The Archive

New college graduates around the country have been booing and heckling commencement speakers who hype up AI. Microsoft would like everyone to talk it out. In a blog post running more than 3,100 words, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith addressed the recent spate of viral clips from graduation ceremonies, like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt getting an earful at the University of Arizona, or the speaker in Florida who seemed surprised when students booed at the mention of AI as "the next industrial revolution." The videos speak to a broader societal sentiment around AI - the technolo...

Anthropic released Claude Fable, its first Mythos-class AI model, yesterday and it's already causing concerns inside Microsoft. Sources tell me that Microsoft is limiting the use of Claude Fable 5 for employees because of Anthropic's new data retention requirements. While Microsoft quickly rolled out Claude Fable 5 to its GitHub Copilot and Foundry customers, I'm told the model isn't available in the model picker that Microsoft employees use for internal versions of GitHub Copilot. All other Claude models are still available internally at Microsoft, because they operate under Zero Data Retent...

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it's "really, really dangerous" for Anthropic to speculate about Claude's consciousness inside its "constitution," or the instructions that tell the model how to behave. During an episode of Decoder, Suleyman argues that this kind of speculation may have set up the chatbot to act as though it's conscious: I think that it's almost as though some of the folks at Anthropic have anthropomorphized the design of Claude so much that it has then gone and wireheaded them and kind of tricked them into believing that it has these glimmers of consciousness that they...

Microsoft AI head Mustafa Suleyman is walking back his statement about AI automating jobs done by white-collar workers, including lawyers, accountants, and project managers. During an episode of Decoder on Monday, Suleyman says he meant AI will help these workers complete tasks, rather than do their jobs: Sending an email, having a conversation with a colleague, putting together a PowerPoint - sub-tasks will increasingly become digitized, automated, and we can basically generate more and more of them. That does not necessarily mean that the role goes away at all. It just means that the work c...

73 packages run self-replicating stealer as soon as they're opened by an AI agent.

Today I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. And I’m actually going to keep today’s intro short — I’m working from my wife’s family farm this week, as you’ll see in the video, but also this is a real burner of an episode. We covered everything from Mustafa’s approach to training new models to his criticisms of Anthropic talking about Claude as though it is conscious. Of course, we also talked about Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI, how Mustafa is thinking about all the negative polling and political pushback around AI right now, and whether any of the consumer product...

The best Stratechery content from the week of June 1, 2026, including Google and Microsoft, YouTubers taking over Hollywood, and a guide to the NBA Finals.

Some of the AI industry's biggest rivals have put their many, many grievances aside for a common cause: making it harder for people to use their technology to develop biological weapons. In an open letter to US lawmakers, tech leaders are pressing Congress to enact rules closing what they say is an alarming biosecurity gap that could help trigger a global pandemic. Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Microsoft's Mustafa Suleyman are among the signatories urging US lawmakers to require companies selling synthetic DNA and RNA - genetic material that can ordered online and assembl...

An interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about figuring out Microsoft's role in AI, the relationship with OpenAI, Capex, Software, and a potential new agentic platform.

The legendary Microsoft CEO makes his first Latent Space appearance!

Microsoft positions Copilot as autonomous agent to manage workflows, raising trust and oversight concerns for always-on deployment.

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...

The Nvidia AI PC feels like a relic of another AI era; Microsoft's vision for devices at Build was much more compelling.

Microsoft Build recap, and new MAI model technical details

Microsoft announced two new text LLMs this morning - MAI-Thinking-1 (reasoning, 35B parameters, available to "select early partners") and MAI-Code-1-Flash (5B parameters, "purpose-built for GitHub Copilot and VS Code to deliver high performance and lower cost [...] rolling out to GitHub Copilot individual users in Visual Studio Code"). I've not been able to try either of them just yet. It's very interesting to see Microsoft releasing models with such low parameter counts, especially given how expensive larger models are to access right now. They claim MAI-Thinking-1 "is preferred to Sonnet 4....

Microsoft missed the boat on apps, so get ready for agents.

Microsoft just kicked off Build 2026 with a keynote from CEO Satya Nadella and other company leaders. As expected, it was filled with announcements, ranging from new Surface hardware to an always-on personal assistant and updates across Microsoft's in-house AI models. If you didn't watch the event live, you can catch up on all the latest news in the roundup below. A mini Surface PC designed for AI development The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is geared toward developers who want to run local AI models on their device, serving as a substitute for Qualcomm's canceled dev kit. It comes equipped with...

Microsoft on Tuesday took the wraps off Adaptive Spec-driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing, an open-source framework for spinning up AI evaluations.

AI agents are changing how you interact with your PC. Creators, developers, and AI enthusiasts are already using these agents extensively to assist with... AI agents are changing how you interact with your PC. Creators, developers, and AI enthusiasts are already using these agents extensively to assist with day-to-day tasks such as coding, video editing, and content management. NVIDIA and Microsoft are teaming up to enable the next generation of developers to build on-device agents on the Windows platform, with easier setup, native security… Source

California Brown Pelican, in Fort Mason, CA, US I'm at the Microsoft Build conference today, held at Fort Mason in San Francisco. There are California Brown Pelicans diving into the water directly behind venue! Tags: microsoft , ai , generative-ai , llms , llm-release

Microsoft announced a bunch of new in-house AI models at Build 2026, including a new "flagship" model: MAI-Thinking-1. It's an ambitious step into model development for Microsoft, which introduced its initial in-house models last year - before then, it had relied on OpenAI's models. The two companies recently renegotiated their deal to loosen ties. According to Microsoft, MAI-Thinking-1 is a "medium-sized model" that "matches leading models" on "key" software engineering benchmarks. Microsoft says the company "trained it from the ground up on clean data, without distillation from third-party ...

The specification lets developer, compliance and security teams define their own policies for agents to follow in portable policy files.

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 Sco...

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. 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 fin...

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. T...

Microsoft’s annual developer conference is kicking off on June 2nd in San Francisco with the keynote presentation streaming live at 12:30PM ET / 9:30AM PT, and we will be following along here with everything as it’s announced. The Verge’s Tom Warren reports that we can expect to hear about new AI models and agentic OpenClaw-like tools, plus a Copilot “super app” to go along with some of the major changes to Windows 11 that have already started appearing. Microsoft just announced the new Surface Laptop Ultra, powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark, so there could be more Windows on ARM news in store. F...

If Nvidia has cracked a way to bring AI agents easily, safely and usefully to the masses, it could — and should — be big.

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 f...

The golden age of Microsoft's Github Copilot appears to be at an end.

Microsoft is launching a revamped version of Microsoft 365 Copilot, offering a cleaner design that the company claims loads twice as fast. As part of this update, Copilot will provide more reliable and structured responses that are easier to scan, according to Microsoft. The redesign, which is rolling out across desktop and mobile devices, comes with a feature Microsoft calls "progressive disclosure." That means Copilot will present you with tools and controls based on your prompt, instead of showing a bunch of options at once. You can now format your text directly inside Copilot's upgraded p...