#Microsoft

AIAnthropic has released Claude Haiku 5.5, available now across all platforms including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The post links to Anthropic's announcement page for further details.

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.

AIGitHub is rolling out a fine-tuned, purpose-built model for secret detection that reads surrounding code to identify likely credentials, including passwords without recognizable token formats. Existing AI-detected Password alerts have been upgraded automatically, and AI-detected secrets in push protection is in private preview. New opt-in checks in push protection and the GitHub Copilot /security-review command will consume GitHub AI Credits.

AIMicrosoft Research Asia has open-sourced Agent Lightning v1.0, a roughly 3,500-line agentic RL framework that trains the same agent harness used in deployment. In an end-to-end coding agent pipeline, Qwen3.5-9B rose from 41.8% to 56.4% Pass@1 on SWE-bench Verified using about 6,000 training samples. The framework runs agents as standard Kubernetes jobs without paid commercial sandbox services.

Why it matters: The source shows how training with the deployed agent harness avoids rebuilding agents, and reports concrete SWE-bench Verified gains from about 6,000 samples.

AIGitHub has made local sandboxing for GitHub Copilot generally available in GitHub Copilot CLI, the GitHub Copilot app, and VS Code sessions using Agent Host. Sandboxes restrict the filesystem, network, and credentials that Copilot-initiated tools and commands can access, based on developer or organization policies. The feature is powered by Microsoft eXecution Container (MXC), supports Windows, macOS, and Linux, and is included at no additional cost.

AIGitHub Copilot CLI version 1.0.94-0 lets users run /model to discover supported models from a running local Ollama instance alongside configured and GitHub Copilot cloud models. Discovered models are not added automatically; users choose one, review its provider and endpoint, then confirm Add and use for this session or Add without switching, and models must support tool calling and streaming. Choosing a local model does not enable offline mode or disable GitHub telemetry, and COPILOT_OFFLINE=true remains a separate explicit setting.

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.

AIGitHub says some IDEs that moved Copilot agent sessions to the Copilot SDK left that activity unattributed in usage metrics, and a fix is rolling out by IDE. Visual Studio Code 1.139.0 and later has the fix now, while Visual Studio 18.12, JetBrains, Eclipse, and Xcode are expected between October and November 2026. Billing is unaffected, and missing data from affected versions cannot be backfilled.

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.

AIMicrosoft Research podcast host Chad Atalla interviews Jennifer Neville, a partner research manager at Microsoft, about her path into AI and her work on how evaluation exposes surprising failures in models tested beyond traditional benchmarks. The conversation also covers practical guidance for working with current AI systems and why examining underlying data matters when results defy expectations.

AINobel laureate Daron Acemoglu argues in the first issue of The Humanist Review, published by MAI, that AI will replace only about 5% of what humans do over the next decade. He says AI is not yet visible in productivity statistics and projects roughly 1.5% added to GDP over 10 years, and he urges building pro-worker tools that make people better at their jobs.

AIMicrosoft has added citation links to Copilot replies in Word, letting users click through to original web pages or internal documents to verify information. The company says the change improves transparency about where Copilot's information comes from. The feature targets AI hallucinations, which are errors or fabricated sources produced by AI tools.

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.

AIEthan Mollick argues that coverage of Claude and OpenAI usage focuses too narrowly on a few technology companies that compete directly with those vendors and have large cloud infrastructure of their own. He says trends among many other firms that are not direct competitors would be more informative.

AIMicrosoft and NVIDIA have co-developed a Sovereign AI white paper offering a framework built on control, choice, flexibility, and resilience for AI workloads. Microsoft defines sovereign AI as designing, deploying, and operating AI workloads under defined controls for data, access, governance, infrastructure, and operations. The framework is intended to help leaders decide the level of control each workload needs.

AISara Hooker congratulates Ali Partovi and the neo team on an important set of conversations. The quoted post introduces Partovi's new podcast, "Confession," where tech veterans including Satya Nadella, Dara Khosrowshahi, and Luana Lopes Lara share painful lessons learned.

AIGitHub Copilot code review can now be requested through the REST and GraphQL APIs, with an optional review effort level set per request. Balanced became the default review effort level for new and existing repositories and organizations as of September 28, 2026, while users who explicitly selected Lite keep that setting. The changes are generally available to Copilot Pro, Pro+, Max, Business, and Enterprise plans.

AIAs of October 2, 2026, GitHub deprecated Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Kimi K2.7 Code, and Claude Opus 4.7 across all Copilot experiences. Suggested replacements are Gemini 3.8 Flash, Kimi K3, and Claude Opus 5.5, and Enterprise administrators may need to enable them through model policies.

AIMicrosoft's MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, MAI-Voice-2.1, and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash are now live on LiveKit for building voice agents. LiveKit says MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming debuts at #1 on the Artificial Analysis accuracy leaderboard, and suggests pairing it with MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash for efficient, expressive voice agents.

AIMicrosoft AI's MAI voice models are now accessible through OpenRouter, according to the announcement. The quoted OpenRouter post highlights MAI-Voice-2.1, a text-to-speech model that supports 23 languages with native accents and is priced at $22 per 1M characters.

AIMicrosoft AI's Voice and Transcribe Streaming model is now available on Vercel for building agents, and the post claims it ranks first for quality and speed. The post says it is cheaper than other hyperscalers and 60% cheaper than Eleven Labs.

AIAI is changing developer work, and the article recommends three skills: directing AI agents, reviewing AI output instead of trusting the first answer, and using saved time for judgment-heavy problems such as customer needs and tradeoffs. It cites GitHub Copilot's built-in Rubber Duck agent, which uses a second model to critique plans, code, and tests. The author argues that developers remain responsible for outcomes while AI handles more implementation.

AIGitHub Copilot's weekly release adds Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol for specified plan tiers, plus HydraFusion, a research preview that lets Copilot select and coordinate models for a task. It also introduces dynamic workflows in public preview, which let users save and reuse multi-step processes, and computer use in public preview on macOS and Windows for automating desktop apps.

AILiveKit has released documentation for a speech-to-text (STT) plugin that connects its agents framework to Microsoft AI. The post shares only a link to the guide and provides no further technical details, model names, or pricing.

AILiveKit now supports Microsoft's MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, MAI-Voice-2.1, and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash for building voice agents. MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming debuts at #1 on the Artificial Analysis accuracy leaderboard. Developers can pair it with MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash to build efficient and expressive voice agents.

AIMicrosoft Copilot begins rolling out OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5 today, joining Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol added earlier this month. Users can pick the model suited to each task, with Work IQ grounding responses in their files, meetings, and chats within existing permissions. The rollout starts today in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Chat following in phases over the coming week.

AIMicrosoft AI's MAI models are now accessible to developers via Vercel, including the newest releases MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, MAI-Voice-2.1, and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash. The partnership brings these models into Vercel's AI Gateway as another route for building Microsoft AI models into applications.

AIMicrosoft AI announces that developers can start building with its MAI models through Vercel. The post is brief and gives no further details on models, pricing, or capabilities.

AIVercel has made Microsoft AI's MAI-Voice-2.1 for long-form and fast-reply speech and MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming for transcription available on AI Gateway starting today. Guillermo Rauch of Vercel said the team is excited to bring the models to Vercel at launch.

AIVercel says it partnered with Microsoft AI to make MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming available through AI Gateway today. MAI-Voice-2.1 handles long-form and fast-reply speech, while MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming provides transcription.