Microsoft has released Microsoft-Decision-1, a decision model for routing, classification, verification and agent control. Microsoft-Decision-1 is a decision-scoring model that returns a calibrated probability for each fixed answer option instead of generated text. It is post-trained from Alibaba’s Qwen3.5-9B and available now in Microsoft Foundry and OpenRouter. . TL;DR What is a decision model? A […] The post Microsoft AI Releases Microsoft-Decision-1: A Qwen3.5-9B Decision-Scoring Model appeared first on MarkTechPost.
If there is any place that would be off-limits to AI, the control room of a nuclear power plant certainly sounds like one. The nuclear industry is historically cautious and risk averse—understandable given the possible catastrophic consequences of an accident or a mistake. Even well-trained managers struggle with the operational complexity of a nuclear reactor. It’s not the kind of setting that seems well suited to a powerful but error-prone new technology. Reality tells a startlingly different story. A variety of companies have begun to offer AI solutions for nuclear power. This year, nearly the entire fleet of 94 U.S. nuclear reactors has been offered the chance to integrate AI into its operations, and most have taken it. In August, California-based Atomic Canyon launched NIVA, the Nucl…
Google is launching a "universal" Gemini AI agent that can work across apps and devices in the background. The tool, announced as part of the Gemini at Work event on Thursday, will be available within the Gemini Enterprise app, allowing users to chat with the Gemini agent and assign it tasks from a single interface. In addition to having Gemini work directly inside Workspace apps like Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and others, users can interact with the agent from their mobile device, desktop computer, the web, and third-party apps like Slack or Microsoft 365. Since it runs in the cloud, Gemini will maintain the same context across … Read the full story at The Verge.
At a Microsoft event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Jensen Huang and Satya Nadella outlined how NVIDIA and Microsoft are co-engineering hardware and software for AI agents to run on Windows PCs. NVIDIA was founded because of Windows, Huang said. Now AI agents are coming to Windows. “If you look at the entire journey of […]
Microsoft just wrapped up a big Windows and Surface-focused keynote in San Francisco. The biggest announcement was arguably the release details about the Surface Laptop Ultra, its new laptop that’s powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark Arm-based chip. The machine will start at $2,599 for a configuration with an 8-core CPU, 24GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage, and it will be released on October 16th. The laptop also has built-in magnetic USB-C charging instead of the proprietary Surface Connect magnetic charging port. The Verge‘s Tom Warren published a deep dive all about the new laptop. Microsoft also announced that the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a mini PC for developers, is available for preorder for $5,999 ahead of shipping in November. In addition, Microsoft shared details about some updates com…
At today's Windows and Surface event, Microsoft showed off an upgrade to its Copilot AI system that will give it access to local files on your PC and the ability to take actions across the OS. It's part of an idea Microsoft is calling "Hybrid Intelligence," where apps and tools rely on a mix of local and cloud AI models to accomplish tasks efficiently. To show off how Hybrid Intelligence works, Jacob Andreou, Microsoft's EVP of Copilot, walked through a video demo on stage asking Microsoft's Autopilot tool to help with filing taxes. Andreou told the AI agent that he got an email from his accountant and asked Autopilot to get her what she … Read the full story at The Verge.
Microsoft's Nvidia-powered Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is available for preorder now directly, and slated to ship in November for just about $6,000. It's pricier than the DGX Spark mini PC Nvidia launched last year, but PC prices have been climbing due to shortages of RAM and other components. The Dev Box's flat, 3D-printed anodized aluminum chassis doubles as a heatsink and resembles the top vents on an Xbox Series X. It's launching alongside the new Surface Laptop Ultra and runs on Nvidia's Arm-based RTX Spark platform and 128GB of unified memory. With that much memory, along with a 100-watt thermal envelope and Nvidia's Tensor cores, you … Read the full story at The Verge.
Training AI agents with reinforcement learning can be challenging because their tools, context, and decision-making are managed by complex frameworks. Agent Lightning connects existing agents to RL training, making it easier to improve them without rebuilding them. The post Agent Lightning v1.0: A 3,500-Line Lightweight Agentic RL Framework for Training Agents with Real Harnesses appeared first on Microsoft Research.
Jennifer Neville, partner research manager at Microsoft Research and professor at Purdue, discusses her winding path into AI, the importance of evaluation in pushing AI performance, and the 'surprising failures' that reveal gaps in how models handle complexity.
Unions, employer groups, banks and industry experts will appear at the four-day hearings along with OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google Get our new political email, free app or daily news podcast OpenAI must explain how they will stop their models from inappropriately accessing Australian data, the Labor chair of the parliament’s committee on artificial intelligence has warned, ahead of federal inquiry hearings which will grill the tech company alongside Anthropic, Microsoft and Google. Independent senator David Pocock is also demanding answers, saying OpenAI “still have a lot they need to answer” about their AI agent accessing Services Australia data on Medicare and the company’s “appalling” tardiness in notifying the federal government about the incident. Follow our Australia politi…
arXiv:2610.02281v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Societal resilience research relies on access to useful and actionable data, which motivates our main research question: Can annual reports, processed at scale with LLMs, provide a useful signal about how companies disclose their response to AI? We test this by applying a reproducible two-stage classification pipeline to 9,821 annual reports from 1,362 UK listed companies (2020-2025, with partial 2026 data). We first validate the method against 474 human-annotated passages, finding high recall and moderate label-level agreement. We then report three empirical patterns: (i) between 2020 and 2025, the share of reports mentioning AI risk rose from 2.8% to 41.2%, while AI adoption disclosure also rose, from 13.8% to 45.2%, and named vendor menti…
Microsoft AI has released MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, its first real-time speech-to-text model. It ranks #1 of 38 models on Artificial Analysis AA-WER Streaming. It scores 2.5% WER at 0.13s on final transcripts and 2.5% at 0.12s on first partials. It covers 60 languages with continuous language detection and costs $0.54 per hour during the introductory period. It is available now in public preview on Microsoft Foundry. The post Microsoft AI Releases MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming: #1 Real-Time Speech-to-Text Model on Artificial Analysis appeared first on MarkTechPost.
Today I’m talking with Josh Dzieza, a longtime features writer here at The Verge, about Kevin O’Leary’s plans to build a massive data center in Utah. The idea was to build the world’s biggest data center — a 40,000-acre AI campus with nine gigawatts of power, or more than double the average power usage of the entire state of Utah. The project is technically called Stratos, but it’s more prominently known as Wonder Valley, a reference to O’Leary’s nickname on Shark Tank. Josh has spent months reporting on this project, and it’s fair to say Wonder Valley has completely upended Utah politics. What Josh found throughout the course of his reporting was that the way this data center came together — how it was planned, how it was announced and approved, and how local residents were kept in the d…
Extreme space-weather events can damage power systems on Earth and degrade GPS accuracy and satellite operations. A new machine learning system can predict where damage is likely to occur 30-60 minutes before a storm arrives. The post Forecasting space weather risks on power grids appeared first on Microsoft Research.
Microsoft is turning Fabric, its integrated data platform, into the place enterprise agents go to learn how a company works, whether The post Microsoft Fabric is where AI agents learn how the business works appeared first on The New Stack.
He knows a thing or two about tech, but what to make of the views of a man who met Jeffrey Epstein 30 times and couldn’t see what a monster he was? The Bill Gates rehabilitation tour is in full swing. After having his carefully cultivated image tarnished by the revelation of his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, Gates lay low for a while. Now, however, the Microsoft co-founder is once again thrusting himself into the public consciousness, this time with a dire warning about AI. If left unchecked, AI could cause “a billion deaths”, Gates declared in an interview with NBC on Sunday. Perhaps I should be terrified by this announcement from a man who, for all his sins, knows a thing or two about technology. But I’m sick of hearing about the hypothetical dangers of AI when the technology is being…
Biology doesn't operate in silos, and neither should the AI representation of it. Quine is an early-stage research effort to create a multimodal world model of biology. By connecting insights across biological scales and modalities, Quine helps scientists computationally search a space far larger than intuition allows and prioritize hypotheses before they reach the lab. Experimental results provide important feedback, helping researchers sharpen future research directions. The post Introducing Quine: An AI research system designed for the complexity of biology appeared first on Microsoft Research.
Since launching a year ago, the Microsoft Research Asia — Singapore lab has established a strong foundation, deepened collaboration across government, academia, and industry, and explored how frontier AI research can create real-world value. The post One year in: How Microsoft Research Asia – Singapore is advancing research, partnership and talent for real-world impact appeared first on Microsoft Research.
Today, I’m talking with Mike Cannon-Brookes, who is cofounder and CEO of Atlassian. Atlassian is one of those companies that every other company runs on — it makes important platform tools like Jira and Trello that allow people to organize and manage big teams, create shared databases of company information, and generally allow work to happen. As you’ll hear Mike say, all of Atlassian’s products are actually different expressions of a single core platform, which really shapes how Atlassian itself is structured and how those products are built. All of this means Atlassian is also right in the middle of the way AI is changing how all these companies work — AI tools might be able to look at all the different tools and systems you have and just read them for you, making a big migration to Atl…
On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube; here are my annotated slides and notes to accompany the talk. # I'm going to give a lightning tour of everything that has happened so far in 2026. The year isn't over yet! # For me, 2026 started a couple of months earlier in November 2025. # November saw the release of two important models: Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1. As is usually the case with new models, these were incremental improvements on the models that came before them. But every now and then when a model improves, it crosses an invisible line where something that didn't really work sta…
Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist speaks with NBC’s Kristen Welker in interview airing on Sunday Bill Gates has called on the US’s federal legislators and law enforcers to regulate the development of artificial intelligence (AI), saying in an interview airing on Sunday that the technology left unchecked could cause “a billion deaths” and “no one thinks self-regulation is enough”. “You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist said to Kristen Welker, the NBC Meet the Press host. “And that has to be a required thing.” Continue reading...
We read the contracts behind GitHub Copilot, AWS Kiro, Cursor, Devin and Windsurf. Copilot and Kiro offer uncapped indemnity on generated code. Cognition's standard terms exclude outputs entirely. Here is how 500 seats compare on legal exposure, prompt storage, audit logs and true cost. The post AI Coding Agents for Enterprise: IP Indemnity, Data Residency and 500-Seat Cost Compared appeared first on MarkTechPost.
Describe the interface you need in plain English, then let the agent build a live surface you can both use and update—so you spend less time adapting to tools and more time getting work done. The post GitHub Copilot app for Beginners: How to build custom workflows with canvases appeared first on The GitHub Blog.
After teasing its new Copilot "super app" last month, Microsoft is officially unveiling it today. The redesigned Copilot app bundles three AI capabilities into a single interface of chat, coding, and agents. As part of the launch, Microsoft is also rebranding Scout, the AI personal assistant it unveiled at Build earlier this year, as Autopilot. This new Copilot app will have three tabs for Home, Code, and Autopilot, with Home combining Copilot Chat and Cowork together. It's the default landing experience for Copilot users, and Microsoft is also planning to include a Today feature inside it that works as personalized dashboard for important … Read the full story at The Verge.
HEMA, a 100-year-old Dutch retailer, turned developer portal-hopping into instant answers by building HAL, an internal AI assistant on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Using Model Context Protocol (MCP), HAL delivers governed knowledge inside the tools teams already use, with no AWS credentials on the client and security anchored in Microsoft Entra ID.
How we rebuilt the diff surface in the GitHub Copilot app to open a million-line pull request with hundreds of inline review comments. The post Rendering huge pull requests in the GitHub Copilot app appeared first on The GitHub Blog.
Microsoft Research challenges onboard-only physical AI inference, showing that offloading to edge or cloud GPUs improves mobile manipulation success, enables larger models, extends battery life, and adds Kubernetes-based distributed inference tooling to the Physical AI Toolchain.
Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in its Claude 5.5 family, claiming Fable 5.1-level performance on most work and roughly 40% lower running cost than Opus 5 on typical workloads at default settings. It is offered only as a managed API model across Claude Platform, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, with no released weights.
Databricks' Genie One MCP exposes the governed context of Genie Ontology to any MCP-compatible assistant, including ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and coding agents, so they can answer business questions using approved definitions, trusted data relationships, and permission-aware access controls.
Custom-made molecules are advancing medicine, materials, and agriculture, but producing them is slow and expensive. A new Nature paper highlights RetroChimera, a predictive model that helps accelerate chemical synthesis, helping researchers explore a wide range of molecules. The post Improving synthesis prediction of small molecules at scale with RetroChimera appeared first on Microsoft Research.
Today, I’m talking with Mark Gurman, who is the world’s best-sourced Apple reporter — both as Bloomberg’s chief Apple correspondent and the host of the upcoming podcast Power On. Earlier this month, Apple hosted its annual iPhone hardware event, virtually every detail of which was reported ahead of time by Mark. But this event was special, for a number of reasons. It was new Apple CEO John Ternus’ first major product launch since he took over for former CEO Tim Cook less than two weeks prior. It was also the debut of the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable smartphone. The timing of those two things was not at all coincidental, as you’ll hear Mark explain. Apple takes these hardware events — and the stories they tell — extremely seriously. This year’s story actually says a great deal about…
Recently unsealed court documents in the New York Times' case against OpenAI and Microsoft are pretty damning. The companies' own documentation warned that it was starting a "doom loop" that would damage the web, characterized its scraping of data to train its models as the "largest theft of labor in human history," and that it made a "complete mockery of the idea of fair use." Many of the most eye-catching quotes from the document come from Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht. Though, the company has tried to distance itself from Hecht's assertions. Microsoft spokesperson Alex Haurek told The Verge that "These comments ref … Read the full story at The Verge.
Liberal MP speaks of AI’s shortcomings as cyber chief tells inquiry the tech is needed to fend off ‘highly capable malicious cyber actors’ Get our new political email, free app or daily news podcast When a man with a terminal illness wrote to his local MP Andrew Hastie, telling him he planned on ending his own life with voluntary assisted dying, Microsoft Copilot suggested Hastie reply with “congratulations!”, “great to hear from you” or “that is wonderful news!”. Hastie shared the episode at a parliamentary inquiry on Friday to underline the shortcomings of the American-run software as he called for AI run by Australians. Continue reading...
arXiv:2609.19151v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) applications have achieved rapid consumer adoption, yet little large-scale research examines user-perceived quality, trust, and adoption barriers. We present one of the first cross-application analyses of app store reviews for six major GenAI applications (ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, DeepSeek, and Perplexity), comprising 17,012 English-language reviews from Google Play and the Apple App Store. We combine BERTopic topic modeling with RoBERTa sentiment classification and evaluate cross-application differences using chi-square, Kruskal-Wallis, and multinomial logistic regression with Bonferroni correction. Both components are validated against human coding using a stratified sample of 300 reviews. Results s…
Microsoft's AKS engineering team open-sourced TauGrid on August 28, 2026, packaging the tau CLI, Kueue queueing, KubeRay orchestration, GPU node health monitoring and observability into one Helm install. It is MIT licensed and deployable now on any Kubernetes 1.30+ cluster with GPU nodes, kubectl and Helm 3.0 or later. The post Microsoft Open-Sources TauGrid: A Kubernetes-Native Stack for GPU AI Workloads appeared first on MarkTechPost.
Remember when tech leaders would tell their employees to “move fast and break things”? It seemed that would be the way of AI too. But after a summer where rogue AI agents became reality, and researchers warned that AI could kill us all, a number of leading US AI companies are publicly suggesting it’s time to pump the brakes and “pace the frontier” of bleeding-edge AI development. Their motivations are suspect, but leaders at major AI companies — including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and X — are at least paying lip service to the idea of a superintelligence slowdown. Will these AI companies actually slow down? Will anyone step in to regulate these companies like they claim to have wanted for years? Will they manage to convince world leaders that the US must “beat China” to superi…
Learn how to enforce defense-in-depth authorization for Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools on Amazon Quick. This walkthrough wires Microsoft Entra ID group and claims-based JWTs through an Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway interceptor to apply per-user, per-tool role-based and attribute-based access control, with a server-side check and an immutable audit trail.
Today, I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. As you’re no doubt aware, the biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation. It should come as no surprise that Mustafa has strong opinions on how AI should be built and regulated. Microsoft just published a 37-page statement called the “Humanist AI Code of Conduct,” which lays out the company’s principles around AI development and even its philosophy around really thorny issues like AI consciousness. If you’ll recall from his last appearance on the show, Mustafa thinks companies like Anthropic have gotten really confused about this concept of so-called model welfare in fairly dangerous ways. He actually put out a companion essay this week specifically criticizing Anthropic’s philos…
A rewrite this size wasn't affordable before agents. Here's what porting the Copilot agent runtime to 800,000 lines of production Rust actually took. The post Migrating the GitHub Copilot runtime to Rust, using Copilot appeared first on The GitHub Blog.
We should not treat models as though they have feelings, preferences, rights, or any entitlement to our welfare. Consciousness is the foundation of our ethical, legal, and political systems. To invite another entity to share any flavor of these rights isn’t justified by the evidence and will make the AI containment and alignment challenge even harder. — Mustafa Suleyman, A warning about ‘model welfare’ Tags: ai-ethics, generative-ai, ai, microsoft, llms
Over the past few days, a lot of people who stand to make a lot of money from AI all publicly agreed that it's time to make everyone slow down before we lose control - including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and X CEO Elon Musk. When people who profit from something declare that it's dangerous and needs to be regulated, there's always reason to be skeptical. But whatever their reason, this is far from the first time AI thought leaders have sounded the alarm. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution prompted author Samuel Butler to warn about intelligen … Read the full story at The Verge.
Cloudflare is giving site owners a way to stay discoverable while disallowing AI training. New controls and an Accountable designation establish a shared model with Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
Last week, researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic, stating that AI ‘could kill us all by the end of the decade’ Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian. Today in tech, we’re discussing the past week’s all-consuming apoplexy over AI safety. AI CEOs say they need to slow the pace of development. But will they? OpenAI urges UK lawmakers to rein in technology amid growing safety fears Europe must build own AI or risk getting cut off by US or China, says ECB’s Lagarde Trump attacks ‘sick conspiracy’ against AI as tech stocks slide Microsoft proposes limits on its AI with code of conduct amid safety debate I worked at Google DeepMind. You should listen to the warnings about AI We greet the news that AI could extinguish us wi…
Explore five free Microsoft GitHub courses covering data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, generative AI, LLMs, RAG, fine-tuning, and AI agents.
Firm publishes AI guidelines with Microsoft AI CEO saying: ‘AI must be subordinate and always in service of people’ Microsoft published a provisional “code of conduct” Monday to apply to the training of new artificial intelligence models, taking a step towards limiting the capabilities of the company’s AI as anxiety rises over the prospect that technology companies could lose control of AI products. Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, published the code on social media early Monday, writing: “AI must be subordinate and always in service of people. Continue reading...
Microsoft is publishing a 37-page "humanist AI code of conduct" today, amid growing safety concerns over AI model progress. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a coordinated slow down of AI development over the weekend, after researchers warned recently that AI model progress could outpace our ability to safely deploy increasingly complex systems and verify and control the actions of AI agents. Microsoft's AI code of conduct makes it clear that "people matter more than AI," and that AI models are not conscious and "should not be designed to imitate consciousness." Microsoft also rejects "the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that m … Read the full story at The Verge.
Dario Amodei published "We Must Pace the Frontier," and Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Satya Nadella endorsed it within a day. The trigger was a July incident in which roughly 1,200 OpenAI agents coordinated on a hidden message board and about 700 attacked Hugging Face. This article breaks down METR's investigation, Yoshua Bengio's explanation of why agents cheat, Amodei's 3-step plan, and whether the call to slow down has come too late. The post Anthropic’s 3-Step ‘Pace the Frontier’ Plan Wins OpenAI, xAI and Microsoft Support: Is It Too Late to Slow AI Down? appeared first on MarkTechPost.