#Microsoft

AIVercel says Microsoft's Decision-1 model, listed as microsoft/microsoft-decision-1, is now available on AI Gateway. The model classifies text, routes requests, and scores responses, returning structured answers with calibrated probabilities.

AIGitHub makes local sandboxing generally available in Copilot CLI, the Copilot app, and VS Code sessions using Agent Host, limiting agents' access to files, networks, and credentials at no extra cost. The Copilot app now lets users sign in with separate GitHub accounts for the Copilot license and for repositories. Copilot CLI's /model command lists local models from a running Ollama instance alongside cloud models, and VS Code 1.141 adds a side-by-side agent session grid and worktree cleanup.

AIOpenRouter has released Microsoft-Decision-1, a model Microsoft says posts the highest accuracy across 36 blind benchmarks of about 150K questions. Microsoft says it runs 4.5x faster than the runner-up and 35x faster than GPT-6 Sol, with decisions flipping on only 1.3% of perturbed inputs. The model is post-trained from Qwen3.5-9B, costs $0.042 per million input tokens, has free output and a 32K context window.

AIMicrosoft announces Office in the new Microsoft Copilot app, which lets users work with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents inside Copilot. The post links to a Microsoft Tech Community blog with details.

AIGitHub adds two Copilot code review admin controls. Organization owners can bill code reviews from members with a Copilot license to the owning organization instead of member quotas, which requires AI Credits paid usage and allows an optional budget. Owners and repository admins can also restrict review requests to users whose Copilot license comes from their organization or enterprise.

AIMicrosoft says the full Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps are now rolling out to the Copilot app in Frontier. Users can create, edit, and collaborate on documents in one connected workspace, with branded templates and version history. The workspace also offers a library of frontier models, with an Auto router that picks a model for each task.

AIAmazon says it will stop using NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move by 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.

AIOpenAI says Codex on Windows now has a new sandbox mode built on Microsoft's Execution Containers (MXC), offering faster setup, stronger network enforcement, and granular file access controls. The mode requires a compatible Windows 11 device. Background from Microsoft's announcement says MXC is now generally available on Windows 11, keeping agents within boundaries the operating system enforces.

AIMicrosoft is selling the Surface Laptop Ultra, which starts at $2,599 and contains an Nvidia Blackwell RTX Spark GPU, with preorders open and shipping set for Oct. 16. The 15-inch laptop weighs 4.4 pounds, supports up to 128 gigabytes of unified memory, and offers up to one petaflop of computing power. Apps can route some AI coding requests to the local GPU or to the cloud.

AIMicrosoft revealed prices and specs for its Surface Laptop Ultra, built on Nvidia's RTX Spark chip, starting at $2,600 and designed to run AI models locally on the device. It also announced the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, starting at $6,000 with developer tools, and a Windows 11 feature called Execution Containers for sandboxing AI agents, which will reach all Windows 11 users.

AIMicrosoft Copilot announced Hybrid Intelligence for Windows, which balances cloud and locally run agents to handle tasks like file wrangling and workflows on the PC. According to Satya Nadella, Copilot can use context on the PC with user permission and draw on local models when appropriate. The feature is described as coming soon.

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.

AIGitHub has introduced a context-aware classifier that checks candidate secrets in under 2 milliseconds. It could more than double the number of secrets that push protection prevents from entering repository history.

AIMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella says Copilot is being positioned as a new operating system for work, paired with a governed headless business layer that gives agents access to CRM, ERP, and other systems of record. He says Microsoft announced over 30 new Copilot skills across Dynamics 365 Sales, Service, and Customer Insights, plus Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime for IT-governed code hosting. He describes users building custom software or Dataverse extensions through Copilot Code, though the post is an early vision with few concrete specifications.

AILarge-scale AI training is spreading across multiple datacenters, with Google, Microsoft, AWS, Meta, and CoreWeave cited as examples. Because synchronized GPU clusters must exchange data in bursts, inter-site links can become a bottleneck, which Cisco estimates may require aggregate bandwidth about 14x a conventional DCI baseline.

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.

AIMicrosoft announced that its Surface Laptop Ultra will launch October 18 with a starting price of $2,599 for the lowest-tier configuration, rising to $6,000. The 15-inch laptop runs Nvidia's RTX Spark processor on Windows on ARM, with up to 128GB of unified memory and a 2,000-nit HDR display. The article notes that five RTX Spark laptops from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI are also available for preorder starting at $2,599.

AIAnthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 is now generally available in GitHub Copilot, a lightweight model built for fast, high-volume work such as subagents, quick edits, and terminal tasks. GitHub's early testing found it matched Claude Sonnet 5 on many coding tasks while using significantly fewer tokens and steps. It can be used in the GitHub Copilot app, CLI, or @code.

AIAnthropic has released Claude Haiku 5.5, its cheapest and fastest small model, priced at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens. It keeps a 1M token context window, up to 128K output tokens, and is generally available on the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud, Microsoft Foundry and Claude Platform on AWS. Anthropic reports 72.4% on OSWorld 2.1 (offline subset) versus 15.7% for Haiku 4.5, and the article notes that non-default temperature, top_p or top_k values return a 400 error.

AIAnthropic's lightweight Claude Haiku 5.5 is now generally available in GitHub Copilot for fast, high-volume tasks such as subagents, quick edits, and terminal work. In early testing, it matched Claude Sonnet 5 on many coding tasks while using significantly fewer tokens and steps. The model is billed at provider list pricing under usage-based billing and is available to Copilot Pro, Pro+, Max, Business, and Enterprise users.

AIReplit is building a powerful desktop app with a focus on security and reliability, citing supply-chain attacks and catastrophic agent mistakes as risks of desktop AI apps. The company is partnering with Microsoft and will be an early adopter of Nvidia's OpenShell. A quoted Replit post says the desktop preview runs builds locally on Windows, with each build in its own sandbox powered by Microsoft Execution Containers and OpenShell, and offers a waitlist.

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.

AINVIDIA and Microsoft announced RTX Spark laptops and compact desktops that run the full NVIDIA AI stack locally, with laptop preorders open today and sales from October 16. Microsoft also announced general availability of Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), an OS-level infrastructure for agents to run securely in the background, while NVIDIA previewed DGX Station for Windows with 748GB of coherent memory and up to 20 petaFLOPS of FP4 compute.

Why it matters: The announcement pairs Windows agent infrastructure with local hardware, showing how agents may move onto personal computers and enterprise desktops rather than only cloud services.