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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 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 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 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 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.

OpenAI has integrated ChatGPT into Microsoft PowerPoint, allowing users to generate and edit presentation slides using natural language prompts. The feature is available in public beta to both free tier users and ChatGPT Business subscribers.

GitHub is piloting an experimental accessibility agent that uses AI to help users with disabilities navigate software interfaces. The company disclosed the project in a technical blog post detailing lessons learned during development.

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 CEO Satya Nadella disclosed that M365 Copilot has reached 20 million paid enterprise seats during the company's quarterly earnings call. Weekly engagement now matches Outlook usage levels, with queries per user up 20% quarter-over-quarter.

Microsoft's GitHub is ending flat-rate billing for Copilot on June 1, 2026, switching to usage-based metered tokens after acknowledging the request-based model is no longer sustainable. Copilot Pro subscribers ($10/month) will receive 1,000 GitHub AI Credits monthly, with each credit worth $0.01.

GitHub Copilot transitions to token-based pricing effective June 1, 2026, replacing its premium request unit system. Base subscription prices remain unchanged at $10/month for Pro and $39/month for Pro+, but users now receive equivalent monthly AI Credits that deplete with usage—and service stops when credits run out.

Microsoft has pushed agentic Copilot features into general availability across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The AI assistant can now make direct edits to documents, spreadsheets, and presentations rather than just suggesting changes from a sidebar.

Microsoft is rolling out Agent Mode as the default Copilot experience in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint this week for all Microsoft 365 Copilot and Premium subscribers. The feature, previously called 'vibe working,' allows the AI to execute multi-step edits directly in documents with real-time visibility into each action.

Microsoft is testing OpenClaw-like features for Microsoft 365 Copilot aimed at enterprise customers, the company confirmed to The Information. The agent would run continuously to complete multi-step tasks over extended periods, distinguishing it from Microsoft's existing cloud-based agents like Copilot Cowork and Copilot Tasks.

Anthropic released a Claude add-in for Microsoft Word, completing its integration across all three major Office applications. The Word add-in joins existing Excel and PowerPoint add-ins, allowing Claude to rewrite text, respond to comments, and track changes across Office documents.

Microsoft has begun removing Copilot branding and buttons from Windows 11 applications including Notepad and Snipping Tool, replacing them with generic icons like a pen symbol. The underlying AI-powered features remain functional but are now labeled as "writing tools" rather than Copilot. This follows user complaints about forced Copilot integration and inconsistent experiences across apps.

Microsoft is removing Copilot buttons from Windows 11 apps including Notepad, Snipping Tool, Photos, and Widgets as part of a broader effort to reduce "unnecessary Copilot entry points." The underlying AI features remain intact, with Notepad's Copilot button replaced by a "writing tools" menu that retains the same AI-powered functionality.

Microsoft's Bing team has open-sourced Harrier, a 27-billion-parameter embedding model that supports over 100 languages and features a 131,072-token context window. The model ranks first on the MTEB v2 multilingual benchmark, outperforming proprietary offerings from OpenAI and Amazon, and is available on Hugging Face under the MIT license.

Microsoft released public preview versions of three proprietary AI models: MAI-Transcribe-1 for speech recognition across 25 languages at 50% lower GPU cost than alternatives, MAI-Voice-1 for speech synthesis generating 60 seconds of audio in under a second, and MAI-Image-2 for text-to-image generation. The models are available exclusively through Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and already power Copilot, Bing, and PowerPoint.

Microsoft AI released three foundational models on April 2: MAI-Transcribe-1 for speech-to-text across 25 languages, MAI-Voice-1 for audio generation, and MAI-Image-2 for video generation. The company positions these models as cheaper alternatives to Google and OpenAI offerings. Models are available on Microsoft Foundry with pricing starting at $0.36 per hour for transcription.

Microsoft has released MAI-Transcribe-1, a speech-to-text model that achieves the lowest word error rate on the FLEURS benchmark across 25 languages, outperforming Whisper-large-V3, GPT-Transcribe, and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. The model runs 2.5 times faster than Microsoft's previous Azure Fast offering and costs $0.36 per audio hour.

Microsoft released the Harrier-OSS embedding model family, comprising three variants with 270M, 600M, and 27B parameters. The largest model achieves 74.3 on the Multilingual MTEB v2 benchmark. All models support 32,768 max tokens and multilingual inputs across 40+ languages.

GitHub has disabled Copilot's ability to insert promotional tips into pull requests following developer backlash. The feature, which injected Raycast ads into over 11,400 pull requests without explicit developer consent, was enabled when Copilot was mentioned in PRs it didn't create. GitHub's product manager acknowledged the decision was a mistake.

Microsoft has released Harrier-OSS-v1, a family of multilingual text embedding models trained with contrastive learning and knowledge distillation. The 0.6B parameter variant achieves a 69.0 score on the Multilingual MTEB v2 benchmark with support for 32,768 token context windows and 45+ languages.

Microsoft is expanding Copilot Cowork availability and introducing a Critique function that enables one AI model to review another's output. The update also includes a new Researcher agent claiming best-in-class deep research performance, outperforming Perplexity by 7 points, and a Model Council feature for direct model comparison.

Microsoft has enabled its Copilot Researcher tool to simultaneously leverage OpenAI's GPT and Anthropic's Claude through two new features: Critique, which uses GPT responses refined by Claude, and Model Council, which displays side-by-side outputs with agreement/disagreement analysis. Both features are rolling out in the Microsoft 365 Copilot Frontier early access program.

GitHub will use Copilot interaction data from Free, Pro, and Pro+ plan users to train AI models starting April 24, 2026, unless users actively opt out. The policy does not affect Copilot Business and Enterprise customers. Data shared will include prompts, outputs, code snippets, filenames, and repository structures.

Stability AI's Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large model is now available through Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, giving businesses integrated access to professional-grade image generation within Azure's ecosystem. The deployment expands SD3.5 Large's availability across major cloud platforms.

Microsoft's superintelligence team, led by Mustafa Suleyman, has released MAI-Image-2, a text-to-image generator that currently ranks third on the Arena.ai leaderboard for text-to-image models, behind OpenAI's GPT-Image-1.5 and Google's Nano Banana 2. The model is now available for testing in the MAI Playground and will roll out to Copilot and Bing Image Creator, with API access opening to all developers through Microsoft Foundry.

Microsoft announced Friday it will reduce Copilot AI integrations across Windows 11, removing the assistant from Photos, Widgets, Notepad, and Snipping Tool. The move reflects what the company calls a shift toward integrating AI "where it's most meaningful" and comes amid growing consumer skepticism about AI features.

Microsoft has launched Copilot Health, an AI-powered tool designed to integrate fitness data from 50+ devices, medical records from 50,000+ US healthcare providers, and health history into unified summaries. The company plans to charge for access via subscription after a free trial period, though pricing remains undisclosed.

Microsoft has launched Copilot Health, a separate space within Copilot designed to aggregate electronic health records and wearable data for personalized health insights. The service explicitly disclaims providing medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment—positioning itself as a wellness tool rather than clinical decision support.

OpenAI is building an internal alternative to GitHub, Microsoft's dominant code collaboration platform, according to The Information. The move marks OpenAI's entry into developer tools and could create tension with its largest investor, Microsoft.

OpenAI has closed the largest private financing round in history, raising up to $110 billion. Amazon is investing up to $50 billion as a strategic partner. The funding amount closely matches OpenAI's newly updated $111 billion cash burn forecast.

Microsoft is previewing Copilot Tasks, an AI feature that automates routine work by running on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure rather than your device. Users can describe tasks in natural language and schedule them to run on a recurring, one-time, or scheduled basis across browsers and applications.

Microsoft's technical report systematically evaluates methods to distinguish authentic media from AI-generated content and finds none are reliably effective on their own. The findings contradict regulatory assumptions underlying new laws designed to combat deepfakes and synthetic media.

Microsoft is developing a new authentication and verification system designed to help users distinguish authentic content from AI-generated material circulating online. The initiative addresses the growing problem of AI-enabled deception now prevalent across social media and digital platforms.