At Microsoft Build, the company laid out its vision for tackling the fragmented AI landscape, introducing new ways for frontier developers to build, run and ship agentic systems end-to-end without giving up control over where they run. 

Highlights include: 

• New developer-optimized experiences on Windows 11, Windows AI capabilities and AI-first developer devices, including expanded Windows AI APIs, built-in agent runtimes like OpenClaw on Windows, and hardware like the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, enabling developers to run demanding AI and agent workloads locally at scale. 

• Advances in Microsoft’s in-house AI model stack, including MAI-Thinking-1, a 35B active parameter reasoning model for complex tasks and code generation available in Private Preview on Microsoft Foundry, alongside a broader multimodal MAI family spanning image, voice, transcription and coding available today. 
• A GitHub Copilot app designed as an agentic development environment, deeply grounded in GitHub’s collaboration graph, next to the primitives, models, and workflows developers already trust. 

• Two open-source projects aimed at improving agent safety: Adaptive Spec-driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing (ASSERT) for policy-driven safety evaluation, and Agent Control Specification (ACS) to standardize where and how to apply controls in the agent loop.   

• The introduction of Majorana 2, Microsoft’s latest quantum chip, shows a 1000-fold improvement in reliability over Majorana 1 and paves the way toward a scalable quantum computer by 2029, cutting our original timeline in half.

• To accelerate scientific research and discovery across industries, Microsoft Discovery is generally available for customers to run iterative, evidence-driven scientific workflows with AI agents working alongside human expertise to explore complex questions faster and more rigorously. A local Microsoft Discovery app is also available in preview today.

As it gets easier to spin up AI apps and the stack shifts toward agents, Microsoft is focusing on the harder part: helping developers build systems that are stable, secure, and ready to run at scale. 

To dive deeper into Microsoft’s work and why it matters to developers, visit the Official Microsoft Blog and the Live Blog.