Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI.
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic have agreed to honour a single new line in a website’s robots.txt file that says “don’t train your AI on this”, so site owners will no longer have to block each company’s crawler one by one. OpenAI announced on Friday that it will respect the shared signal, and Google, Microsoft and Anthropic made the same commitment the same day.
North Korea’s state hackers have made AI a routine part of their work, using it to build fake job applicants, churn out phishing lures by the dozen and help write malware, Microsoft Threat Intelligence said on Thursday. It rates the country’s overall adoption of AI as “high” and says three of its hacking groups now use it across their entire operations.
Microsoft says its AI diagnostic system got the right answer on 83% of medicine’s hardest published cases, more than double the score of doctors given the same cases. The results, for a system called MAI-DxO, appeared on Thursday in a peer-reviewed paper in Science, and Microsoft presents it as a step towards “medical superintelligence”, the goal its AI chief Mustafa Suleyman has set for the company.
Bill Gates says the world should brace for about two decades of upheaval as AI takes over more of the work people do, and that some people may respond by opting out. “Even in the very best case of how we manage AI, this is going to be as tumultuous a period as there’s been in human history,” the Microsoft cofounder told Nilay Patel on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, published on Thursday, October 22.
A Chinese state-aligned hacking group used an AI agent system to go after hundreds of organisations around the world, and turned a trusted backup app into a way into its customers’ Microsoft 365 accounts, Microsoft Threat Intelligence said on Wednesday. In several attacks, Microsoft says, the group went from first picking a target to privileged access in its cloud in less than three hours.
A geometry problem that has beaten mathematicians since 1995 may finally be solved, and the two researchers behind the proof say a team of AI agents did much of the legwork. Microsoft Research senior researcher Xinzhi Zhang said on Wednesday that she and Zhao Song, listed on the paper as an independent researcher, have proved the Kannan-Lovász-Simonovits (KLS) conjecture in a 140-page paper on arXiv.
The machine Microsoft billed as Britain’s largest supercomputer has lost its main customer before a single chip was switched on. Microsoft has pulled out of its deal to be the anchor tenant at Nscale’s planned AI data centre in Loughton, Essex, the Telegraph reported on Sunday. Microsoft hasn’t commented, and the paper didn’t say why it walked away.
Nvidia’s first Windows laptops built around its own chip went on sale around the world on Friday, and the company is pitching them as PCs that run AI agents and large AI models without the cloud. Nvidia said RTX Spark laptops from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI are available today, starting at $2,599.
Microsoft has built a giant AI model of its own, and it did it without OpenAI. Microsoft AI, the lab run by Mustafa Suleyman, said on Thursday it has finished pre-training MAI-Base-2, a mixture-of-experts model with 2.8 trillion parameters in total, of which 80 billion are active for any given word.
When a fault hits the power grid, a giant AI data centre can vanish from it in an instant, and that sudden loss of demand can push the whole grid off balance. Google, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia now say their AI computers will stay on the line. The four companies published a grid specification through the Open Compute Project (OCP), the industry group for open data centre designs, as Nvidia opened up its next-generation Vera Rubin rack designs at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose on October 12.
Microsoft wants its own chips, not someone else’s GPUs, to run most of its AI. The company unveiled Maia 300 on Monday, the third generation of its in-house AI accelerator, and said it will scale the Maia family to “multi-gigawatt deployments” from 2027, making it “the primary inference system for Microsoft products and services”.
Microsoft has launched Microsoft-Decision-1, an AI model that never writes a sentence. Give it a question and a fixed list of answers, and it hands back a probability for each one, in a single pass. Under the Microsoft name sits a model from China: Microsoft built it by post-training Alibaba’s open-weight Qwen3.5-9B.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella says companies should treat every frontier AI model as a possible insider threat, assume it has already been compromised and keep a brake within reach. He set out the case in an essay titled “Models as Insider Risks in the Super Intelligence Era”, posted on his personal blog, sn scratchpad, on Saturday, October 10.
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.
Hundreds of human contractors working to improve Microsoft’s Copilot are reading users’ image prompts and looking at the photos people upload, 404 Media reported on Monday, citing internal instruction guides, samples of the work and the contractors’ own message boards. Many say they are faced with a steady stream of sexual and disturbing requests.
Microsoft has rebuilt Copilot from the ground up, and it’s betting big on AI agents. The company today unveiled what CEO Satya Nadella calls its “biggest update to Copilot to date”: a redesigned app with an agent called Autopilot that keeps working even when you don’t, a Code tab that builds apps from plain English, and a new Home, Microsoft announced. Nadella set out the ambition on X:
Bill Gates has one of the starkest warnings yet about AI. In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, the Microsoft co-founder said AI is “certainly powerful enough to drive events” that could “cause a billion deaths,” and that the companies building it can’t be left to regulate themselves. NBC released the clip today, ahead of the full interview airing on Sunday.
Microsoft is about to make its Copilot AI assistant a lot cheaper for large companies. According to The Information, the company has authorised its sales teams to offer discounts of 30% to 50% on Copilot subscriptions for corporate customers who buy in bulk, timed to coincide with the launch of its new Copilot “super app.”
