Microsoft announced MAI-Thinking-1 as its new flagship model at Build 2026 among several proprietary systems developed in-house. The releases mark continued progress toward independent AI development following last year’s initial models and a recent renegotiation with OpenAI intended to loosen ties.
Microsoft says the company trained it from the ground up on clean data, without distillation from third-party models.
The two companies recently renegotiated their deal to loosen ties.
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Meta and Microsoft are cutting employee use of Anthropic’s Claude AI and directing staff toward their own coding tools, The Information reported. The changes reflect tighter internal AI budgets while customer access to Claude through Microsoft platforms continues to expand.
Microsoft has introduced a local edition of MAI-Code-1.1-Flash that runs on Windows PCs without server access. The model requires substantial memory and is coming to GitHub Copilot in experimental preview by the end of October, starting with Nvidia RTX Spark PCs.
At its Windows and Surface event, Microsoft opened preorders for the $2,599 Surface Laptop Ultra and the $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, and said Copilot will be able to use files and act across Windows in the coming months.
NVIDIA and Microsoft opened RTX Spark preorders and made Microsoft Execution Containers generally available at the Windows AI and Surface event, aimed at running AI agents on Windows PCs. RTX Spark laptops, first introduced in June, are on preorder today with up to 128 GB unified memory and one petaflop of AI compute, shipping October 16.
Microsoft says Copilot on Copilot+ PCs will be able to use files and recent activity on your PC, take actions across Windows, and tap local AI models, with your permission. The features are expected to start rolling out in the coming months.
