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AI IS MY COPILOT

It’s all about AI agents at Microsoft Build

Microsoft announced new “agentic AI” tools for coding, science, and data at its Build 2025 developer conference.

5/19/25 4:41PM

Microsoft announced a bevy of new AI tools at its Build 2025 developer conference in Seattle. The big theme: AI agents are here.

CEO Satya Nadella took the stage for a two-hour presentation outlining the company’s plans for developers. Nadella’s presentation included cameos from some key AI leaders: OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Tesla/X/xAI CEO Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang.

Microsoft’s $14 billion partnership with OpenAI was recently reported to be fraying due to tension between Nadella and Altman, but the OpenAI CEO was the very first guest for a live interview, which was a completely cordial talk. Altman discussed OpenAI’s new Codex coding agent and how agents are the future of coding.

Nadella also highlighted updates to Copilot — but that requires some unpacking.

There’s Microsoft Copilot 365, which is an AI agent that lurks in your productivity suite of apps and can help generate PowerPoint slides, summarize Microsoft Teams meetings, or analyze your data.

There are also big updates to Github Copilot, an AI tool that helps software developers generate, test, and debug code, which has evolved from an in-editor AI tool to an “asynchronous coding agent.”

That’s not to be confused with plain old Microsoft Copilot, which is just a ChatGPT-style chatbot.

Also there’s Microsoft Copilot Studio, for building new AI agents, and Copilot Tuning, for fine-tuning your AI agents on your company’s proprietary data. (It seems Microsoft didn’t get our memo on the growing AI naming branding confusion.)

Microsoft’s Azure AI cloud computing platform is adding xAI’s Grok3 models. In a prerecorded interview, Musk waxed nostalgic about his early days working with Windows and how the goal with Grok is “to aspire to truth with minimal error.”

Nadella highlighted that Azure AI Foundry lets developers use models from OpenAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, and Meta’s “full heard of llama” models.

Microsoft is now embracing Model Context Protocol into its tools, an open standard developed by Anthropic to standardize the way apps interact with different AI models.

Microsoft also announced a new tool to let companies quickly add conversational chatbots to their websites called NLWeb that can pull from a company’s own data.

For the scientific community, the company announced Microsoft Discovery, an AI-powered research platform that is built to help scientists research, develop hypotheses, and test new discoveries.

At one point during Nadella’s presentation, two protestors disrupted the keynote, challenging the company’s cloud computing contracts with the Israeli government. One protestor turned out to be a Microsoft employee who was able to email several thousand coworkers about the protest after being ejected from the theater.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

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Tesla used skewed data in push for European FSD approval, Reuters finds

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Tesla reportedly pitched regulators in Sweden and the Netherlands with claims that its Full Self-Driving (FSD) tech is over 7x safer than human drivers. However, independent researchers told Reuters that the stats are misleading because Tesla compares airbag-deployment crashes involving FSD-equipped vehicles with much broader US crash statistics, while also benchmarking newer Teslas against the entire US vehicle fleet, which is significantly older on average.

Despite the flawed metrics, the Dutch regulator approved FSD in April, saying its decision was based on its own “tests, analyses and verifications,” and Tesla is now pushing for EU-wide clearance. A version of FSD is currently available in five European markets.

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Report: Microsoft weighs Xbox spin-off amid major overhaul

Microsoft is reportedly considering spinning out or restructuring its struggling Xbox unit, per The Information. While new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who took over in February, is preparing for layoffs, she’s simultaneously planning to boost investment in its biggest franchises like “Halo,” “Fallout,” and “Minecraft.”

The latest potential shake-up comes as the gaming division battles major headwinds, following a massive 33% plunge in Q3 console sales and a recent move to slash Game Pass prices while removing new “Call of Duty” titles.