Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Microsoft Copilot, newest first.
At its Windows and Surface event in San Francisco, Microsoft showed Copilot finding tax documents across folders on a PC, renaming and zipping them, and drafting an email to an accountant. Microsoft calls the approach Hybrid Intelligence because it mixes models on the device with models in the cloud, and says it reaches Copilot over the next couple of months. Windows 11 also gains Execution Containers, a way to sandbox AI agents, which Satya Nadella said will reach every Windows 11 user. The new Surface Laptop Ultra, built on Nvidia's RTX Spark chip to run models locally, starts at $2,599.
Microsoft unveiled a redesigned Copilot app on Thursday with three tabs. Home merges Copilot Chat and Cowork and builds Word, Excel and PowerPoint into the conversation. Code lets anyone describe an app, dashboard or automation and have it built and hosted inside their company's tenant, using the same technology as GitHub Copilot. Autopilot, the personal agent previously called Scout, runs in the cloud with its own identity and keeps working while its owner is offline. Cowork, Code and Autopilot move to usage-based billing, and a new set of FinOps tools lets administrators cap agent spending. Home and Code reach Microsoft's Frontier early-access program first, and Autopilot enters private preview at the end of the month. Microsoft now calls Copilot "the AI built for work," leaving the consumer chatbot race to others.
A summary judgment motion unsealed on September 17 in the news publishers' copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft quotes Microsoft's director of applied science, Brent Hecht, calling the scraping of news for AI training "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" and "the largest theft of labor in human history." The filing also cites Microsoft data showing click-through rates to some publishers falling 83 to 93 percent under Copilot, and an internal OpenAI message from ChatGPT head Nick Turley describing chatbots as an "existential threat" to publishers. The quotes come from the plaintiffs' own brief, and the underlying exhibits remain sealed. Earlier this month Microsoft argued that its chatbot almost never reproduced Times articles; this motion shifts the fight to substitution, the fair-use factor that asks whether a product replaces the work it learned from.
Defending copyright claims from The New York Times and from book authors, Microsoft says it gave the publishers' expert 8.2 million Copilot chat logs, picked because they hit keywords most likely to surface the plaintiffs' work. Of those, 59,545 shared at least sixteen words with news content, and just 24 responses matched thirty or more words from a book, with only ten of 212 books matching at all. The Times rejects the conclusions. Reproduction is the harm these cases turn on, so the scale of it is the argument.
Varonis Threat Labs kept asking Copilot why auto-execution would not work, and Copilot answered —
naming the disabled parameters and one undocumented one, autorun=1. Appending that to a crafted
query string produced a zero-click prompt injection: a victim clicks a link, Copilot loads in
their authenticated session, and the attacker's instructions run with no prompt and no visible sign.
Reachable data included mail, calendar, chat history, connected drives and Copilot's stored memory.
Microsoft planned a patch and a formal vulnerability identifier for Tuesday.
Microsoft is folding its consumer Copilot app into Microsoft 365 Copilot as a single app handling both personal and work accounts, with the mobile and web rollout starting in mid-August. Five things disappear on August 18: group chats, AI-generated podcasts, Copilot Labs, Deep Research and the animated assistant Mico. Paying business users get Researcher in place of Deep Research, and files from the standalone app move to OneDrive.
Microsoft told Axios it is exploring a self-hosted, fine-tuned version of China's DeepSeek V4 as a lower-cost engine for its new Copilot Cowork agent, possibly within weeks — an optional model run entirely on Azure, with added safeguards to reduce bias. The driver is surging inference costs, as agents make hundreds of model calls per task and OpenAI and Anthropic pull back from flat-rate pricing. In a Stratechery analysis, Ben Thompson casts the move as part of a broader pull toward China: Microsoft is strongly incentivized to use cheap, capable Chinese models, while memory makers Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron may regret opening the door to Chinese chipmakers.
The Verge reports that Microsoft will stop issuing Claude Code licenses to its own employees effective June 30, redirecting users to GitHub Copilot CLI. The original internal pilot — meant to expose project managers and designers to AI coding for the first time — reportedly burned through Microsoft's 2026 AI budget in months, with one employee reporting Claude consumed their monthly token allocation in just over a week. Hacker News commenters framed the move as procurement economics, not contractual or security friction, and noted developers picked Claude over Copilot when offered the choice — undermining Microsoft's own product strategy.