomwarren on Telegram, if you’d prefer to chat there.

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Microsoft and OpenAI broke up — now they’re ready to fight

2026-06-03T10:14:26-04:00

At Microsoft’s annual Build conference on Tuesday, the company announced a slew of new or expanded AI initiatives, including a super app, in-house reasoning models, a cybersecurity tool, and OpenClaw-esque AI agents. All this news added up to a clear message: Microsoft is positioned to be one of the biggest players in AI, and it’s finally acting like it.

For years, Microsoft’s AI business leaned hard on its early and exclusive partnership with OpenAI. But the drama-filled marriage slowly devolved into a situationship, and the pair effectively separated in late April (though Microsoft is still OpenAI’s primary cloud partner — for now). This year’s Build had the vibe of a freshly single divorcée posting a thirst trap on Instagram. “It’s always fun to be at developer conferences in times of great change,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said onstage Tuesday, adding that events like this are about “coming to grips with the new opportunity.”

AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, in an interview with The Verge, put it even more bluntly.

“The goal is to prove that we can become one of the top four labs in the world,” Suleyman said. “There’s three labs that matter, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. We are not one of them at the moment, and that’s always been my intention. It’s why I came here. I want to build the very best frontier models in the world, fully multimodal, and in order to do that, we have to prove that we can do everything that we need to from the ground up, and we’re not just going to take from others.”

One of Microsoft’s first steps at Build was indeed to play catch-up on AI models. Suleyman unveiled MAI-Thinking-1, the company’s first reasoning model, along with six other new models focused on image, voice, transcription, and coding. Microsoft said the medium-size MAI-Thinking-1 model, which will likely be marketed to primarily enterprise clients, is “built from scratch for serious math, coding, and real-world enterprise deployment.” Microsoft is years behind both OpenAI and Anthropic here; OpenAI began releasing reasoning models in the fall of 2024. But Suleyman emphasized its performance on benchmarks like coding and its price point, saying it was cheaper than OpenAI equivalents on some tasks — a big deal in the age of the AI money squeeze, which has inspired a lot of complaints with customers.

While Microsoft has had years to glean insights from OpenAI, Suleyman made sure to mention that its development did not involve any distillation, meaning that it wasn’t trained using a different company’s AI model. If MAI-Thinking-1 is good, Microsoft clearly doesn’t want people thinking it’s due to the influence of OpenAI.

Suleyman told The Verge that for Microsoft, “the pivotal moment was renegotiating our contract with OpenAI. That meant that we were allowed to train models at a larger scale and explicitly pursue superintelligence entirely with our own IP, with our own data, no distillation, training from scratch.”

Nadella also highlighted Microsoft’s recently launched AI cybersecurity tool MDASH, which he said brings together 100 AI agents to find exploitable bugs “better than any single model.” It was clearly a dig at Claude Mythos Preview, which Anthropic introduced in April to much fear and fanfare — and expanded access to just before Build. OpenAI has its own cybersecurity-focused system as well, and all three companies will likely use their offerings to jockey for position in the government and enterprise markets they desperately need to court.

Microsoft is in a more complex situation with AI agents. The popular open-source platform OpenClaw demonstrated a potential path forward for AI agents, and after OpenAI quickly hired its creator, Peter Steinberger, Microsoft (among other companies) is trying to catch up. One of its key strategies is making OpenClaw work well with Windows. At Build, Nadella said he was very committed to OpenClaw support, and Microsoft employees chatted with developers in the audience about how they were using it.

Steinberger himself made a surprise appearance to great audience reaction, taking the stage to boast about how OpenClaw had bolstered its security and earned user trust. “What I kept hearing was, ‘Peter, I love my Claw, but can I use it at work?’” Steinberger said. “You can totally run OpenClaw inside your company now, and we even made the harness itself a plug-in.” Steinberger said that whether someone trusts Copilot, Codex, or another company’s coding platform, users can now run OpenClaw on top of that via Windows.

But Microsoft is also promoting its own separate Copilot “super app” that integrates OpenClaw-esque agents. A super app is a major focal point for OpenAI right now — president Greg Brockman is leading development of one that will tie together ChatGPT, the Codex coding platform, and the Atlas web browser. Microsoft’s strategy is similar, bringing together a variety of existing Copilot AI assistants. Its agents, called “Autopilots,” are designed to act as a helpful user interface. Cassidy Williams, GitHub’s senior director of developer advocacy, called Copilot “your home base for development and operations on your computer,” demonstrating how multiple agents could perform tasks like app-building. (In an extra flourish, Williams demonstrated how she could approve or deny code changes by flashing her computer camera a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.)

Autopilots are designed specifically to appeal to business customers — Nadella called them “autonomous, long-running agents with full enterprise compliance.” The first one Microsoft will offer is “Scout,” billed as “your always-on personal agent,” but clients can build and personalize their own. The Autopilot agents should be able to look through an email inbox, join group chats in Teams, check a calendar, and send daily briefings, among other things. Accordingly, employees on stage at Build repeatedly emphasized Copilot’s security tools and guardrails — obviously aiming to calm enterprise clients who may have heard horror stories about tools like OpenClaw.

Suleyman made sure to emphasize, again and again, Microsoft’s “humanist superintelligence” as an “AI that prioritizes humanity first” — part of AI companies’ recent rebrand of AGI to make it sound less frightening in an era when people are pushing back against AI more than ever before.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, another speaker known for working closely with OpenAI, appeared via video call to tout how Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip is fueling Microsoft’s AI agent goals. “I could be traveling and I’m on the phone and I can text my PC … and it would fire up the tools on the PC,” Huang said. “The idea that the PC evolved from a personal computer to a personal AI is just really exciting.”

Microsoft spent years betting on OpenAI, and in some ways, that’s left it behind in the AI race. But as OpenAI and other competitors turn to enterprise to finally make money, it’s got some obvious advantages. Microsoft already has a substantial client base and, compared with other AI companies, a reputation for safety and security. And like Google, it also has deep pockets, considerable computing resources, and a diversified revenue stream, meaning it can take big bets without a ton of risk.

Suleyman told The Verge, “There’s a lot of people who are either like chasing startup valuations or about to IPO, so we can operate with a little bit more humility and a little bit more long-term optimization.” He added, “We’ve got the money to be able to buy Anthropic [models] when we need to. We’ve got the optionality in Azure with 11,000 models, so people can use literally whatever they want whenever they want, but that buys us the time to do it right from the start.”

At the same time, there are a lot of unanswered questions here. Microsoft called out a lot of benchmark wins and advancements for its seven new models, but that doesn’t always translate to real-world adoption, and even a new model that pulls ahead for a week or two can quickly fall behind. AI super apps are a mostly yet-untested idea. And Microsoft is entering a crowded yet still largely underwhelming AI agent marketplace with a product that we haven’t seen in action. There’s still plenty of room for its promises to fall flat.

A first look at Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface Dev Box

2026-06-03T09:22:17-04:00

The Surface Laptop Ultra.

Microsoft has two new Surface devices arriving later this year, both powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark chips. I got a chance to take a closer look at both the Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at Microsoft’s Build conference this week, and while both have the same chip inside, they’re utilizing Nvidia’s RTX Spark in different ways.

The Surface Laptop Ultra looks and feels very much like a 16-inch MacBook Pro. There are no transforming hinges, detachable displays, or any other tricks — this is a clamshell laptop built with performance in mind. Microsoft has opted for a 15-inch mini LED panel, which operates at up to 2,000 nits of HDR brightness. I got to see that peak HDR level in a dark room, and I can confirm it’s a very, very bright display. In fact, it’s the brightest display Microsoft has ever put on a Surface device.

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The trackpad on the Surface Laptop Ultra is not only bigger than regular Surface trackpads, it also has the new haptics support in Windows 11. This adds subtle haptic patterns when you’re hovering near a close button in Windows, or alignment cues when you’re trying to drag, scale, or rotate objects. It’s the type of haptics that really transforms how a device feels, and you’ll notice it in various parts of Windows 11 when you’re dragging sliders and interacting with UI elements. I hope other laptop manufacturers start shipping this improved haptics support, too.

When I first picked up the Surface Laptop Ultra, I was also surprised by the weight. It feels hefty compared to the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7, but there’s clearly been a tradeoff of weight in favor of performance and battery life. “When we went through the priority order of what we’re going to design for, performance, performance, performance, battery life, battery life, battery life, display, display, display, making sure we’d nailed those things,” says Andrew Hill, corporate vice president of Surface product, in an interview with The Verge. “If other tradeoffs have to be made, so be it, but let’s make sure we nail the fundamentals that are really what people care about.”

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I got to see the Surface Laptop Ultra being put through its paces in a variety of tasks, including one demo where it was running a local AI model that was eating up a lot of the 128GB of unified memory, all while Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was playable.

I also got to feel the heat dissipation of the Surface Laptop Ultra, which has a hot spot just above the keyboard. It felt warm to touch at the section on the top of the keyboard and below that area on the rear of the device, but not hot enough to be uncomfortable on a lap. Microsoft is also using two fans to cool the device, and I could barely hear them even at almost full load.

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Inside the Surface Laptop Ultra, Microsoft has also made it easier to replace parts. It’s honestly like a work of art inside, with clearly marked components all neatly arranged in a black grid. Microsoft really focused on repairability for its Surface Laptop 7, improving its iFixit repairability score from 0/10 in 2017 to 8/10 in 2024. I’m very curious to see where iFixit ranks the Surface Laptop Ultra later this year.

The Surface Laptop Ultra also has a surprising number of ports. On the left-hand side, there are two USB-C ports and an HDMI port, and on the right-hand side, there’s a single USB-C, a USB-A port, and a full-sized SD Card reader. There’s also something intriguing about the single USB-C port on the right-hand side: It’s a little wider than the two on the left.

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I asked Hill about the mysterious USB-C port and he smiled and laughed and said Microsoft would have more to share about the Surface Laptop Ultra later this year. This laptop is missing Microsoft’s traditional Surface Connect magnetic charging port, so I do wonder if the company has created some form of USB-C replacement.

It’s also worth noting that Microsoft isn’t really talking about its Copilot Plus PC initiative with the Surface Laptop Ultra. While it still qualifies for all the Copilot Plus PC features, Microsoft doesn’t mention that branding in its blog, and all the initial marketing around this device is aimed at professionals, creators, and developers.

Hill tells me Microsoft isn’t giving up on the Copilot Plus PC brand, even if it’s heavily deemphasized for this Surface device. Instead, it’s focusing on the creators and developers that would buy a laptop like this, especially for local AI compute where you won’t have to pay an AI cloud provider for tokens. “What you have here is an option where you’ll be able to do a lot of work locally on a thing you own, and if you want to let it rip, cool, you’re not on a meter,” says Hill. “There are sets of workloads that run in the cloud that are better, but you’ll be able to do a lot of work here.”

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I also got a chance to briefly see the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. It’s very much targeted at developers who want a powerful miniature PC on their desk and the ability to run AI workloads locally with 128GB of unified memory. Microsoft has manufactured the Dev Box with an aluminum 3D-printed body, and it has 1,000 air vents in the chassis to represent its 1,000 teraflops of compute performance.

Those air vents really remind me of an Xbox Series X, and the whole Dev Box looks like a flattened version of Microsoft’s console. At the rear, there are two USB-C ports, USB-A, HDMI, Ethernet, and a headphone jack. Inside it will run the same chip as the Surface Laptop Ultra, but Microsoft tells me there are some minor differences it’s not fully disclosing just yet.

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One of the major differences is that it has a 100-watt thermal envelope, compared to up to 80 watts on the Surface Laptop Ultra. That will mean the Dev Box will be more capable of sustained workloads, and in particular anything that takes advantage of Nvidia’s Tensor cores. That will largely be AI workloads, but Tensor cores are also utilized for upscaling with Nvidia’s DLSS technology, so gaming on the Dev Box could be slightly better than the Surface Laptop Ultra.

The big question hanging over both of these devices is pricing. RAMageddon has already pushed the prices of Microsoft’s new Intel-powered Surface devices up, and I suspect that these new RTX Spark devices are going to be at the very top end of premium PC pricing. We’ll find out later this year.

Photography by Tom Warren / The Verge

Microsoft’s next-gen quantum chip cuts timeline to useful quantum computing

2026-06-04T01:08:06-04:00

Microsoft’s new Majorana 2 quantum chip. | Image: Microsoft

Microsoft claimed last year that it had made a key breakthrough in quantum computing with Majorana 1, the company’s first quantum processor. While physicists were immediately skeptical of Microsoft’s claims, the software giant is announcing Majorana 2 today, the next generation of its topological quantum chip.

Majorana 2 contains qubits, a unit of information in quantum computing much like the binary bits that computers use today, that are 1,000 times more reliable, according to Microsoft. It’s a milestone that helps make quantum computing more reliable, thanks to the use of a new material stack and some help from Microsoft Discovery’s agentic AI.

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“To create Majorana 2, the Microsoft Quantum team improved Majorana 1’s material stack to create a more stable topological phase,” explains Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow and corporate vice president of quantum hardware. “Majorana 2 replaces Majorana 1’s superconductor, aluminum, with lead, and also updates the semiconductor active region to a combination of indium arsenide and indium arsenide antimonide.”

The improved materials mean better performance of qubits, according to Microsoft. “In the aluminum-based Majorana 1, qubit lifetimes were between one and 12 milliseconds, whereas in Majorana 2, the lifetimes exceed 20 seconds, representing more than 1,000x improvement in stability,” says Nayak. Some qubit lifetimes now exceed a minute, enough to convince Microsoft that it has made enough significant progress to promise useful quantum computing much sooner.

“Based on this rapid progress, we are accelerating our roadmap to a scalable, practical quantum computer,” says Nayak. “We have cut our timeline in half and now aim to reach this target by 2029.” Microsoft is working toward building a fault-tolerant prototype quantum computer based on topological qubits, with an aim of quantum computing solving some of the world’s most difficult problems.

Microsoft is now releasing Discovery, the platform that helped improve its Majorana chips, to its customers today. Microsoft Discovery is designed to help apply agentic workflows to research and development programs. A local app version of Microsoft Discovery is now available on GitHub, and researchers can use a GitHub Copilot account to access it.

Microsoft Scout is a new AI personal assistant built on OpenClaw

2026-06-02T14:28:48-04:00

Much like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, allowing businesses to assign a virtual assistant to employees to help with organizing calendars, expense reporting, email drafts, and much more.

Unlike Copilot that lives inside Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft Scout can see and do a lot more. “This is a personal assistant, it’s the first real personal assistant we’ve offered customers,” explains Omar Shahine, corporate vice president of Microsoft Scout, in an interview with The Verge. “I think it’s important for customers to understand that you’re going to get a phone call from this assistant, it’s a very different type of AI than chat.”

Microsoft Scout can monitor local road traffic and your calendar to recommend the best time to leave for appointments, school pickups, and dinner dates. It also works much like a real assistant, surfacing things that it learns are important to you by reading Teams threads, transcripts, and email in the background.

Microsoft is starting off slowly with Scout, and only releasing a desktop preview version to its Frontier customers in the US this week, but the goal is to have this running in the cloud and always on. A more limited preview will be available to a small number of customers in the coming months, before Microsoft rolls out the full cloud version more broadly.

The desktop app has already proved popular internally, with more than 3,000 Microsoft employees already using the app. Engineers have been using Scout to schedule meetings, help with paperwork, book travel, and fill out forms. A lot of Microsoft Scout usage is simply staying on top of tasks, whether work related or personal. “A lot of people are using it to just be better versions of themselves. … We all have aspirations we want for ourselves but we just often lose time and can’t do,” says Shahine.

Instead of creating a separate version of OpenClaw, Microsoft is contributing directly to the core technology of the open-source project. It’s surprising to see Microsoft embrace OpenClaw just months after CEO Satya Nadella compared the technology to a virus. OpenClaw’s AI “skill” extensions have also been branded a security nightmare. I asked Shahine why Microsoft was now confident it could manage the security and privacy aspects of an AI agent that can access a lot of critical corporate data.

“We have a process for intake [of OpenClaw] that makes sure we’re protecting ourselves from things like supply chain risk, and also just breaking changes,” says Shahine. “It’s a very fast-moving open-source project, one of the fastest I’ve ever seen. We operate OpenClaw in a cloud environment that’s in a sandbox, and we treat OpenClaw as untrusted so it doesn’t have secrets or access to any of your Microsoft 365 data.”

Microsoft also uses its suite of security capabilities to control OpenClaw, including Agent 365, Purview, and Defender. Then there’s the usual red teaming, privacy reviews, and security reviews to ensure it’s safe for enterprise environments. “I feel good that we’re doing things that Microsoft has a history of doing to run the service and protect it,” says Shahine. “OpenClaw is very powerful … so we’re also curating a set of features that we’re going to offer customers out of the box.”

With Google pushing to make Gemini Spark, its own take on OpenClaw, available to connect to Workspace apps like Gmail and Docs, it feels like there’s a new AI race emerging to own the personal assistant of the enterprise. The real test will be just how well Gemini Spark and Microsoft Scout manage to organize daily work life without any major security hiccups, and just how quickly these AI agents can learn habits and preferences, just like a human assistant.

Microsoft’s Project Solara is an OS for AI agent gadgets

2026-06-02T13:46:30-04:00

Microsoft just announced “Project Solara,” a new OS designed for gadgets that run AI agents, at Build 2026. The company is calling it “a new platform built from the ground up to power agent-driven experiences.” It’s built on Android, not Windows.

Microsoft demonstrated two concept Project Solara devices at Build today: Desk concept and badge concept. The desk concept is an Amazon Echo Show-like device that unlocks with facial recognition and provides access to AI agents.

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The badge concept is a wearable, the type of badge you’d typically use to access a work building. It has a camera and a fingerprint scanner, which can wake an AI agent with a single press. Microsoft demonstrated the ability to tap and record a conversation and instantly transcribe it. The camera can also be used by the agent to see what a user can see.

Microsoft isn’t planning to ship these two devices, but they’ll be reference designs that it hopes other hardware makers will build into real products, according to GeekWire. Project Solara is designed for agent-first devices, and the platform is “highly flexible,” according to Microsoft fellow Steven Bathiche. Companies like AccuWeather, Best Buy, CVS Healthcare, and Target are planning to kick off pilots of the hardware.

Microsoft picked a version of Android, the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform, instead of Windows to “run on smaller, lower-power devices while keeping the management and security features IT departments expect,” GeekWire reports.

The work on this initiative is early. But Microsoft wants to get involved in AI hardware as the category is expected to heat up in the coming months and years. Traditional rivals like Google and Meta are working on their own AI gadgets, and OpenAI is building devices in partnership with Jony Ive.

Microsoft created the mini Surface dev box that Qualcomm couldn’t

2026-06-02T12:52:54-04:00

Microsoft only just announced a new Surface Laptop Ultra at the weekend, and it’s now revealing a miniature Surface PC aimed at developers. The new Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is powered by Nvidia’s new Arm-based RTX Spark chips, just like the Surface Laptop Ultra, and is optimized for sustained workloads and local AI tasks.

The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box looks a little like the top of an Xbox Series X console, with an aluminum chassis that also doubles as a heatsink. It has a 100-watt thermal envelope, slightly more than the 45-watt-to-80-watt thermal envelopes for Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops. This miniature Surface PC also has 128GB of unified memory, making it capable of running up to 120 billion parameter models locally.

The top of the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box looks a lot like the top of an Xbox Series X. | Image: Microsoft" data-portal-copyright="Image: Microsoft" />The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. | Image: Microsoft" data-portal-copyright="Image: Microsoft" />

Microsoft is preconfiguring the RTX Spark Dev Box with apps like Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, and other tools. “Surface RTX Spark Dev Box ships with Windows 11 Pro pre-configured for developers at the image level,” explains Andrew Hill, corporate vice president of Surface. “The setup keeps developers in their workflow: dark theme, taskbar simplified for development, Widgets removed, Do Not Disturb on. Developer Mode is enabled. PowerShell 7 is the default shell.”

The RTX Spark Dev Box joins similar options from other OEMs that are embracing Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chips for miniature PCs. It’s also a direct replacement for Qualcomm’s canceled Snapdragon Dev Kit, the miniature Windows on Arm PC that was originally supposed to ship two years ago. The Dev Kit was supposed to help developers port their apps to Windows on Arm, but Qualcomm faced some complications with hardware quality.

While we don’t have full specifications or pricing, the RTX Spark Dev Box will be available later this year in the US from Microsoft’s online store.

Microsoft’s new developer-optimized Windows embraces Linux even more

2026-06-02T12:52:19-04:00

Microsoft is kicking off its Build developer conference today with a promise of making Windows a trusted platform for development. As the company continues to focus on performance and reliability fixes for Windows 11, it’s also creating a developer-optimized experience that bundles a lot of useful tools and apps and embraces Linux even further.

“We have optimized the Windows 11 experience for developers, bringing frequently used command line utilities, a familiar comfort shell, faster setup experience, a built-in way to create and interact with Linux containers on Windows and a new experimental Intelligent Terminal,” explains Windows chief Pavan Davuluri.

Microsoft has created Coreutils for Windows from the uutils open-source project, a cross-platform reimplementation of the GNU coreutils in Rust. “These are Linux-like command-line utilities that run natively on Windows,” says Davuluri. “Whether you’re moving between Linux, macOS, WSL, containers, or cloud environments, the commands and workflows you’ve built over years just work in your Windows environment.“

After open-sourcing the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) at Build last year, Microsoft is now integrating WSL even further into Windows with its new WSL containers. As the name implies, WSL containers is a built-in way to create, run, and interact with Linux containers on Windows. Microsoft has built both a command-line interface and API for WSL containers, allowing developers to also run Linux containers inside native Windows apps. WSL containers will be available in public preview in the coming months.

Microsoft is also building on the success of its existing Windows Terminal experience with a new experimental Intelligent Terminal for developers. “Intelligent Terminal provides context to your favorite agents via ACP (Agent Communication Protocol) so you can stay in the terminal and query, debug or complete any task on hand,” explains Davuluri. “It is based on the existing Windows Terminal experience, so you get everything it offers (tabs, profiles, themes, settings, shells) plus native agent CLI integration in the agent pane.”

The developer-friendly Windows changes also include the general availability of Windows Developer Configurations, a quick way to setup new machines with developer-optimized settings. Microsoft has been experimenting with this idea for a few years now, and the Developer Configurations will install tools like WSL, PowerShell 7, and Visual Studio code, while also enabling Git version control in File Explorer and showing hidden files.

Microsoft to unveil new AI models and Windows improvements at Build

2026-06-02T12:44:52-04:00

Microsoft is heading to San Francisco this week in a bid to win back developers at its Build conference. I’ve been attending Build since the days when Microsoft called it the Professional Developers Conference, and I can’t remember a more pivotal moment. As Microsoft continues to reshuffle its entire business around AI, it’s moving Build into a smaller, more intimate venue. Trust in Windows and GitHub is at an all-time low, and this is Microsoft’s chance to reconnect with developers and outline the future.

Sources tell me that we’ll hear about new AI models in Windows, a new reasoning model from Microsoft AI, and a Copilot “super app.” But perhaps more importantly for Build attendees, I understand that Microsoft will be revealing more about its work on improving the experience of Windows for developers. I’m told that Microsoft will unveil a new Windows 11 developer optimized experience this week, which includes many of the things that developers have been asking for in Windows: a distraction-free environment with preinstalled apps, tools, and scripts.

I also expect to hear more about Microsoft’s efforts to rewrite parts of Windows 11 to improve performance and the overall experience. Microsoft outlined its plan to fix Windows 11 earlier this year, and we’ve started to see plenty of early improvements already. The Windows Insider team is getting ready to show off more customization changes later today, ahead of the Build keynote tomorrow.

Microsoft will also have more news about how Windows is adapting to new silicon like Nvidia’s RTX Spark. I’m told there will be a bigger focus on local models running on Windows at Build this year, allowing developers to tap into local compute instead of relying on costly cloud models. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri teased last week that “something new is coming for developers” at Build, so I’m expecting to hear more about the next generation of Microsoft’s smaller AI models. Miniature RTX Spark PCs from Microsoft and HP were also notably absent in a lineup of OEMs during Nvidia’s Computex keynote, so perhaps a little something more is on the way.

While Satya Nadella will discuss the new RTX Spark announcement with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his keynote, I’m also expecting we’ll hear from Qualcomm about its continued work with Microsoft to grow Windows on Arm. Qualcomm and Microsoft laid most of the groundwork for the Arm improvements in Windows 11, allowing Nvidia to return to Windows on Arm after a rocky start with the Surface RT. Microsoft now has to balance two major Arm silicon providers, just like how it’s had to keep both AMD and Intel happy over the decades.

Sources tell me we’re also going to be hearing about the very latest on Microsoft’s own in-house models at Build this week. I’m told Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman will unveil a new MAI-Thinking-1 model at Build, the company’s first reasoning model. Microsoft hasn’t used distillation to create its reasoning model, meaning it wasn’t trained by learning from another AI model’s outputs. I’m expecting this reasoning model to be targeted primarily at enterprise use.

The reasoning model is one of several new models I’m expecting to hear about at Build, including MAI-Image-2.5 and MAI-Image-2.5-Flash. Suleyman teased the MAI-Image-2.5 release last week, promising more at Build.

Microsoft will also discuss its upcoming Copilot “super app” at Build. Fortune first reported on this last week, and it’s essentially an app that combines Microsoft’s various Copilot AI assistants into a single interface. Sources tell me work is underway to build the app, but that the leaked screenshot that appeared on Friday is simply a mockup prepared for Microsoft’s Build demonstrations.

The image also includes an early look at Microsoft Scout, which is reportedly a new AI agent based on Microsoft’s OpenClaw work. This Copilot super app won’t be available at Build, though, as Microsoft is still in the process of creating it, so I wouldn’t expect to see it in preview until late summer.

I’m also hoping we’ll hear a lot more about improvements to GitHub at Build this week. I wrote last month that GitHub is facing a fight for its survival at Microsoft, after a wave of departures, outages, and security incidents. Microsoft desperately needs to win back GitHub trust here, particularly as high-profile developers are starting to sound the alarm. There’s no easy quick fix, but given that Build is being driven by some of the GitHub team, Microsoft can’t ignore the issues it faces here.

We’ll be covering all the news from Microsoft Build this week, so stay tuned for plenty of coverage when the conference kicks off at 9:30AM PT / 12:30PM ET on Tuesday, June 2nd.

Nvidia, Microsoft, and Arm are all teasing Nvidia’s new N1X laptop processors

2026-06-01T04:22:29-04:00

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with an RTX laptop at CES 2025. | Image: Getty Images

It’s the world’s worst kept secret that Nvidia is about to announce its own Arm-powered laptop chips at Computex this weekend, and now Microsoft, Nvidia, and Arm are all openly teasing the announcement. The Windows and Nvidia GeForce accounts on X both posted “A new era of PC” earlier today, and now Arm has followed up with an identical post.

All three posts include coordinates pointing to where Computex is hosted in Taipei. Nvidia is holding a Computex keynote in Taipei at 8PM PT / 11PM ET on Sunday night, where it’s rumored to be announcing its new N1 and N1x laptop chips.

A new era of PC.

25.0528, 121.5990
— Windows (@Windows) May 29, 2026

A new era of PC.

25.0528, 121.5990
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) May 29, 2026

A new era of PC.

25.0528, 121.5990
— Arm (@Arm) May 29, 2026

These Arm-powered Nvidia processors have been long-rumored, with reports earlier this year suggesting that both Lenovo and Dell have been preparing new laptops with the N1X chips. We first heard rumors about Nvidia’s laptop processors in 2023, and Dell CEO Michael Dell hinted at the possibility of an AI PC with Nvidia during an interview in 2024.

Nvidia’s entry into Windows on Arm will mean Qualcomm will no longer have an exclusive license for Microsoft’s Windows 11 Arm variant of its operating system. That’s good news for laptop competition, even if Qualcomm is trying to keep entry-level laptops affordable with its new Snapdragon C platform.