It might not get the same kind of attention as Google and Apple, but Microsoft is still one of the biggest and most powerful tech companies operating today. It runs Azure, one of the biggest cloud computing services, and maintains Windows 11 and the whole Office suite of software. It also makes plenty of Surface hardware and has a whole slew of gaming products, including the Xbox Series X. But the company is ever expanding — building new hardware, acquiring new game studios, and making sure that even if Microsoft doesn’t run your phone, it can touch plenty of the apps on it.
Ryan Roslansky is leaving after nearly 18 years at LinkedIn and Microsoft.
Copilot is now being positioned as the ‘OS for work.’
Microsoft is holding a Windows and Surface event in San Francisco next week. With Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in attendance, it was already clear that RTX Spark PCs would be the main focus of the event. Now Microsoft says the October 7th event will include “RTX Spark and new experiences designed to unlock more possibilities for developers and builders.” Mysterious. Stay tuned for full coverage from The Verge next week.
A confident return for one of Xbox’s most iconic franchises is coming during a period of dramatic upheaval.
Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 version 26H2, aka the Windows 11 2026 Update today. It’s what Microsoft calls a “small enablement package,” allowing Windows 11 users to download and install the latest release quickly with a single restart. So what’s new? Well, due to the way Microsoft releases new Windows features these days, many of the same features that have been rolling out to version 25H2 will be part of 26H2.
[Windows Experience Blog]
Xbox has teamed up with Prince St. Pizza to launch a pizza cutter to mark the launch of Gears of War: E-Day. The $60 cutter is built in the shape of the Prototype Lancer weapon from the game, and also includes an in-game pizza emblem. Price St. Pizza will also be selling an “Emergence Pie” pizza with a spicy vodka sauce in stores across the US and Canada through November 1st.
That’s according to a report from 404 Media, which viewed internal messages from contractors who describe seeing disturbing requests and potentially illegal images:
Some of the Copilot contractors complained in the private forum about accepting “tasks” that they unknowingly contained explicit unsafe or even potentially illegal images. “I just came across an image set that consisted of eight upskirt photos,” the contractor wrote, while asking for superiors to add an unsafe content flag to the task. On the same thread, another contractor said they had seen images of “some sort of animal sacrifice.”
Minecraft Dungeons 2 is coming out on September 29th with the first new Minecraft dimension in 14 years: The Sift. But Microsoft has confirmed that you’ll also be able to check out the new realm in both the Java and Bedrock editions of Minecraft in 2027.
NBC News released this clip from a Meet the Press interview with Gates that will air on Sunday, where he said, “No one thinks self-regulation is enough” around AI.
Saying that AI is “certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths,” he suggested, “You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like… And that has to be a required thing. And it will be a little bit of overhead for the industry, but not a dramatic slowing of what they’re doing.” Everyone agrees someone should do it, but who, and how?
Microsoft is launching a new digital sketchpad app for Windows next month. Microsoft Ink Canvas will be available first on the new Surface Pro 12-inch, and other supported devices on October 13th. It supports sketching with pen or touch, and includes AI image generation and summaries. It’s essentially an AI-powered version of the various digital whiteboard apps Microsoft has created over the years.
While Undead Labs is avoiding closing as Xbox’s assortment of developers continues to shrink, the studio announced on LinkedIn that “Unfortunately, today we are also saying goodbye to a significant number of our colleagues. It’s difficult to reach this moment knowing that not everyone who helped get us here gets to make the rest of the journey with us.”
Its blog post earlier said that State of Decay 3 development “remains actively underway,” targeting a 2027 release on Xbox, Game Pass, PC, and PlayStation.
State of Decay 3 developer Undead Labs is now an independent employee-owned studio. It’s the third studio to successfully separate from Xbox, after Double Fine and Compulsion Games did the same recently. “Development of State of Decay 3 remains actively underway at Undead Labs,” says the team. The game is still planned to release in 2027 on Xbox (and Game Pass), PC, and PlayStation.
Sadly, it looks like Ninja Theory won’t be the fourth Xbox studio avoiding closure, though.
[State of Decay 3]
Microsoft is due to announce another round of Xbox layoffs today, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The cuts will reportedly be part of a larger restructuring, with The Information reporting that Microsoft plans to “consolidate several of its game studios.” Today’s layoffs will reportedly affect hundreds of employees, and are part of the 3,200 Xbox layoffs that Microsoft is planning by the end of June 2027.
A system for “contextually aware” ads described in the patent application could pause gameplay “at the operating system level” to show an ad when certain in-game events or triggers happen. For instance, players might get an ad break after a boss fight or when their avatar “is determined to be in a safe location, such as the user’s team base.”
In court documents unredacted Thursday, lawyers for the NYT in its copyright infringement case against Microsoft and OpenAI cited Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, saying that “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions… almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.”
The Orlando Sentinel, which is also part of the suit, reports a Microsoft filing “framed Hecht as someone on the payroll to play a contrarian.”
Mustafa Suleyman on the AI safety debate, why AI isn’t consciousness, and how the industry pushes toward alignment.
Physint just switched publishers from PlayStation to Xbox, and Hideo Kojima appeared at Xbox’s Tokyo game show stream today to reveal the lead role for the game. Swedish actor and producer Bill Skarsgård, best known for playing Pennywise the Clown in the It horror films, will portray the lead role alongside Charlee Fraser in Kojima’s upcoming action-espionage game. Kojima says Physint “continues to make steady progress,” months after Sony gave the studio an unexpected cancellation notice in June.
Over the next two years, the funding will go toward improving AI access in education, healthcare, and agriculture, and adding to AI’s “digital foundation.” That includes priorities like creating AI datasets in more languages and making access to AI more affordable.
Microsoft added SpaceXAI’s Grok models to its Foundry service last year, and now it’s expanding the access to Copilot itself. Grok models can now be used in Word, Excel and PowerPoint from the model picker interface for Microsoft Frontier users. Microsoft says it’s starting with a preview release to “gather feedback.” This means Office Copilot users can now pick between OpenAI’s GPT models, Anthropic’s Claude models, and SpaceXAI’s Grok models.
There will be a panel at 4:45 PM ET (1:45 PT) today at BlizzCon where more info will be revealed, but for now you’ll have to satisfy your thirst for fire, brimstone, and Sanctuary with this short teaser.
After Microsoft removed the Copilot buttons from some Windows 11 apps, the latest Insider Release Preview builds (26100.9539 and 26200.9539) add an option for easily changing that dedicated AI key back to a control or Context Menu button, without using workarounds.
[Windows Insider Program]
