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.

GitHub published a guide showing how four Agent Apps can handle scoping, security review, rollout, and shipping of features directly inside GitHub, without switching tools. The post frames Agent Apps as a way to consolidate software delivery workflow steps into the GitHub platform.

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'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.

Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel have released Agent Plugins, an open standard defining a single package format for AI agent extensions. Version 1.0.0 covers Agent Skills and MCP servers, but leaves marketplaces, permissions, and runtime out of scope.

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.

Perplexity has launched Personal Computer for Windows, extending its agentic AI tool beyond Mac to work directly across local files, Microsoft Office 365, and the web. The tool is rolling out now to Max and Enterprise Max subscribers on plans starting at $200 per month.

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 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.

OpenAI has designated its newly launched GPT-5.6 as the 'preferred model' for Microsoft 365 Copilot, powering Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Cowork. The announcement comes days after Bloomberg reported Microsoft is increasingly deploying its in-house MAI models to reduce reliance on OpenAI and cut costs.

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.

GitHub has released the redesigned terminal interface for GitHub Copilot CLI to general availability. The update, previewed at Microsoft Build 2026, introduces a tabbed layout for working with GitHub directly from the command line.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

Microsoft is updating Edge to let Copilot read and analyze content across all open browser tabs simultaneously. The update includes AI-generated podcasts from tabs, study mode with quizzes, and long-term conversation memory.

AWS has added OpenAI's latest models, Codex, and a new managed agents service to its Bedrock platform, one day after OpenAI revised its agreement with Microsoft. The integration follows OpenAI's up-to-$50 billion deal with Amazon.

GitHub has paused new subscriptions for Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student plans due to compute capacity constraints. The company cites agentic workflows as consuming significantly more resources than its original pricing structure anticipated, forcing tighter usage limits and a shift away from flat-rate billing.

GitHub has announced changes to its Copilot Individual subscription plans, citing the need for reliability and predictability for existing customers. The company has not yet disclosed specific details about pricing adjustments, feature modifications, or implementation timelines.

Microsoft has added track changes monitoring, comment management, and table of contents insertion to Copilot in Word. The features run on Microsoft's "Work IQ" adaptation layer and are currently available only through the Office Insiders Beta Channel Frontier program on Windows.

Microsoft is testing OpenClaw-style autonomous agents for 365 Copilot that would run continuously to complete tasks on behalf of users, according to The Information. The company plans to demonstrate some features at its Build conference on June 2nd.