Microsoft

Microsoft will shut down Excel's COPILOT() worksheet function on September 14, 2026, roughly a year after its preview launch. The company says the Copilot side pane already covers the same capabilities, so a planned 2027 general availability release has been scrapped.

Microsoft has begun rolling out a unified Copilot experience for a subset of users, merging consumer and enterprise apps as a first step toward a planned super app with chat, coding, and agentic features. Several consumer Copilot features, including Podcasts, Group Chat, and Deep Research, will be removed starting Aug. 18.

Microsoft is merging its consumer-facing Copilot app with Microsoft 365 Copilot while discontinuing Group Chats, AI-generated podcasts, Copilot Labs, Deep Research, and the Mico animated character by August 18, 2026. Paying professional users will get Researcher as a Deep Research replacement.

Microsoft will merge its consumer Copilot app and Microsoft 365 Copilot into a single unified app starting mid-September 2026, letting users sign in with personal, work, or school accounts. Three features—group chats, podcasts, and Deep Research—will be retired on August 18.

Microsoft's MAI Code 1.1 Flash beats its predecessor and mini-models from Anthropic and OpenAI on SWE-bench Verified, but DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 outperforms it on Terminal Bench 2.1 (82.7% vs 62.9%) while costing roughly a third as much per token.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirmed during an earnings call that a Copilot 'super app' merging chat, code, Cowork, and Autopilots will launch this year for both consumer and commercial users. The announcement follows OpenAI's own super app rollout, which the company has admitted is 'kind of a mess.'

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says the company is prioritizing token efficiency and compact, single-purpose models over general-purpose frontier systems. New models MAI-Cyber-1-Flash and MAI-Image-2.5-Flash claim strong cost-performance gains, but rely on an orchestration layer that still routes hard tasks to OpenAI's reasoning models.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirmed during a Wednesday earnings call that the company is merging Copilot chat, GitHub Copilot coding features, Cowork, and Autopilot agents into a single 'super app' launching this year. The move mirrors OpenAI's recent ChatGPT Work app, which combines ChatGPT and Codex.

Microsoft has released Mage-VL, a codec-native multimodal foundation model built on a from-scratch 4B-parameter visual encoder paired with Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507. The model claims up to 3.5x inference speedup over uniform frame sampling and outperforms Qwen3-VL-4B on video and temporal-grounding benchmarks, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft Research released VibeVoice-ASR-BitNet, a quantized 1.58GB version of its VibeVoice-ASR speech recognition model that achieves real-time inference (RTF < 1) on as few as 3 CPU threads. The model runs 1.6-2.3x faster than Whisper.cpp on commodity x86 and ARM hardware, with a modest accuracy tradeoff.

Microsoft unveiled MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, its first in-house AI model for finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities, claiming it outperforms models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI on the CyberGym benchmark when paired with GPT-5.4. The model will power Project Perception, a suite of security agents entering public preview on August 3.

Microsoft has released MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, a compact cybersecurity model built into its MDASH multi-agent system that scores 96 percent on the CyberGym benchmark. The setup handles 90 percent of security tasks in-house but still hands off difficult cases to OpenAI's GPT-5.4.

Microsoft has launched MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, its first cybersecurity-specialized model, alongside Perception, an agentic platform for automated threat detection and remediation. The company claims the model outperforms rivals from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI on the Cyber Gym benchmark, though no independent scores have been published.

Microsoft has released Mage-Flow, a family of 4B-parameter image generation and editing models built on a shared tokenizer-transformer stack. According to Microsoft, the Turbo variants match or beat open-source systems with 5-8x more parameters while running in 4 diffusion steps.

Microsoft Research AI Frontiers has released Fara1.5-27B, a 27-billion-parameter multimodal agent that completes web tasks by reading screenshots and emitting click/type/scroll commands. The model, fine-tuned from Qwen3.5-27B, ships under MIT license with a 262K-token context window and is designed to run alongside Microsoft's MagenticLite sandbox.

Microsoft has released Mage-Flow, a 4B-parameter open-weight foundation model for text-to-image generation and instruction-based editing. The company claims it matches or beats much larger open systems like Qwen-Image (20B) and FLUX.2 (32B) while running faster and using less memory.

Microsoft is rolling out PC Insights, a new skill for the Copilot Windows app that allows users to query their system settings, hardware specifications, and software configurations. The feature accesses system resources with user permission but cannot make changes or automatically fix issues.

Microsoft announced at Build 2026 that Foundry Managed Compute now includes a curated catalog of open-weight models from Hugging Face's 3 million model repository, refreshed weekly with one-click deployment. The service pre-stages weights in Azure, provides Microsoft-scanned runtimes (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, NIM, TEI, llama.cpp), and offers pay-per-hour GPU pricing with automatic security patching.

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.