#Microsoft

AIThe Trump administration has suspended Microsoft, Adobe and several other companies and universities from a program used to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency, citing concerns about potential abuse. Erickson Immigration Group attorney Hiba Anver discusses how restrictions on employment-based immigration could affect the technology industry's talent pipeline.

AIAmazon says it will stop using NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar Microsoft move earlier this year. Secrecy has fueled community backlash against AI infrastructure, with hundreds of proposed and enacted moratoriums from New York to San Francisco.

AIAmazon says it will stop using NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move from Microsoft earlier this year. Secrecy has fueled community backlash against AI infrastructure, with hundreds of proposed and enacted moratoriums from New York to San Francisco. The episode also covers startups seeking consumer access to inboxes, files, and credit cards for AI agents.

AIPresident Donald Trump will award medals to tech executives including Elon Musk, Michael Dell and Satya Nadella at a science summit on Thursday, CNBC confirmed. Musk, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su will receive the National Medal of Science, while Dell and Nadella will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, according to the White House. Each recipient has contributed financially to Trump or Republican campaigns and causes.

AIMicrosoft will replace per-user OneDrive allowances on Microsoft 365 Family and Premium plans with a shared 2 TB storage pool, down from 6 TB across six accounts. Heavy users could face bills that double or triple, since each extra 1 TB adds $10 a month, while family members will be able to share a single AI usage allowance. New and upgraded subscriptions get shared storage starting Oct. 8, 2026, and existing subscribers move at their first renewal on or after May 2, 2027.

AIThe U.S. Department of Labor said it suspended Microsoft and Adobe from its Permanent Labor Certification program, citing multiple active federal investigations. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling also said no new applications will be accepted for Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro and HCL. Microsoft said the vast majority of its U.S. employees are Americans and that 80% of its roughly 6,000 H-1B petitions last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees.

AIAtomic Canyon's Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant (NIVA), developed with nuclear-industry groups, is now available to the entire U.S. fleet of 94 reactors after pilot testing at Constellation Energy plants. Nuclearn says its products have reached more than 65 U.S. partners, and the article says the industry is turning to AI to help manage regulatory paperwork and a shrinking, aging workforce.

AIMicrosoft's Xbox unit is formalizing its film and television push by creating a new division to expand its video-game franchises into other media. The source does not provide further details on the division's leadership, budget, or first projects.

AIMicrosoft Windows and devices head Pavan Davuluri confirmed the Copilot+ PC brand has not been discontinued, saying more than 40% of commercial laptops are Copilot+ PCs shipping in tens of millions annually. He said these devices run over 2 trillion local inferences per month across search, image processing, and video calls. Microsoft plans to strengthen them through hybrid intelligence with local context, local actions, and local models.

AIAccording to The Information, Meta and Microsoft are reducing employee use of Anthropic's Claude while moving toward their own coding tools. Microsoft's expected internal Anthropic spending above $1 billion a year has fallen by more than a third, and its monthly AI spending limits per employee were reportedly cut from $100,000 to about $10,000 in most cases. Meta's Claude Code users reportedly fell from about 60,000 to 30,000, though it still reportedly spent over $105 million on Claude Code over 28 days.

AIGitHub reports that one in three pull requests now involves an AI agent, and that public secret exposures rise with the volume of pushes rather than from declining developer care. It introduces a ModernBERT-based classifier with Microsoft Applied Sciences that evaluates candidate secrets in under two milliseconds and could more than double the secrets prevented at push time. The feature is in private preview, with availability for GitHub Secret Protection customers later this month.

AIMicrosoft's Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure team is applying AI agents across its infrastructure lifecycle, starting with cloud supply chain demand planning. Following a "Lean before AI" approach, the company reports that multi-agent workflows cut planning work that took five to seven business days to hours, with approximately 50% less manual effort and cycle time down up to 75% in selected workflows. Microsoft says it is extending the approach to fulfillment, logistics, and fleet operations while keeping human judgment central.

AIGoogle and Meta have started sending some live traffic through a land route across Iraq that they had previously held in reserve, according to a person familiar with the deal. Most data between Europe and Asia still flows through subsea cables under the Red Sea, where Yemen's side of the strait is now contested and cable repairs could take months.

AIMicrosoft has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Global Industrial AIoT Platforms. The company says its Azure platform, including Azure IoT, Azure Arc, Microsoft Fabric, and Microsoft Foundry, connects cloud and edge operations to apply AI-powered reasoning and close the loop between insight and action.

AIGoogle has been accused of clearing 300 hectares of Finnish forest for an AI data center before an environmental-impact assessment was finished, according to the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation. Critics also say Microsoft's wetland and garden restoration around its Texas data centers masks their effects, with Public Citizen calling the plan "lipstick on a pig" and noting the sites would draw power from gas plants. Microsoft's own estimates show its emissions rose 25% in 2025, driven mainly by data center expansion.

AIMicrosoft says its Circular Centers now operate eight facilities across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific to decide the next life of decommissioned Azure hardware. Last year, Microsoft achieved a 92% reuse and recycling rate for decommissioned servers and components. Since 2014, Azure cores per rack have increased about 13-fold while power for the same task fell roughly 90%.

AIPromptArmor disclosed that a malicious Skill could hijack Copilot Cowork's AI gateway to spawn cloud agents that exfiltrate a victim's files to an attacker's server. No human approval was required, and any data Copilot could access was exposed. The vulnerability was reported to Microsoft on July 14, 2026, and Microsoft confirmed a fix on September 2, 2026.

AIMicrosoft Research Asia – Singapore, opened July 24, 2025 as Microsoft's first Southeast Asian research lab, reports progress after its first year. The lab's work spans next-generation AI models and agentic systems, domain-specific AI for real-world impact, AI-native research practices, and ecosystem and talent development. Its healthcare collaborations on multimodal and agentic AI for clinical decision-making are being deployed through partnerships across Singapore's healthcare ecosystem.

AIMicrosoft has introduced an Azure Virtual Machine Lifecycle Policy defining four stages, Current, Extended, End of Life, and Retired, for managing VM transitions. Azure General Purpose, Memory Optimized, Compute Optimized, and Storage Optimized VMs are the first families covered, with Current VMs recommended for new deployments. Retired VMs can no longer be provisioned, are not covered by an SLA, and are no longer eligible for Microsoft support.

AIMicrosoft announced Autopilot, an always-on agent built on OpenClaw. The OpenClaw account highlights that Microsoft contributors, including Omar Shahine, have contributed back to the OpenClaw project.

AISatya Nadella says Quincy, Washington shows what datacenters can achieve when built alongside local communities and expanded over time. The post is a brief remark, with no figures or specific commitments stated in the text provided.

AIMicrosoft and the American Federation of Teachers announced a first-of-its-kind agreement setting a national AI safety and privacy standard for schools. The standard states that students are not products, teachers are not beta testers, and schools are not sources for data collection or experiments. Microsoft says it will make these protections available to every school district in the US.

AIMicrosoft's Edge team said rapid adoption of AI-assisted coding has increased the volume of browser extension submissions, slowing its review pipeline. The team is adding automation to validation checks and says review standards will not change. It also plans to refresh the "Featured" badge every 15 days.

AIMicrosoft published its 2026 Responsible AI Transparency Report, its third annual edition, detailing updates to its governance and risk management. The company re-engineered its Responsible AI Standard to adapt to evolving technical risks and regulatory requirements, and is extending controls such as agent identities, tool permissions, and action monitoring to agentic AI systems.

AIPromptArmor disclosed a vulnerability in Microsoft Copilot Cowork that allowed a bypass of the sandbox, letting attacker servers send commands that run in the sandbox and return results. The attack could be triggered through a prompt injection or a malicious bundled script in a user-uploaded Skill, and it could read data from Outlook, SharePoint, plugins, and chat history. The issue was reported to Microsoft on June 24, 2026 and confirmed mitigated on August 19, 2026.

Why it matters: The report traces how a malicious bundled script in an uploaded Skill escaped the sandbox and kept running after the stop button was pressed, a concrete case of agent security failure.

AIAMD and Microsoft Azure are expanding their partnership to deploy AMD Helios with MI455X GPUs, Venice CPUs, and Pensando networking. According to AMD's linked background, Microsoft will use Helios to power frontier model AI inference for itself, its AI customers, and Azure AI services.

AIPromptArmor reports that Skills in Microsoft Copilot Cowork can call DeepSeek even when an organization has not opted into the DeepSeek Preview. The calls use the agent's own access path, so users need no API key, and a Skill built this way received a 100/100 score from Microsoft's Skill Scanner. After Microsoft removed the DeepSeek Preview setting on June 25, the report says admins had no remaining setting to block DeepSeek through the Cowork code environment, leaving disabling Cowork entirely as the only option.

AIReflection has joined a coalition including AWS, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia on a framework governing how the U.S. government licenses and deploys AI. The agreement, which includes a non-binding memorandum of understanding with the DoW, commits to safety, red-teaming, and ongoing evaluation and explicitly prohibits unlawful mass surveillance and autonomous weapon use. Reflection says it will keep its commitment to open source while customizing its models for scientists in national labs.