Microsoft Build 2025: news and announcements from the developer conference – The Verge

Windows 11 is getting a macOS-like Handoff feature between phone and PC

2025-05-21T07:11:06-04:00

The Windows 11 handoff feature.

Microsoft is working on a new "Cross Device Resume" feature for Windows 11 that works similarly to Apple's Handoff feature in macOS. The feature was spotted in a Microsoft Build 2025 session, before Windows Central noticed Microsoft editing out the demo that showed a mobile Spotify session resuming on a PC.

"When you open the app on your mobile device or tablet, Windows can show a subtle badge right on your app's taskbar icon," explains Aakash Varshney, a senior product manager for cross devices and experiences at Microsoft, in a "Create Seamless Cross-Device Experiences with Windows for your app" Build session for developers. "It's a visua …

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Microsoft’s AI security chief accidentally reveals Walmart’s AI plans after protest

2025-05-21T08:32:42-04:00

Protesters outside Microsoft’s Build conference

Microsoft's head of security for AI, Neta Haiby, accidentally revealed confidential messages about Walmart's use of Microsoft's AI tools during a Build talk that was disrupted by protesters.

The Build livestream was muted and the camera pointed down, but the session resumed moments later after the protesters were escorted out. In the aftermath, Haiby then accidentally switched to Microsoft Teams while sharing her screen, revealing confidential internal messages about Walmart's upcoming use of Microsoft's Entra and AI gateway services.

Haiby was co-hosting a Build session on best security practices for AI, alongside Sarah Bird, Microsoft's …

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Palestinian developer disrupts Microsoft keynote: ‘my people are suffering’

2025-05-21T06:31:30-04:00

Protesters outside of Microsoft’s Build developer conference. | Image: AFP via Getty Images

Microsoft's Build developer conference has been interrupted by a protester for the second day in a row. Microsoft's head of CoreAI, Jay Parikh, was on stage discussing the company's Azure AI Foundry efforts when a Palestinian tech worker interrupted his keynote to protest against Microsoft's contracts with the Israeli government.

"Jay! My people are suffering!" said the unnamed tech worker. "Cut ties! No Azure for apartheid! Free, free Palestine!"

The developer was quickly escorted out of the keynote while he was yelling at Parikh, a member of Microsoft's senior leadership team, to cut the company's ties with Israel. Hossam Nasr, an organi …

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Microsoft is putting AI actions into the Windows File Explorer

2025-05-20T11:48:09-04:00

The new AI actions in the File Explorer context menu.

Microsoft is starting to integrate AI shortcuts, or what it calls AI actions, into the File Explorer in Windows 11. These shortcuts let you right-click on a file and quickly get to Windows AI features like blurring the background of a photo, erasing objects, or even summarizing content from Office files.

Four image actions are currently being tested in the latest Dev Channel builds of Windows 11, including Bing visual search to find similar images on the web, the blur background and erase objects features found in the Photos app, and the remove background option in Paint.

Microsoft is also planning to test similar AI actions for Office fil …

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Microsoft’s Edit on Windows is a new command-line text editor

2025-05-19T14:51:30-04:00

Microsoft is unveiling its own command-line text editor at its Build conference today. Edit on Windows will be accessible by using "edit" in a command prompt, allowing developers to edit files within the command line. It's part of several improvements aimed at bettering the Windows experience for developers.

Edit on Windows is an open-source project by Microsoft, and it enables developers to edit files directly in the command line, just like vim, without having to switch to another app or window. Edit is small and lightweight, at less than 250KB in size. All the menu options on Edit have key bindings, and you can open multiple files and swi …

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Microsoft employee disrupts Satya Nadella’s keynote with ‘Free Palestine’ protest

2025-05-19T17:08:46-04:00

A Microsoft employee disrupted the company's Build developer conference in Seattle, Washington, this morning, protesting against the company's cloud and AI contracts with the Israeli government. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had only been onstage for a matter of minutes before protesters started interrupting his speech, with one shouting, "Free Palestine!" Nadella continued his keynote, ignoring the protesters as they were escorted out of a hall inside the Seattle conference center.

Microsoft employee Joe Lopez, who has spent the past four years working as a firmware engineer on the company's Azure hardware systems team, was one of the protes …

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Microsoft is opening its on-device AI models up to web apps in Edge

2025-05-19T12:05:03-04:00

Web developers will be able to start leveraging on-device AI in Microsoft's Edge browser soon, using new APIs that can give their web apps access to Microsoft's Phi-4-mini model, the company announced at its Build conference today. And Microsoft says the API will be cross-platform, so it sounds like these APIs will work with the Edge browser in macOS, as well.

The 3.8-billion-parameter Phi-4-mini is Microsoft's latest small, on-device model, rolled out in February alongside the company's larger Phi-4. With the new APIs, web developers will be able to add prompt boxes and offer writing assistance tools for text generation, summarizing, and …

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Microsoft is now hosting xAI’s Grok 3 models

2025-05-19T15:51:06-04:00

I reported in my Notepad newsletter earlier this month that Microsoft was getting ready to host Elon Musk's Grok AI models, and now it's official. At Microsoft's Build developer conference today, the company confirmed it's expanding its Azure AI Foundry models list to include Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini from xAI.

"These models will have all the service level agreements (SLAs) Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product," says Microsoft. The Grok AI models will be hosted and billed directly by Microsoft, and offered to its own product teams and customers through its Azure AI Foundry service.

It's a surprise addition that could prove contro …

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Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open-source

2025-05-19T10:51:00-04:00

Microsoft is making its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) open-source today, opening up the code for community members to contribute to. After launching WSL for Windows 10 nearly nine years ago, it has been a multiyear effort at Microsoft to open-source the feature that enables a Linux environment within Windows.

"It has been a consistent request from the developer community for some time now," says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with The Verge. "It took us a little bit of time, because we needed to refactor the operating system to allow WSL to live in a standalone capacity that then allowed us to open-source the project and b …

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Windows is getting support for the ‘USB-C of AI apps’

2025-05-19T16:48:47-04:00

Microsoft launched its Copilot Plus PC and Windows AI efforts last year, and now it's going a step further today with native Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Windows and the launch of the Windows AI Foundry. The groundwork is necessary for a future envisioned by Microsoft whereby automated AI agents assist their human companions.

Introduced by Anthropic late last year, MCP is an open-source standard that's often referred to as the "USB-C port of AI" apps. Just as USB-C connects devices from many manufacturers to a variety of peripherals, developers can use MCP to quickly let their AI apps or agents talk to other apps, web services, or now e …

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