Tom Warren | The Verge

Xbox is closing down Hellblade creator Ninja Theory

2026-06-15T17:13:35-04:00

Xbox is closing down Ninja Theory, the studio behind the Hellblade series, a source tells The Verge. Staffers were told on a call on Monday about the closure, but they are hoping the studio will find a buyer. The closure comes as “several” Xbox studios at Microsoft, including Compulsion Games and Double Fine, are in “active negotiations” about spinning off, Bloomberg reports.

The closure and negotiations follow Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and chief content officer Matt Booty warning last week of a “reset” at Xbox, laying out several challenges facing Xbox’s business — including that it had “over extended” with its studio system and the hardware component crisis is significantly driving up prices. Kotaku reported earlier on Monday that Microsoft was planning to shut down Compulsion, though it noted in an update that studio leadership was in “negotiations” with Microsoft.

Sharma has made many major decisions since taking over at Xbox in February, including locking down Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution as Xbox console exclusives in an announcement at its Xbox Games Showcase just over a week ago. During that event, Microsoft also revealed a new Hellblade game, Senua, and its future with this change is unclear.

Xbox didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Xbox warns of a ‘reset’ as it prepares for layoffs

2026-06-10T17:44:30-04:00

Microsoft’s Xbox division will be hit with significant layoffs next month, according to people familiar with Microsoft’s plans.

The company has been preparing for the layoffs internally for weeks, with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma hinting about “making hard choices” last month. Sources suggest the cuts could even involve a studio closure, or changes to the Xbox studio lineup. In a recent Giant Bomb episode, rumors of 1,000 layoffs for Microsoft’s Xbox division were mentioned. Bloomberg also reported today that the cuts would be “major,” and involve budget cuts for marketing and other areas of Microsoft’s Xbox business.

Moments before Bloomberg’s report, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and chief content officer Matt Booty sent a memo to Xbox staff, warning of an “Xbox reset” over the next 100 days. Sharma and Booty pointed to difficult challenges the business is facing. “Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform, and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time,” they wrote. “Going forward, this cannot continue.”

They also noted that “we are in a hardware component crisis,” saying that component costs for the 2027 holiday season are expected to be “over 5x the prices we paid only two years earlier. Memory costs have followed a broadly similar trajectory.” They said that “we need a new business model and partnerships for hardware as we remain committed to Helix.”

Sharma and Xbox strategy chief Matthew Ball have been hinting at “radically different” console business models this week, and the mention of “partnerships for hardware” certainly plays into the idea that other PC OEMs might be able to create Xbox-branded devices based on AMD’s new chips in the future.

But right now, Xbox’s “current platform infrastructure is not built for the battle ahead,” Sharma and Booty wrote, saying that “we’ll evolve and rebuild our stack and look at capabilities across all of XBOX and potential M&A to help us win in hardware, PC, mobile, and streaming.”

Sharma has already made some big decisions since taking over, including making Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution Xbox console exclusives.

Microsoft restricts Claude Fable for employees over data retention concerns

2026-06-10T14:58:05-04:00

Anthropic released Claude Fable, its first Mythos-class AI model, yesterday and it’s already causing concerns inside Microsoft. Sources tell me that Microsoft is limiting the use of Claude Fable 5 for employees because of Anthropic’s new data retention requirements.

While Microsoft quickly rolled out Claude Fable 5 to its GitHub Copilot and Foundry customers, I’m told the model isn’t available in the model picker that Microsoft employees use for internal versions of GitHub Copilot. All other Claude models are still available internally at Microsoft, because they operate under Zero Data Retention (ZDR) rules.

I understand that Microsoft has been telling employees that its legal teams are evaluating changes to Anthropic’s data retention requirements. I’m told that the main concerns are around customer data and confidential information, and that it’s not yet clear whether Microsoft’s legal teams will clear Claude Fable for internal use.

Claude Fable 5 requires data retention to operate Anthropic’s new safety classifiers, meaning Anthropic retains prompts and outputs and deletes this data after 30 days. Some prompts and outputs can even be stored for up to two years if they’re flagged as violating Anthropic’s usage policy, so there are legal concerns around how Microsoft should be using Claude Fable 5.

Microsoft declined to comment.

Claude Fable 5 is the first broad release from Anthropic’s Mythos class of AI models, and it arrives just weeks after the company said the family was so capable at cybersecurity tasks that it was too dangerous to release publicly. Anthropic has put prompt safeguards in place to make Fable 5 less dangerous, leading to these challenging data retention changes.

Update, June 10th: Added that Microsoft declined to comment.

Xbox exploring ‘radically different’ console business models

2026-06-10T08:06:59-04:00

The RAMageddon crisis has got Microsoft rethinking its Xbox console hardware business. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox strategy chief Matthew Ball have both revealed this week that Microsoft is reevaluating plans for its next-generation Project Helix console and exploring “radically different” console business models in the meantime.

“We are working very hard to rethink everything that we can about Helix, which is a console we are committed to shipping, and we are very cognizant of the ways in which we need to change as a company to make sure it is affordable, to make sure that it’s flexible,” said Ball in an interview with The Game Business earlier this week.

Microsoft’s former Xbox president Sarah Bond described its next-gen Xbox console as “a very premium, very high-end curated experience” back in October, before the industry-wide constraints on memory and storage really started to hit. Sharma is now looking at ways to navigate the RAMageddon crisis, with a focus on affordability for current and next-gen Xbox consoles.

“On hardware, we are in a crisis right now, the entire industry is,” said Sharma in an interview with Fortune. While the costs of memory and storage keep rising, Xbox is looking at different ways to combat the underlying price pressures. “We must think about other ways to think about the cost construction of a console. We must think about how we create different plans, so more people can participate in the console,” says Sharma. “We must think about partnerships that will allow us to have better distribution and reach.”

Microsoft is now looking at new business models for consoles, and “what is needed for console rather than just the most premium, high-performance console in the world,” according to Sharma. “I think we’ve reached a point where it will be hard to imagine that mass audiences can afford thousands of dollars to spend on a console generation, and so I think we will start to see radically different business models that we never expected start to come into orbit later this year.”

Microsoft has many options, particularly if it’s weighing up more partnerships. In the past, the company has bundled Xbox hardware with Game Pass subscriptions, creating an easier way for gamers to finance the cost of a new console over a 24-month period. Xbox All Access was quietly discontinued last year, after many retailers pulled out of the program. It’s possible Microsoft could launch something similar, if it’s prepared to subsidize Xbox hardware further to tempt consumers into subscriptions.

Sharma also teased that Microsoft is preparing to “do more this summer” with Xbox Game Pass “to create more flexible offerings” for the subscription service. One of Sharma’s first big Xbox changes was cutting the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate in April. Microsoft also partnered with Discord last month to bundle a free Xbox Game Pass “starter edition” with Nitro subscriptions.

Microsoft could also focus on more ad-supported options for Xbox. The company has been working on a free Xbox Cloud Gaming option for well over a year now and previously confirmed it was in testing in October. While this will help Microsoft attract consumers who don’t want to purchase increasingly expensive game consoles, it’s not “radically different” from what exists today.

Radically different would be something like Telly, a startup that offers you a free TV in exchange for watching ads. Radically different could also hint at Microsoft allowing others to make Xbox consoles. Microsoft has already been exploring this with its Xbox-branded handhelds with Asus, and the next Xbox, codenamed Project Helix, could go a step further. Microsoft has previously hinted it will be some kind of hybrid of a console and a PC, and if other PC OEMs are able to create Xbox-branded devices based on AMD’s new chips, it may well help with affordability.

Both Sharma and Ball have also hinted that the next Xbox also needs to be more flexible. “I think that we have to think very differently about storage and memory going forward,” says Sharma. “We will have to apply new techniques, so that we can compress that. We will have to empower customers to have very flexible storage offerings. We will have to empower new types of games, so they can fit on device, and so there’s going to be a lot of innovation. This will take years, not days, not weeks, but we’ll go through it together with the community.”

Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like Microsoft is looking at making sure Project Helix owners will be able to extend storage without expensive proprietary solutions like the Xbox expansion cards found on the Xbox Series S / X. Sony opted for standard M.2 SSD expandable storage support on the PS5, and while it wasn’t as friendly to use as simply slotting in an Xbox expansion card, it was a lot less expensive for PS5 owners.

There’s no quick fix for Microsoft’s Xbox console pricing, but it’s not an easy issue for the rest of the industry to navigate either. We’ve already seen PS5 sales plummet after price rises, and Valve also raised Steam Deck prices by more than $200 last month. All eyes are now on Valve’s pricing for its Steam Machine this summer, which could hint at the direction of Xbox and PlayStation pricing decisions.

Microsoft is disabling Office 2019 for Mac next month

2026-06-10T05:14:35-04:00

Microsoft’s Office 2019 apps for Mac will stop working next month, because the company isn’t renewing a certificate that validates Office licenses. Owners of Office 2019 for Mac are being warned they’ll have to purchase Office 2024 or a Microsoft 365 subscription if they want to continue editing documents.

Microsoft previously promised that “all your Office 2019 apps will continue to function,” when it announced end of support in 2023. The company then quietly updated that support note last month to remove the mention of apps continuing to function, replacing it with “Rest assured that all your Office 2019 apps won’t lose any data.”

Starting on July 13th, Office 2019 for Mac and Office 2021 for Mac will both run in “reduced functionality mode,” allowing people to open files but not edit, save, or create new documents. The reduced functionality will impact Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote.

While Microsoft is providing a certificate update for Office 2021 as it’s still supported until October 13th, 2026, the company is leaving Office 2019 for Mac users out in the cold as support for these apps ended a few years ago. “Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support on October 10, 2023, and no longer receives updates,” says Microsoft. “Because Office 2019 cannot be updated to the required version, this issue cannot be resolved by updating or reinstalling Office 2019 for Mac.”

JimmyTech points out that old versions of Microsoft 365 apps on Mac and iOS will also be affected by this certificate issue, but a simple update will fix it for those users.

Microsoft regularly ends support of software and there’s always the risk you could run into issues running older apps or versions of Windows. It’s still surprising to not see Microsoft make an exception here though, particularly because this certificate issue breaks the main functionality of an app you’ve paid a one-time license fee for.

Apple drops support for a long list of Apple Watches with latest OS updates

2026-06-08T20:31:53-04:00

So long, Series 8. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

I hope you have a modern Apple Watch or iPad, because otherwise watchOS 27 and iPadOS 27 won’t run on your device. Apple often drops support for older devices with its latest software updates, but this year it’s culling even more device generations than ever before.

Apple is dropping support for at least three generations of Apple Watch models in watchOS 27. Apple’s website initially stated that the latest watchOS update would only be available on Apple Watch Series 10 devices and above, Apple Watch Ultra 2 and above, and Apple Watch SE 3. Apple later updated the listing to include the Series 9. We’ve also seen reports of people successfully installing the watchOS 27 developer beta on the first-generation Watch Ultra, though it doesn’t appear on the list. We’ve asked Apple for confirmation on which models are supported.

It’s a surprise support cull for Apple Watch models, which consumers certainly don’t refresh as much as an iPhone. WatchOS 26, released a year ago, supported Apple Watch Series 6 and later, as well as Apple Watch SE (2nd generation) and later, and all Apple Watch Ultra models. This was the same list of devices as watchOS 11. Even if the first-gen Watch Ultra is still supported in watchOS 27, that still means owners of the Series 6, 7, and 8, as well as the Watch SE (2nd gen), are out of luck.

Over on the iPad side, iPadOS 27 cuts support for 3rd-generation iPad Air models and 8th generation regular iPad models. iPad Pro owners will also need a 4th generation 12.9-inch model or above, or a 2nd generation 11-inch model and above.

Surprisingly, Apple is maintaining support for its iPhone 11 models with iOS 27 later this year. This means an iPhone from 2019 is supported by its latest OS updates, but an Apple Watch from 2022 isn’t. Make it make sense.

Update and correction, June 8th: An earlier version of this article misstated which iPads would receive iPadOS 27. The 4th-generation (A14) and 5th-generation (M1) iPad Air are supported, not unsupported. In addition, Apple’s watchOS 27 preview page initially omitted the Apple Watch Series 9 from the list of supported devices. It has now been added.

Xbox exclusives are back and more complicated than ever

2026-06-08T10:25:22-04:00

Two years ago, when Microsoft first revealed that it was bringing four Xbox-exclusive games to the PS5 and Nintendo Switch, it made the announcement far more complicated than necessary. That’s not likely to improve anytime soon. In fact, things now seem more confusing than ever as the company tries to appease both fans and the bottom line.

When making the experimental move away from exclusives in 2024, Microsoft initially refused to name the games — Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded — going cross platform, but was happy to shoot down rumors of Starfield and Indiana Jones coming to the PS5. Some Xbox fans thought the announcement meant “just four games,” others worried it was more, setting the stage for two years of confusion over what other titles would or would not be released on rival platforms. Eventually, Starfield and Indiana Jones both arrived on the PS5, only adding to the uncertainty.

With a new Xbox CEO in charge, hardcore fans have been ramping up the pressure on Microsoft to bring back Xbox-exclusive games, and the company finally relented during the Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday. Both Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution are now Xbox console exclusive titles, meaning they won’t be released on rival consoles. Sources at Xbox tell me the decision not to bring Gears of War: E-Day to PS5 was made fairly recently, after Microsoft had already done most of the work to port the game to Sony’s console.

Microsoft characterized the decision as “the return of exclusives,” noting that these two games “are not timed exclusives” so they theoretically won’t ever appear on the PS5 or Nintendo Switch 2. But what about other Xbox games in the future? “Games already announced for multiplatform releases will stick to that plan — we’re committed to investing in and growing Xbox both on console and beyond,” says Microsoft.

Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty revealed more about the decision in an interview with Gamertag Radio. “We want people to have a reason to get on board with Xbox, we want them to have a reason to buy an Xbox, a reason to be an Xbox fan,” says Booty. “At the same time we want to reward all our players that have been with us for a long time. We know that exclusives are important, that’s why we’ve got Gears coming in 2026 and Clockwork in 2027. We also want to be clear, our big multiplayer games, live-service games, are going to be multiplatform. If we’ve promised something to players already, we’re going to honor that promise.”

That helps explain why Fable, which was announced for PS5 earlier this year, is still coming to Sony’s console, and why Gears of War: E-Day is not. Microsoft never previously announced the platforms for E-Day.

But what about the new Xbox games Microsoft announced at its showcase? Senua, set in the Hellblade universe, is coming to PS5, and Spyro: A Real Beyond is also releasing on PS5 and Switch 2. You could argue that both of these franchises have a fan base on PlayStation thanks to past releases, but you could also argue that Microsoft was trying to build up a similar Gears of War fan base by releasing a remaster of the original Gears on PlayStation last year. PlayStation fans who enjoyed Re-Loaded will have to buy a PC or Xbox to play E-Day.

“Our principle is when we announce a date we want to announce the platforms,” says Booty. “So it’s going to be case-by-case, but we’re going to be clear that when it’s got a date it’s got a platform, and you’ll know what the choice will be.”

That doesn’t make Microsoft’s choices any clearer, though. State of Decay 3 is also being released on PS5, despite previous installments only ever being available on Xbox and PC. It has an open world survival sandbox with co-op for up to four players, so perhaps that makes it part of Microsoft’s “live service games,” or maybe it’s just a “case-by-case” decision. Who knows.

Microsoft’s return to Xbox exclusives has also created a weird situation where three of its big “four horsemen” Xbox franchises are coming to PS5. Halo: Campaign Evolved, Forza Horizon 6, and Fable are launching on PS5, but Gears of War: E-Day is not. It’s not clear if E-Day is enough of a big title to sell more Xbox consoles, but it certainly feels like a response to demands for Xbox exclusives from some fans.

I’m not surprised that Microsoft is in this complicated and confusing position, particularly because it’s been here for more than two years now. It’s complicated because Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood set across-the-board targets of 30 percent profit margins for Xbox in fall 2023, and the company responded by desperately trying to find revenue from rival platforms.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who took over the role in February, now has a little more breathing room to make changes, and Gears of War: E-Day debuting as an Xbox console exclusive is clearly part of that. “My mandate is not 30 percent accountability margins, it’s not enterprise software margins, it’s to be the number one gaming and entertainment company, and that’s what we’re going to do,” said Sharma in an interview with Bloomberg last week.

In the same interview, Sharma also talked about exclusivity and revealed why it’s difficult to make decisions like the E-Day one. “We’re the number two publisher in the world, and in order to be a great publisher you must have your games reach large audiences to play,” said Sharma. “At the same time we’re increasingly becoming a platform, in order to be a platform you must have exclusive content and services. I think we have to be very thoughtful about each title and how we want to think about it and learn from similar cases in the industry.”

Sharma’s comments speak to the tension between being a big game publisher and a platform holder. It’s difficult to do both and keep everyone happy, particularly in an era when game development is costly and the console install base isn’t growing like it used to. Sony is similarly returning to PlayStation-exclusive titles after dabbling in the PC space. But Microsoft has pushed much harder on being a multiplatform publisher, and because of this I don’t expect much clarity on its exclusives strategy anytime soon. Microsoft will keep testing different approaches in pursuit of its vague “return of Xbox” goal, all while leaving players to speculate about where Xbox games might appear next. Perhaps that ambiguity is part of the strategy.

Microsoft’s Xbox 25th anniversary console comes in translucent green

2026-06-08T10:03:35-04:00

Microsoft has created a special edition Xbox Series X to celebrate 25 years of the console. The Xbox 25th-anniversary console takes design cues from the original Xbox console, with both the console and controller featuring a translucent green design.

“For the first time, we’re bringing a translucent design to Xbox Series X, drawing inspiration from the original Xbox and OG Green so many players remember,” explains Jason Ronald, VP of next generation. “The Xbox Series X25 Limited Edition respects our history, with the power and performance of the Xbox Series X, including 1 TB of storage, and a design that reflects where we’ve been and the community that’s been with us along the way.”

The top of the Xbox 25th anniversary edition. | Image: Microsoft" data-portal-copyright="Image: Microsoft" />The Xbox X25 special edition controller. | Image: Microsoft" data-portal-copyright="Image: Microsoft" />

The X on the front of the console lights up green when you power this special edition console on, and there’s a 25th anniversary logo on the front, too. Microsoft says there will also be “a few hidden surprises throughout, as a thank you to the community.”

The controller has the original ABXY colors, as well as bumpers that honor the original black and white buttons found on the Duke controller. “The back case and battery door are fully transparent, revealing the classic XBOX logo,” explains Ronald.

Both the console and controller will be available in November, but Microsoft hasn’t announced an exact release date or all-important pricing just yet.

Windows is back on the Microsoft menu

2026-06-05T10:04:10-04:00

I can’t remember the last time Microsoft kicked off a Build keynote with Windows front and center, but that’s exactly what CEO Satya Nadella did this week. Nadella didn’t address the issues Microsoft is trying to fix in Windows 11 but chose to woo the audience with Microsoft’s slick Surface RTX Spark Dev Kit instead, calling it a “dream machine.”

Nadella unveiled the new Surface hardware just days after Nvidia officially returned to Windows on Arm with its new RTX Spark chips. Both companies are talking up these chips as some kind of new beginning for PCs, and it’s clear that RTX Spark will drive local AI workloads in a way that Microsoft’s previous Copilot Plus PCs haven’t yet managed.

Build really drove home that message this week, with Windows positioned as an all-important part of Microsoft’s AI agent efforts. Microsoft’s original mission under Bill Gates was a computer on every desk and in every home, and Nadella reframed that as “unmetered intelligence on every desk and in every home” within a few minutes of his keynote beginning.

It set the stage for Microsoft and Nvidia to position their new Windows PCs as a potential solution for costly, usage-based pricing of cloud-based AI models. As local compute grows in capability, there’s a clear gap that Microsoft and Nvidia can fill with powerful hardware you actually own.

“I think we, as Microsoft, have the responsibility for building the best possible AI stack that we can on [Windows], and obviously drive the best AI stack that we can in the cloud,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with Notepad. Davuluri thinks that Microsoft is in a good position to capitalize on hybrid compute, where chips like the RTX Spark will handle a lot of local workloads and intelligently hand off to the cloud when they need something more powerful.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is even more bullish about local AI compute. He wants to turn PCs into devices that work for you, eliminating that idle time when PCs are switched off or you’re not using them. “In the future, if I need my laptop to do something, I just text it with WhatsApp,” said Huang earlier this week. “You don’t want to necessarily run everything in the cloud, because if you can run it locally, it’s free.”

Nadella seems to agree. “The amount of compute that there is at the edge is astounding,” he said during his Build keynote. “Every PC, if you sort of aggregate that, that’s a lot of compute power.”

That power is really on display with Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chips, which will come to a variety of creator-focused laptops and miniature PCs later this year. RTX Spark is capable of running a 120 billion parameter large language model locally, allowing many AI workloads to run without ever touching the cloud. That’s an appealing concept during a continued AI money squeeze for developers and consumers.

Microsoft is targeting its own Surface Laptop Ultra at developers and creators and pairing it with ongoing improvements to Windows 11 performance and developer-friendly additions. While Microsoft’s deeper embrace of Linux utilities inside Windows this week didn’t generate the same gleeful audience reaction as the Windows Terminal announcement in 2019, developers I’ve spoken to are excited by the Coreutils and WSL containers additions.

The Surface Laptop Ultra has also been generating some buzz, particularly among developers and power users. Microsoft isn’t quite positioning this as a mainstream premium laptop, but there’s certainly room for it to appeal far beyond developers. “I think you’ll see us do well when it comes to STEM applications, and CAD apps running on the platform, because they take advantage of the same characteristic patterns of high-performance compute,” explains Davuluri.

All of this renewed focus on Windows at Microsoft seemed impossible only six months ago. Davuluri responded to the pressure on Microsoft to improve Windows 11 by laying out a plan to focus on performance, reliability, and overall experiences in the OS just a couple of months ago. I got to see some of the performance improvements at Build this week, with side-by-side comparisons of the Start menu and taskbar loading faster. Microsoft is putting in a lot of effort to turn Windows 11 around and listen to feedback from a variety of users.

But I’ve been wondering why Microsoft doesn’t just jump to Windows 12. It seems easier to just admit defeat on Windows 11 and then position Windows 12 as the remedy. Microsoft has done this many times in the past, particularly with the releases of Windows 7 and Windows 10.

“There are a lot of considerations when you think about the versioning of an operating system itself, and I think for us, a lot of the core proposition with Windows 11, or quite frankly, with Windows 12, or any label we use, has to do with end users and how they use the product and the workflow that they’re in,” says Davuluri. “I think we are more focused on having the product experience be better in the context they’re using it, and that I think is the most important thing for us.”

While we might not be getting a Windows 12 anytime soon, I’m curious how this Windows exists in a world of AI agents. Microsoft has been clear that it sees Windows as a home for AI agents and workloads, but it also unveiled Project Solara this week, a new platform for agent-first devices. Microsoft demonstrated a smart employee key card that could run an agent capable of transcribing and recognizing real world objects, and it also showed a reference design for an Amazon Echo Show–like device with an AI agent. It’s clear that Microsoft wants to offer up a platform for dedicated AI devices of the future.

The big surprise is that Project Solara devices are powered by a version of Android, not Windows. Despite this, Davuluri expects to see Project Solara running on Windows devices too. “We are not hard bound to a device specific operating system,” says Davuluri. “You should imagine a world where Solara will be great on a bunch of platforms, including Windows, both Windows 11 locally and Windows 365 instances in the cloud.”

Whether the future of AI agents runs on Windows, Android, or something else may not ultimately matter right now. For the first time in years, Microsoft seems determined to make Windows central to that conversation either way. Build 2026 wasn’t about fixing Windows’ past problems, it was about convincing developers that Windows still has a significant role to play in AI’s future.

The pad

Microsoft and OpenAI broke up — now they’re ready to fight. Microsoft announced a slew of new or expanded AI initiatives at Build this week. MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft’s first reasoning model, was the main addition, along with six other new models focused on image, voice, transcription, and coding. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told me these models are part of a bigger effort to prove that Microsoft can become a top AI model creator.
A first look at Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface Dev Box. I got a chance to take a closer look at both the Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at Build this week. Microsoft laid on a miniature showcase, demonstrating just how bright the Laptop Ultra screen is, as well as the power of Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip. As is tradition at any Surface event, there was also a full breakdown of the components inside the Laptop Ultra. It’s impressive how much attention to detail there is inside, alongside the focus on repairability.
Microsoft’s next-gen quantum chip cuts timeline to useful quantum computing. Microsoft unveiled its latest Majorana 2 chip this week, which uses a new material stack that promises quantum computing much sooner. Microsoft is claiming that by switching from aluminum to lead it has improved the performance of qubits, a unit of information in quantum computing much like the binary bits that computers use today. Physicists were skeptical of Microsoft’s first claims with Majorana 1, so some are once again questioning the company’s target of useful quantum computing by 2029.
Microsoft Scout is a new AI personal assistant built on OpenClaw. Much like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, allowing businesses to assign a virtual assistant to employees to help with organizing calendars, expense reporting, email drafts, and much more. Microsoft is releasing a preview version of Scout in the form of a desktop app, but eventually the plan is to have a full Scout cloud service.
Microsoft could be the next Big Tech antitrust target. Microsoft has escaped antitrust action in the US for 25 years, but that might change soon. New civil investigative demands reveal that the Federal Trade Commission is looking at potentially exclusionary behavior around Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, as well as its role in the AI industry. Customers have complained that Microsoft’s 2019 changes to its licensing terms made it significantly more costly to run Windows software on infrastructure outside of Microsoft’s own Azure cloud service. The US isn’t the only country probing this issue. The European Commission, UK Competition and Markets Authority, and Japan Fair Trade Commission have been investigating Microsoft’s cloud services within the last year.
This extravagant gaming laptop could ruin other screens for you. Asus’ Strix Scar 18 has a 4K 240Hz display that has impressed my colleague Antonio G. Di Benedetto. The Mini LED panel has over 2,000 dimming zones and up to 1,600 nits of peak brightness in HDR mode, but when you disable the HDR mode you get access to a special feature called Extreme Low Motion Blur (ELMB). This allows the dimming zones to automatically divide the display into smaller horizontal bands of pixels, refreshing them row by row very quickly — much like a traditional CRT. This dramatically reduces motion blur, a great benefit for fast-paced video games.
Microsoft makes it more secure to run OpenClaw on Windows. Microsoft launched Microsoft Execution Containers this week, a policy-driven layer to make its OS more secure for things like OpenClaw on Windows. It’s going a step further too, allowing a companion app for OpenClaw to run contained on Windows PCs. It should stop AI agents like OpenClaw from deleting all your files. “You can totally run OpenClaw inside your company now,” says OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger.
Call of Duty: Warzone is dropping PS4 and Xbox One support later this year. Activision is planning to drop support for PS4 and Xbox One consoles in Call of Duty: Warzone later this year. Players will need to upgrade to a PS5 or Xbox Series S / X console to continue playing Call of Duty: Warzone once season 6 of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 concludes later this year. Although the news isn’t too surprising, the timing couldn’t be worse for Warzone players still holding on to older consoles. Both Microsoft and Sony have increased the prices of their consoles over the past year, with the PS5 and Xbox Series X now $150 more than their original $499 launch prices.
Microsoft is threatening legal action for disclosing exploits. Microsoft is feuding with a security researcher publicly posting vulnerabilities. Someone going by the name Nightmare Eclipse has been posting proof-of-concept exploit code, with some posts suggesting that they’re a disgruntled former employee. Microsoft’s response has angered the cybersecurity community, after the company suggested it plans to bring a criminal case against Nightmare Eclipse for failing to follow “proper coordination” in disclosing vulnerabilities.
Microsoft 365 Copilot gets a speed boost and cleaner design. Microsoft launched a revamped version of Microsoft 365 Copilot last week, complete with a cleaner design that the company claims loads twice as fast. The redesign is rolling out across desktop and mobile and enables Copilot to present you with tools and controls based on your prompt, instead of showing a bunch of options at once. It’s part of a bigger effort to improve Copilot’s usefulness for businesses, while Microsoft continues to remove the AI assistant from parts of Windows.

I’m always keen to hear from readers, so please drop a comment here, or you can reach me at notepad@theverge.com if you want to discuss anything else. If you’ve heard about any of Microsoft’s secret projects, you can reach me via email at notepad@theverge.com or speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01. I’m also tomwarren on Telegram, if you’d prefer to chat there.

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Microsoft and OpenAI broke up — now they’re ready to fight

2026-06-03T10:14:26-04:00

At Microsoft’s annual Build conference on Tuesday, the company announced a slew of new or expanded AI initiatives, including a super app, in-house reasoning models, a cybersecurity tool, and OpenClaw-esque AI agents. All this news added up to a clear message: Microsoft is positioned to be one of the biggest players in AI, and it’s finally acting like it.

For years, Microsoft’s AI business leaned hard on its early and exclusive partnership with OpenAI. But the drama-filled marriage slowly devolved into a situationship, and the pair effectively separated in late April (though Microsoft is still OpenAI’s primary cloud partner — for now). This year’s Build had the vibe of a freshly single divorcée posting a thirst trap on Instagram. “It’s always fun to be at developer conferences in times of great change,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said onstage Tuesday, adding that events like this are about “coming to grips with the new opportunity.”

AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, in an interview with The Verge, put it even more bluntly.

“The goal is to prove that we can become one of the top four labs in the world,” Suleyman said. “There’s three labs that matter, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. We are not one of them at the moment, and that’s always been my intention. It’s why I came here. I want to build the very best frontier models in the world, fully multimodal, and in order to do that, we have to prove that we can do everything that we need to from the ground up, and we’re not just going to take from others.”

One of Microsoft’s first steps at Build was indeed to play catch-up on AI models. Suleyman unveiled MAI-Thinking-1, the company’s first reasoning model, along with six other new models focused on image, voice, transcription, and coding. Microsoft said the medium-size MAI-Thinking-1 model, which will likely be marketed to primarily enterprise clients, is “built from scratch for serious math, coding, and real-world enterprise deployment.” Microsoft is years behind both OpenAI and Anthropic here; OpenAI began releasing reasoning models in the fall of 2024. But Suleyman emphasized its performance on benchmarks like coding and its price point, saying it was cheaper than OpenAI equivalents on some tasks — a big deal in the age of the AI money squeeze, which has inspired a lot of complaints with customers.

While Microsoft has had years to glean insights from OpenAI, Suleyman made sure to mention that its development did not involve any distillation, meaning that it wasn’t trained using a different company’s AI model. If MAI-Thinking-1 is good, Microsoft clearly doesn’t want people thinking it’s due to the influence of OpenAI.

Suleyman told The Verge that for Microsoft, “the pivotal moment was renegotiating our contract with OpenAI. That meant that we were allowed to train models at a larger scale and explicitly pursue superintelligence entirely with our own IP, with our own data, no distillation, training from scratch.”

Nadella also highlighted Microsoft’s recently launched AI cybersecurity tool MDASH, which he said brings together 100 AI agents to find exploitable bugs “better than any single model.” It was clearly a dig at Claude Mythos Preview, which Anthropic introduced in April to much fear and fanfare — and expanded access to just before Build. OpenAI has its own cybersecurity-focused system as well, and all three companies will likely use their offerings to jockey for position in the government and enterprise markets they desperately need to court.

Microsoft is in a more complex situation with AI agents. The popular open-source platform OpenClaw demonstrated a potential path forward for AI agents, and after OpenAI quickly hired its creator, Peter Steinberger, Microsoft (among other companies) is trying to catch up. One of its key strategies is making OpenClaw work well with Windows. At Build, Nadella said he was very committed to OpenClaw support, and Microsoft employees chatted with developers in the audience about how they were using it.

Steinberger himself made a surprise appearance to great audience reaction, taking the stage to boast about how OpenClaw had bolstered its security and earned user trust. “What I kept hearing was, ‘Peter, I love my Claw, but can I use it at work?’” Steinberger said. “You can totally run OpenClaw inside your company now, and we even made the harness itself a plug-in.” Steinberger said that whether someone trusts Copilot, Codex, or another company’s coding platform, users can now run OpenClaw on top of that via Windows.

But Microsoft is also promoting its own separate Copilot “super app” that integrates OpenClaw-esque agents. A super app is a major focal point for OpenAI right now — president Greg Brockman is leading development of one that will tie together ChatGPT, the Codex coding platform, and the Atlas web browser. Microsoft’s strategy is similar, bringing together a variety of existing Copilot AI assistants. Its agents, called “Autopilots,” are designed to act as a helpful user interface. Cassidy Williams, GitHub’s senior director of developer advocacy, called Copilot “your home base for development and operations on your computer,” demonstrating how multiple agents could perform tasks like app-building. (In an extra flourish, Williams demonstrated how she could approve or deny code changes by flashing her computer camera a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.)

Autopilots are designed specifically to appeal to business customers — Nadella called them “autonomous, long-running agents with full enterprise compliance.” The first one Microsoft will offer is “Scout,” billed as “your always-on personal agent,” but clients can build and personalize their own. The Autopilot agents should be able to look through an email inbox, join group chats in Teams, check a calendar, and send daily briefings, among other things. Accordingly, employees on stage at Build repeatedly emphasized Copilot’s security tools and guardrails — obviously aiming to calm enterprise clients who may have heard horror stories about tools like OpenClaw.

Suleyman made sure to emphasize, again and again, Microsoft’s “humanist superintelligence” as an “AI that prioritizes humanity first” — part of AI companies’ recent rebrand of AGI to make it sound less frightening in an era when people are pushing back against AI more than ever before.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, another speaker known for working closely with OpenAI, appeared via video call to tout how Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip is fueling Microsoft’s AI agent goals. “I could be traveling and I’m on the phone and I can text my PC … and it would fire up the tools on the PC,” Huang said. “The idea that the PC evolved from a personal computer to a personal AI is just really exciting.”

Microsoft spent years betting on OpenAI, and in some ways, that’s left it behind in the AI race. But as OpenAI and other competitors turn to enterprise to finally make money, it’s got some obvious advantages. Microsoft already has a substantial client base and, compared with other AI companies, a reputation for safety and security. And like Google, it also has deep pockets, considerable computing resources, and a diversified revenue stream, meaning it can take big bets without a ton of risk.

Suleyman told The Verge, “There’s a lot of people who are either like chasing startup valuations or about to IPO, so we can operate with a little bit more humility and a little bit more long-term optimization.” He added, “We’ve got the money to be able to buy Anthropic [models] when we need to. We’ve got the optionality in Azure with 11,000 models, so people can use literally whatever they want whenever they want, but that buys us the time to do it right from the start.”

At the same time, there are a lot of unanswered questions here. Microsoft called out a lot of benchmark wins and advancements for its seven new models, but that doesn’t always translate to real-world adoption, and even a new model that pulls ahead for a week or two can quickly fall behind. AI super apps are a mostly yet-untested idea. And Microsoft is entering a crowded yet still largely underwhelming AI agent marketplace with a product that we haven’t seen in action. There’s still plenty of room for its promises to fall flat.