Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (left, in a 2017 Microsoft photo) and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (right, at Stanford in April 2026). Image: Satya Nadella: Brian Smale and Microsoft (CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons); Jensen Huang: Anders Eidesvik (CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Microsoft says Copilot will soon be able to read the files on your Windows PC and take actions for you across the operating system. The company announced the change at a Windows and Surface event in San Francisco on Wednesday, alongside a new sandbox that keeps AI agents fenced in and the first laptops built on Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip.
Nvidia is Microsoft’s partner in the push, and its chief executive Jensen Huang joined Satya Nadella on stage. Microsoft calls the idea “hybrid intelligence”: AI that runs on your own PC, on chips like Nvidia’s, when it can and reaches for the cloud when it needs to.
What Copilot will do on your PC
On Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft says Copilot is getting three local abilities. With your permission it can use “local context”, meaning the files and recent activity on your PC. It can take “local actions”, such as organising files, running device diagnostics, troubleshooting problems, writing code and carrying out workflows on the machine. And it can hand some jobs to AI models running on the PC itself, which Microsoft pitches as a way to make your tokens go further.
The changes apply across the new Copilot Microsoft launched last month, including its always-on Autopilot agent. Copilot chief Jacob Andreou showed Autopilot answering an email from his accountant by finding his tax documents in different folders, renaming them, zipping them up and drafting a reply with the file attached.
Microsoft says these features are “expected to begin rolling out on Copilot+ PCs in the coming months”. It hasn’t given a date or said which countries get them first.
A sandbox for agents, built into Windows
The other big announcement is Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), now generally available on Windows 11. MXC lets developers and IT teams set which files and network destinations an agent can reach, and Windows enforces those rules while the agent runs. Microsoft says in a developer post that “an agent cannot be its own security authority”: the policy sits outside the agent, so it can’t grant itself more access.
That is the problem behind stories like the Claude user whose agent wiped his C: drive this week. MXC offers several levels of isolation, from a light process sandbox up to a separate Windows session with its own desktop and clipboard, a Linux container through WSL and an experimental virtual machine.
Microsoft says Codex from OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, OpenClaw, Replit, LM Studio, Nvidia’s OpenShell and Unsloth already support MXC, and that Anthropic’s Claude Code, Perplexity, Manus and Nous Research’s Hermes Agent are among those adding it. Meta’s Muse is also coming to Windows as a native app with MXC built in.
Windows and Devices chief Pavan Davuluri said:
We are building these primitives directly into Windows, so agents can be secured, observed and governed.
Pavan Davuluri, EVP, Windows and Devices, Microsoft
“It is now your personal assistant”
Nadella and Huang made the case together in a fireside chat. “We needed to make the desktop the most secure place for agents to execute,” Nadella said. Huang compared MXC to DirectX, the Windows graphics layer games are built on, and said an agent that lives on your own machine changes what a PC is for:
What happens in the era of agents, when the agent is on your computer? It is now your personal assistant.
Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia
Surface Laptop Ultra and the RTX Spark PCs
The hardware is where Nvidia comes in. RTX Spark, first shown in June, pairs a Blackwell GPU with up to 6,144 cores and a Grace Arm CPU with up to 20 cores, with up to 128GB of memory shared between them. Microsoft says the Surface Laptop Ultra can run AI models of more than 120 billion parameters on the device.
- Surface Laptop Ultra: 15-inch touchscreen, from $2,599, on pre-order now from Microsoft.com and selected retailers worldwide, available from October 16.
- Surface RTX Spark Dev Box: a mini PC for developers at $5,999, US only through Microsoft.com, shipping in November.
- Other RTX Spark PCs: pre-orders from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI, with compact desktops on sale in November, according to Nvidia.
Microsoft is also bringing its MAI Code 1.1 Flash coding model and DeepSeek V4 Flash to RTX Spark machines to run locally. GitHub’s HydraFusion, which picks a model for each coding task, will start using local models in the GitHub Copilot app, the Copilot CLI and VS Code in an experimental preview later in October.
Why it matters
Microsoft wants Windows to be where AI agents live, and it is pairing more access with more control: Copilot gets your files and the power to act on them, while every agent, including rivals’ from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, can be boxed in by the operating system. Apple is tackling the same worry from the other end, tightening how much of a Mac agents can reach. How well MXC holds up once millions of agents run on it is the real test.
Sources: Windows Experience Blog, Windows Developer Blog, Surface blog, Nvidia, The Verge (Andreou demo).
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