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Microsoft

Topic24 articles · Updated June 22, 2026

Microsoft AI News

Microsoft's AI story: Copilot family launches across Office, GitHub, and Windows; Azure OpenAI and AI Foundry updates; Fortune 500 partnerships; and the strategy behind it.

data-centers
7.3
Jun 22, 2026
Microsoft Signs 20-Year Power Deal With Chevron
Chevron announced a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft to develop a co-located natural-gas-fired facility, Project Kilby, to supply a Microsoft data center campus in Pecos, West Texas. Chevron said the project will deliver approximately 2.67 gigawatts of capacity and will be built in phases, with first power expected by 2028 and a ramp to full capacity over time (Chevron newsroom release, Reuters). Reuters and Microsoft said the campus is expected to expand Microsoft's data center capacity by 2 gigawatts and that the multi-billion-dollar investment could support over 6,000 construction jobs and hundreds of permanent operations roles (Reuters). Chevron and Microsoft named GE Vernova and Solar Turbines/Caterpillar as major equipment suppliers (Chevron; Reuters). Chevron said it expects a final investment decision by the end of this year (Reuters).
Quick Read+8
nvidia
7.0
Jun 22, 2026
NVIDIA and Microsoft unveil RTX Spark AI PC platform
NVIDIA and Microsoft announced RTX Spark, a Windows PC platform built for local AI agents, creative workflows and RTX graphics, unveiled at Computex 2026 on May 31. According to NVIDIA's newsroom release, RTX Spark delivers 1 petaflop of AI performance, up to 128GB of unified memory, a Blackwell GPU with up to 6,144 CUDA/RTX cores and a 20-core Arm-based CPU co-developed with MediaTek, with OEM partners including Microsoft Surface, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Acer and GIGABYTE (NVIDIA Newsroom; Windows Experience Blog). NVIDIA and Microsoft say Adobe is rearchitecting Photoshop and Premiere for the platform (NVIDIA Newsroom). Over 30 laptops and 10 desktops are expected this fall (Tom's Hardware). Jensen Huang said at the announcement: "The PC is being reinvented. For forty years, you launched apps. Click. Type. With RTX Spark and Microsoft Windows, you ask -- and the PC does the work" (NVIDIA Newsroom).
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microsoft
6.2
Jun 21, 2026
Microsoft Auto-Installs Microsoft 365 Copilot on Windows
Microsoft resumed automatic installation of the Microsoft 365 Copilot app on eligible commercial Windows devices starting in June 2026, per Microsoft's MC1152323 admin-center notification and updated deployment documentation. The rollout targets Windows 10 (22H2 or later) and Windows 11 devices with Microsoft 365 desktop apps installed, initially for tenants with Copilot add-on licenses, with completion expected by late July 2026. Enterprise admins can block the install via a 'Disable Microsoft 365 Copilot auto-install' policy introduced in the May 2026 Administrative Templates update; end users can manually remove the app, and Microsoft has committed not to reinstall it for 90 days after manual removal. Neowin and other outlets report that the European Economic Area is exempt under the Digital Markets Act. The resumption follows a March 2026 pause after a configuration error caused installations on unlicensed tenants, and the original October 2025 rollout plan that generated significant user backlash documented by BleepingComputer and others.
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deepseek-v4
7.3
Jun 19, 2026
Microsoft explores DeepSeek V4 for Copilot Cowork costs
Microsoft is shifting Copilot Cowork to usage-based pricing and is exploring a lower-cost model option, according to reporting by Axios and follow-ups. Axios reports Microsoft told the outlet it is testing a fine-tuned, self-hosted version of DeepSeek V4 or another open-source model as a cheaper alternative to the Anthropic and OpenAI models currently used. Axios also reports Microsoft expects to make a lower-cost model available in the coming weeks. Reporting by Axios and The Next Web says any DeepSeek option would be optional for customers and would be hosted on Azure, keeping data inside Microsoft's cloud. Reporting by IT之家 (IT Home) provides a token-price comparison, saying Anthropic's latest flagship model costs about $50 per million tokens while DeepSeek V4 Pro costs about $0.87 per million tokens, a roughly 57x price gap.
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microsoft
7.2
Jun 18, 2026
Microsoft sells OpenAI models to Chinese firms
Microsoft has established a major commercial business selling OpenAI models to Chinese technology companies, Bloomberg and the Japan Times report. ByteDance is described by people familiar with the matter as Microsoft's largest Chinese AI customer and is on track to spend more than $1 billion a year on Microsoft AI and cloud services, per Bloomberg. Ant Group, Meituan, and Tencent Holdings are also named as significant buyers via Microsoft's Azure cloud. An internal sales transcript cited by the Japan Times shows then-Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff saying Azure AI revenue in China roughly tripled in the fiscal year ended June 2025, after surging approximately 400% the prior year. Microsoft President Brad Smith has said China accounted for about 1.5% of Microsoft's overall revenue in 2024. Anthropic and OpenAI do not sell their models in China; Microsoft and OpenAI declined to comment.
Quick Read+1
microsoft
6.0
Jun 17, 2026
Microsoft Sued Over AI-Related Cloud Spending
Shareholders filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Microsoft, alleging the company concealed slowing growth in its Azure cloud business and the scale of capital spending needed for AI infrastructure, Reuters reports. The complaint was filed in Seattle federal court by the City of St. Clair Shores Police and Fire Retirement System and names CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood as defendants, per Reuters and PYMNTS. The proposed class period runs from May 1, 2025 to January 28, 2026, Reuters says. The filing follows a sharp market reaction after Microsoft issued fiscal second-quarter results in late January, when shares fell 10% and about $357 billion of market value was erased, Reuters reports. For the quarter, Microsoft reported 39% revenue growth in Azure and other cloud businesses, down from 40%, and disclosed $37.5 billion of capital spending, up nearly 66% year over year and above analysts' $34.3 billion projection. The complaint alleges those results were masked by statements attributing slower growth and higher spending to capacity constraints as resources shifted to AI-related R&D and Copilot, per Reuters. Microsoft said the claims are "without merit" and will vigorously defend itself in court, Reuters adds.
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microsoft
6.8
Jun 17, 2026
Microsoft Amends OpenAI Deal, Gains Licensing Flexibility
According to Microsoft's April 27, 2026 blog post, the companies amended their partnership to make Microsoft's license to OpenAI IP non-exclusive, keep Microsoft as OpenAI's primary cloud partner with OpenAI products shipping first on Azure (unless Microsoft cannot or chooses not to support required capabilities), remove Microsoft's obligation to pay a revenue share to OpenAI, and maintain revenue-share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft through 2030 at the same percentage but subject to a total cap. Microsoft's October 28, 2025 blog post put Microsoft's investment in OpenAI Group PBC at roughly $135 billion (about 27 percent on an as-converted basis). Seeking Alpha reports the amended terms improve Microsoft's gross margins and enable non-exclusive licensing and proprietary model development. Editorial analysis: For practitioners, the change widens cloud-choice dynamics for model deployment while leaving Azure primacy intact for first availability, which affects procurement and deployment planning.
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microsoft
7.0
Jun 17, 2026
Microsoft launches Copilot Cowork with pay-as-you-go pricing
AFP reports that Microsoft launched Copilot Cowork on June 16 as generally available, an agentic AI assistant that independently carries out office tasks such as drafting documents, building spreadsheets, and sending emails. The tool requires a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription but moves to usage-based billing -- denominated in Copilot Credits at $0.01 each -- charging per task based on compute consumed. Microsoft calls this its first pricing model change in nearly two decades. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft EVP for Copilot and agents, told AFP the new plan will be "like you're filling up your gas tank at the pump." At general availability, Cowork runs on Anthropic Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6; Frontier customers can also access GPT 5.5. Per Axios, Microsoft is exploring a hosted DeepSeek V4 option as a lower-cost alternative.
Quick Read+3
microsoft
6.9
Jun 16, 2026
Microsoft Considers DeepSeek for Lower-cost Copilot
Axios reports that Microsoft is moving Copilot Cowork to usage-based pricing and is exploring a fine-tuned version of DeepSeek V4, or another open-source model, as a lower-cost option for the enterprise agent. Axios also reports Microsoft expects to make a lower-cost model available in the coming weeks and says the alternative would be optional for customers and fully hosted on Azure, keeping customer data in Microsoft's cloud and under Azure's enterprise security and compliance controls. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president for Copilot, agents and platform, is quoted by Axios: "We have users who do hundreds of tasks a week, which is great - they're way productive - but the consequence is the costs can go very high."
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github
6.5
Jun 16, 2026
GitHub Capacity Surge Pushes Microsoft to AWS
Business Insider, citing two people familiar with the plans, reports that Microsoft has provisioned extra cloud capacity from Amazon Web Services to support GitHub following a series of AI-driven outages and reliability issues. GitHub, which historically operated much of its own infrastructure and had been on track to migrate fully to Microsoft Azure by 2027, has faced sudden and steep demand growth from AI coding tools and autonomous agents. GitHub COO Kyle Daigle confirmed in April 2026 that the platform was processing 275 million commits per week -- on pace for 14 billion in 2026, up from 1 billion for all of 2025. The Register reported nine service incidents on GitHub in May 2026 alone. Business Insider frames the AWS capacity addition as an operational response to immediate infrastructure strain, not a strategic realignment away from Azure.
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frontier-ai
6.2
Jun 15, 2026
Microsoft CEO calls for frontier AI ecosystem
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published an extended post on X arguing that AI success depends on building "frontier ecosystems" rather than relying on individual frontier models. He introduced two complementary assets organizations must develop: human capital (expertise, judgment, relationships, creativity, pattern recognition) and token capital (owned AI capability). Nadella warned that companies passively depending on a handful of general-purpose models risk ceding their institutional knowledge to those models. He called for enterprises to build "agentic systems" and "learning loops" - continuous feedback cycles where human and AI capabilities reinforce and compound together over time. Drawing on the history of globalization, he cautioned that concentrating AI value in a few models could cause political and economic blowback. "Without human direction, you have compute running in circles," Nadella wrote on X.
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ai-safety
6.7
Jun 14, 2026
IMDA and Microsoft sign AI safety MOU
Per a joint media release published on June 12, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and Microsoft signed a Memorandum of Understanding to deepen collaboration on artificial intelligence safety and security (IMDA-Microsoft media release, June 12). The agreement, signed by Kiren Kumar, Deputy Chief Executive of IMDA, and Natasha Crampton, Chief Responsible AI Officer at Microsoft, covers three areas: joint technical and research work on AI safety (including agentic AI and multilingual safety), information sharing of governance frameworks and best practices, and exploratory policy work on trusted access to frontier AI models including a planned white paper on demand- and supply-side considerations (IMDA-Microsoft media release). Reporting by OpenGovAsia and The Independent provides additional summary coverage of the same announcement.
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project-solara
7.1
Jun 14, 2026
Microsoft Unveils Project Solara, Agent-First Platform
Reporting by Reuters and GeekWire describes Microsoft unveiling Project Solara, a chip-to-cloud platform for "agent-first" devices that run AI agents instead of traditional apps or operating systems. Reuters reports prototypes include small, screen- and microphone-equipped devices built with Qualcomm and MediaTek chips and that Solara devices will connect to cloud models to carry out tasks such as documenting medical visits. Forbes reports Microsoft also revealed a family of in-house models under the MAI brand, including MAI-Thinking-1 with a sparse Mixture-of-Experts design and roughly 35 billion active parameters and a 256,000-token context window. WindowsCentral quotes Satya Nadella saying, "You need to give them identities," in reference to AI agents. Industry outlets frame Solara as Microsoft's bid to create hardware, silicon, and runtime for agentic workflows rather than conventional apps.
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microsoft
6.3
Jun 13, 2026
Microsoft President Frames Gen Z AI Backlash as Wake-Up Call
In a blog post published Wednesday, Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote that recent pushback from college graduates against AI should serve as "a powerful wake-up call for the tech sector," Business Insider reports. Smith wrote, "To those in the tech sector who seemingly want to pursue a future where computers replace jobs, and AI becomes more capable than people, the next generation has offered a compelling response: 'Not so fast.'" Business Insider reports Smith also warned graduates face "AI automation of tasks in current entry-level positions" and pressure from companies reducing head count while investing heavily in AI infrastructure. Business Insider cites prior executive comments, including an Anthropic CEO remark about AI wiping out entry-level jobs and a quoted comment attributed to a Microsoft AI executive about near-term automation timelines.
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anthropic
6.7
Jun 11, 2026
Microsoft restricts Claude Fable 5 internal access
The Verge reports Microsoft is limiting employee access to Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 after Anthropic introduced mandatory data retention rules tied to its safety classifiers. Per The Verge, Fable 5 is absent from the model picker in Microsoft's internal GitHub Copilot, while other Claude models remain available under Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreements. Microsoft told employees its legal teams are evaluating Anthropic's policy changes over concerns about customer data and confidential information. Anthropic's classifiers retain prompts and outputs for 30 days on all Fable 5 sessions, and flag violations can be held for up to two years - making Fable 5 the only Claude model that cannot operate under ZDR. Microsoft simultaneously made Fable 5 available to GitHub Copilot and Azure Foundry customers, creating a visible gap between its internal policy and its customer offering.
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microsoft
6.5
Jun 11, 2026
BNP Paribas Models Copilot Seats Above Wall Street Outlook
Microsoft confirmed on its April 29, 2026 earnings call that paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats have topped 20 million and Azure grew 40% year-over-year in Q3 FY2026, per CNBC and Microsoft's own investor post. BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski subsequently modeled scenarios in which Copilot seats could exceed 25 million by end of fiscal 2026, potentially sustaining Azure growth above 40%, per Benzinga and Seeking Alpha. Microsoft is pairing seat licensing with consumption-based billing for advanced Copilot features and is expanding data-center capacity at Fairwater facilities in Wisconsin and Atlanta, per GPU Trade. Charles Holive, chief AI officer at BNP Paribas CIB, separately told Business Insider that outcome-oriented metrics - productivity and dollar impact - are replacing raw token counts as the primary measure of AI project ROI at the bank.
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microsoft
6.4
Jun 11, 2026
Nadella Urges Employees to Use Appropriate AI Models
At a live taping of The New York Times "Hard Fork" podcast, Satya Nadella told the audience that tokenmaxxing is common at Microsoft, replying "A lot," when asked about excessive token use, according to Business Insider. Nadella added, "I'm a tokenmaxxer too, it's addictive," and warned, "Don't use frontier models for non-frontier problems," per Business Insider. He pointed to Copilot's auto mode as an example of matching tasks to models to control costs, Business Insider reports. Editorial analysis: This public admonition from a CEO highlights an operational cost issue, rising token consumption, that many orgs face as model usage scales, increasing the need for model-tiering policies and usage monitoring.
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anthropic
6.8
Jun 11, 2026
Microsoft restricts employee access to Claude Fable 5
Microsoft is restricting employee access to Anthropic's Mythos-class model Claude Fable 5, reporting sources say. According to The Verge, the model is not available in the internal model picker used by Microsoft employees in internal versions of GitHub Copilot even though Microsoft has offered Claude Fable 5 to customer-facing GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Foundry users. Reuters and The Verge report the restriction stems from Anthropic's new data retention rules: inputs and outputs are retained for 30 days for safety classifier use, and items flagged by classifiers may be retained for up to two years. Both Reuters and The Verge say Microsoft legal teams are evaluating those retention changes. Editorial analysis: Companies balancing safety telemetry and enterprise privacy commonly face legal and procurement friction when vendors adopt time-limited retention policies.
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microsoft
6.8
Jun 10, 2026
Microsoft Faces AI CapEx Pressure, Palantir Competition Contained
Per Seeking Alpha, the analyst update rates Microsoft as a "Buy" while warning that AI CapEx is pressuring margins. The article notes that earnings and cash flow remain strong, and that Palantir represents a real competitor but that Microsoft's scale advantage remains larger, according to Seeking Alpha. The writeup includes market snapshot metrics, listing MSFT at 397.36 and a $3.00T market cap in the published chart. The piece frames Microsoft as financially resilient despite AI infrastructure spending, while flagging competitive dynamics with Palantir as worth monitoring, per Seeking Alpha.
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ai-policy
6.5
Jun 10, 2026
Washington AI Network Gala Highlights Policy Frictions
NBC News and Deadline report that the Washington AI Network hosted its second annual AI Honors Gala at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington D.C. on June 3, 2026, gathering AI lobbyists, administration officials, industry leaders, and scientists (NBC News; Deadline). Vatican ambassador Gabriele Caccia opened the event by citing Pope Leo XIV's encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas" and its call to prevent AI from "dominating humanity." Separately, The Verge reports Microsoft AI head Mustafa Suleyman publicly criticized Anthropic for discussing possible consciousness in its model Claude, calling such speculation "really, really dangerous" and warning against a super-intelligence with ideas about its own suffering (Emma Roth, The Verge, Jun 9, 2026). The Verge further reports Anthropic has said it will "interview" models when they are deprecated and document any stated "preferences" (Emma Roth, The Verge, Jun 9, 2026).
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nlweb
7.3
Jun 10, 2026
Microsoft Launches NLWeb To Enable Agentic Websites
Microsoft introduced NLWeb, an open project and protocol that makes websites conversational and discoverable to AI agents, according to Microsoft News (May 2025). Per Microsoft, every NLWeb instance can act as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, exposing site content and optional capabilities to agents via endpoints such as /ask and /mcp (Microsoft News; Itnext deep dive). NLWeb leverages common web formats including Schema.org, RSS, sitemaps, and site feeds and combines them with LLMs and tooling to produce grounded natural-language responses, Microsoft states. Cloudflare and community posts (Cloudflare blog; TechCommunity Microsoft Foundry) outline complementary practices for making sites agent-ready: open bot-friendly crawling, up-to-date sitemaps and feeds, and consistent structured data. Several community deep dives and vendor guides provide implementation details and examples for .NET, static sites, and e-commerce publishers (C-SharpCorner; Itnext; Cloudflare).
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ai-welfare
6.6
Jun 9, 2026
Microsoft AI head criticizes Anthropic over Claude consciousness
Microsoft's CEO of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, criticized Anthropic during a Decoder interview, calling the company's speculation about its Claude model "really, really dangerous," according to The Verge. Suleyman argued that Anthropic's design choices and public discussion around model well-being have led to anthropomorphizing the system, and warned against contending with "a super-intelligence that has ideas about its own suffering," The Verge reports. The Verge also reports that Anthropic has said it will "interview" models when they are deprecated and document any "preferences" those models express about future releases. Earlier coverage by TechCrunch and Fortune documents Suleyman's longer critique of AI welfare and his framing of risks from what he calls "seemingly conscious AI," placing the latest remarks in an ongoing industry debate.
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apple
5.5
Jun 9, 2026
iPhone Faces Challenge from Thin-Client AI Ecosystems
In a June 9, 2026 Stratechery analysis titled "The iPhone's Last Stand," Ben Thompson argues that Microsoft's newly unveiled Project Solara points toward a future where AI agents run in the cloud and devices act mainly as thin clients for input and display (Stratechery). Microsoft introduced Project Solara at its Build 2026 conference as a chip-to-cloud platform for "agent-first devices," starting with enterprise concept hardware and pilots at retailers including Target and CVS Health, per Microsoft and trade coverage. Stratechery contends that if agents live server-side, raw on-device compute matters less than interaction design, latency, and cross-device handoff, and characterizes Apple's Siri as adequate for many consumer tasks rather than state-of-the-art. The piece is analysis rather than reporting, but it rests on a real, multi-vendor shift toward agent-centric computing.
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nvidia
7.6
Jun 9, 2026
Nvidia launches RTX Spark for AI PCs
Nvidia unveiled the RTX Spark superchip at Computex 2026 in Taipei, a combined CPU-GPU design that Nvidia and Microsoft say delivers 1 petaflop of AI performance and up to 128GB of unified memory (Nvidia; Microsoft). It pairs a 20-core Arm-based Grace CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU. OEMs including ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface, and MSI announced RTX Spark laptops and small desktops shipping in fall 2026, with Acer and Gigabyte to follow (Nvidia). Nvidia and Microsoft described Windows integrations for local personal agents and new OS security primitives, and Adobe said it is rearchitecting Photoshop and Premiere for the platform (Microsoft; Nvidia). Reuters reports analyst skepticism that broad consumer demand exists beyond developers and creators, citing cost and a memory-supply crunch as adoption barriers and quoting Tirias Research analyst Kevin Hein (Reuters).
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