Microsoft

GitHub has added the Microsoft C++ Language Server as a plugin to the Copilot CLI marketplace. The plugin includes a built-in setup skill designed to automate C++ project configuration.

Microsoft is evaluating a self-hosted version of DeepSeek V3 to power Copilot Cowork as agent costs spiral. The company plans to launch a lower-cost tier within weeks while moving to usage-based pricing, charging enterprises for actual compute consumed rather than flat fees.

Microsoft released FastContext-1.0, a lightweight repository-exploration subagent for LLM coding agents spanning 4B to 30B parameters. The model reduced main-agent token consumption by up to 60% while improving end-to-end resolution rates by up to 5.5% on SWE-bench Pro when integrated with agents like GPT-5.4 and GLM-5.1.

Microsoft has restricted internal employee access to Anthropic's newly released Claude Fable 5 model while its legal teams evaluate the company's new data retention requirements. The model requires storing prompts and outputs for 30 days to operate safety classifiers, with some content potentially retained for up to two years if flagged for policy violations.

Microsoft announced two new language models: MAI-Thinking-1, a 35B parameter reasoning model available to select early partners, and MAI-Code-1-Flash, a 5B parameter coding model rolling out to GitHub Copilot individual users in VS Code. Both models were trained on commercially licensed data without distillation from third-party models.

Microsoft released ASSERT (Adaptive Spec-driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing), an open-source framework that converts natural language descriptions of expected AI behavior into structured test cases. The tool addresses a gap in AI evaluation by testing application-specific behaviors that general benchmarks cannot capture.

Microsoft released seven AI models at Build 2026, headlined by MAI-Thinking-1, its first reasoning model with 35 billion parameters. The company claims the model matches Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE Bench Pro coding benchmarks and beats Sonnet 4.61 in blind tests.

Microsoft announced two proprietary AI models at its Build developer conference: MAI-Code-1 for code generation and MAI-Thinking-1 for reasoning tasks. The models are designed to run on Azure infrastructure, allowing Microsoft to reduce costs from its $13 billion OpenAI investment while competing directly with Anthropic and Google.

Microsoft announced MAI-Thinking-1, its first advanced reasoning AI model, at Build 2026. The company claims it's a medium-sized model matching leading models on key software engineering benchmarks, trained from scratch without distillation from third-party models.

Microsoft has launched Scout, an AI assistant built on the OpenClaw framework that operates across Microsoft 365. The system requires a GitHub Copilot subscription and includes policy conformance checks with audit trails to address security concerns about autonomous AI agents.

GitHub announced a new Copilot desktop application at Microsoft Build 2026. The standalone app introduces what the company calls an "agent-native" interface designed to integrate AI agents into developer workflows.

Microsoft will announce MAI-Thinking-1 at its Build conference on June 2, 2026, according to sources cited by The Verge. The model is Microsoft's first reasoning model and was not trained using distillation from other AI models. The company will also reveal MAI-Image-2.5 and MAI-Image-2.5-Flash image models, along with a new developer-optimized Windows 11 experience.

Microsoft is ending GitHub Copilot's flat-rate subscription model in favor of token-based billing starting June 1. Some developers report monthly costs rising from approximately $29-50 to $750-3,000, while others claim the increases only affect inefficient "vibe-coders" who iterate excessively without clear direction.

Microsoft has rolled out a visual overhaul for Copilot in Microsoft 365, replacing the colorful interface with a predominantly black-and-white, text-forward design. The redesign, aimed at making the AI assistant feel "present but not imposing," includes a new adaptive prompt surface and consistent side panel placement across Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

Microsoft is rolling out a redesigned Microsoft 365 Copilot that loads twice as fast, according to the company. The update introduces "progressive disclosure" — showing tools and controls contextually based on prompts rather than displaying all options at once.

Microsoft released Lens, a 3.8-parameter foundational text-to-image model trained on Lens-800M, an 800 million image-text corpus with GPT-4.1 captions. The model uses a 48-block MMDiT denoiser with FLUX.2 latents and supports generation up to 1440×1440 resolution across aspect ratios from 1:2 to 2:1.

Microsoft has released Lens-Turbo, a 3.8B-parameter foundational text-to-image model designed for efficient training and fast generation. The model was trained on Lens-800M, an 800 million image-text corpus with GPT-4.1 captions, and supports resolutions up to 1440×1440 with 4-step distilled inference.

Microsoft Research has released Fara-7B, a 7-billion parameter small language model designed for computer automation tasks. The model, which took 2.5 days to train on 64 H100 GPUs, can navigate websites to complete tasks like booking restaurants and shopping, using screenshots as input with a 128K token context window.

Microsoft is removing Claude Code access from its Experiences + Devices division by June 30, 2026, redirecting thousands of engineers to GitHub Copilot CLI instead. The decision follows six months of Claude Code proving more popular than Microsoft's own coding tool among internal developers.

Microsoft Edge mobile version 148 and higher integrates six AI-powered features from its desktop version, including the ability to summarize multiple tabs simultaneously, generate podcasts from web pages, and recall browsing history for continued conversations. The update also adds a Journeys feature that tracks research topics and a Study and Learn mode for interactive quizzes.