Search “Microsoft”

Opera launches WebAI, with local AI models built into the browser

On October 27, 2026, Opera announced that it has begun building local AI models into its browser and described WebAI as a proposed web standard. The first capabilities launched in Opera One as an optional early preview, with Opera GX and Opera Neon to follow. Opera said WebAI is backed by companies including Google and Microsoft; at launch, users can use Google's Gemma as well as Apple's on-device foundation models on Mac, and it offers APIs such as Prompt, Decision, Semantic Embeddings, and Summarizer, Writer, Rewriter, Translator, and Proofreader. The feature must be manually enabled in settings and currently supports only 64-bit Windows PCs with Intel or AMD processors and Apple silicon Macs; it does not support Intel-based Macs, Linux, or Windows on Arm.

Databricks adds productivity and AI data connectors to Lakeflow Connect

On October 27, 2026, Databricks announced that Lakeflow Connect offers native, fully managed connectors for sources including Atlassian (Jira, Confluence), Microsoft SharePoint, Google Workspace (Drive, Outlook, Gmail), GitHub, as well as OpenAI and Anthropic, with data landing directly in Unity Catalog. Unstructured files, pages, and emails land as governed tables, with no need to build or maintain data pipelines, and can be used for enterprise knowledge bases, AI agents, and developer productivity dashboards. According to the Databricks blog, Toyota Finance Australia used its Jira connector to achieve a zero-maintenance pipeline, and VaxCare used its Confluence connector to provide knowledge base support for its chatbot. There are currently no further developments.

Databricks adds productivity and AI data connectors to Lakeflow Connect

On October 27, 2026, Databricks announced that Lakeflow Connect offers native, fully managed connectors for sources including Atlassian (Jira, Confluence), Microsoft SharePoint, Google Workspace (Drive, Outlook, Gmail), GitHub, as well as OpenAI and Anthropic, with data landing directly in Unity Catalog. Unstructured files, pages, and emails land as governed tables, with no need to build or maintain data pipelines, and can be used for enterprise knowledge bases, AI agents, and developer productivity dashboards. According to the Databricks blog, Toyota Finance Australia used its Jira connector to achieve a zero-maintenance pipeline, and VaxCare used its Confluence connector to provide knowledge base support for its chatbot. There are currently no further developments.

View story:Databricks adds productivity and AI data connectors to Lakeflow Connect

Perplexity Releases Practical Guide to LLM Gateways

On October 27, 2026, Perplexity released a practical guide to LLM gateways, explaining how this middleware layer routes, authenticates, caches, and logs model calls, and distinguishing four forms: API gateways, LLM gateways, MCP gateways, and AI gateways. The guide breaks down the mechanism through a six-step request lifecycle, while warning that gateways concentrate credentials from various vendors, and cites the LiteLLM gateway intrusion incident disclosed by Microsoft and two high-severity vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-35029 and CVE-2026-59823, reported by Check Point (already fixed in LiteLLM 1.83.9). The article also lists post-incident reviews of Cloudflare AI Gateway and OpenRouter, four deployment paths, and paid plans starting at about $50 per month. The guide is currently reported by Unite.AI, with no further developments yet.

QorusDocs Launches QPilot Workspace

On October 27, 2026, QorusDocs launched QPilot Workspace, a shared environment that lets business development teams and AI agents co-author proposals, bids, and RFP responses within Microsoft 365, with integrations for Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT. According to Unite.AI, the product uses PursuitIQ as its knowledge foundation layer, connecting people, project experience, approved answers, and bid history, and organizes workflows through Templates, Assignments, and Skills. QorusDocs says its platform is used by more than 200 organizations, including WSP, CDW, and Insight. There are currently no subsequent developments.

Claude Code v2.1.312 adds the oidc.user_id_claim configuration

Claude Code released version v2.1.312, adding the oidc.user_id_claim configuration. This configuration allows identifying users by a claim in the id_token other than sub, such as the oid in Microsoft Entra ID. The same version also supports clicking the prompt of a queued message in full-screen mode to send it directly, and fixes issues including that after logging in from the VS Code extension, managed settings and organizational policies are no longer fetched within the session, and that Claude overwrites the original file after seeing only the beginning of an oversized CLAUDE.md, while also renaming the usage prompt for the 5-hour window to "5-hour limit". This version is currently available via GitHub Releases.

IDC integrates Quanta with Claude and opens it to customers

On October 28, 2026, IDC Research partnered with Anthropic to connect IDC Quanta to Claude through an MCP connector, allowing customers to directly access IDC's forecasts, market data, and research within the Claude app, Cowork, and Microsoft Office plugins, generating cited analyses based on more than 15 billion data points. Reports from the same day also stated that IDC is rolling out Claude company-wide: engineers used Claude Code to cut the rebuild of an internal data warehouse from an estimated three months to three weeks, code reviews from five days to about 30 minutes, and planning sprints from three weeks to three days. There have been no subsequent independent developments so far.

Microsoft says China-linked hackers breached about 2,250 organizations using AI agents

Microsoft security researchers say that hackers linked to the Chinese government breached ConnectWise's cloud backup service and stole application credentials used to establish data links, allowing them to log in as authorized users to customers' Microsoft-hosted environments and access email and other files. The hackers used AI agents to break into about 2,250 organizations at a rate of nearly 3,000 login attempts per minute, a pace Microsoft says left defenders with almost no time to detect and respond. The AI framework used was the open-source stress-testing framework ARTEX. ConnectWise said it has suspended access to the cloud backup system and launched an investigation, and as of Thursday it was restoring service.

Research team fine-tunes Qwen3.8-27B with RL using ThinkingBox-Bench terminal-state checks as rewards

The research team performed full-parameter RL fine-tuning of Qwen3.8-27B, using the executable checks on the final database state in ThinkingBox-Bench directly as reinforcement learning rewards. This work was done by the Microsoft Copilot Studio team in collaboration with Toloka and others. On 507 out-of-distribution tasks not used in training, the number of tasks the model passed on all 20 attempts rose from 38 (7.5%) to 107 (21.1%), pass@1 rose from 51.70% to 60.78%, and the cost per successful attempt dropped from $0.177 to $0.139. The training pool used offline-policy relative-difficulty filtering, ultimately retaining 187 tasks; the training and evaluation code has been open-sourced at microsoft/thinkingbox-training.

Microsoft announces that Teams will roll out AI contextual phishing detection

Microsoft announced that Teams will launch an AI-driven, context-aware phishing detection feature. The feature is planned to begin rolling out in early November 2026 and is expected to become generally available worldwide in mid-to-early December. According to the published description, the feature analyzes conversation context to identify phishing, social engineering, impersonation, and deception intent, and can detect suspicious behavior that does not contain malicious links or files, primarily covering chats initiated by external parties for the first time. Administrators can enable it without any action, and message content will not be retained for model training or other purposes. The feature is currently in an announced, pending-launch state, with no subsequent development facts yet.

View story:Microsoft announces that Teams will launch AI contextual phishing detection

British detective investigated over alleged use of Copilot in criminal case decisions

The UK's Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) is conducting a gross misconduct investigation into a senior detective at Derbyshire Constabulary over allegations that they used Microsoft Copilot to help make decisions in criminal cases. According to reports on its behalf, the detective is alleged to have used AI to make policy decisions, assess and manage risk, inform investigative decisions, and input case-related sensitive operational and personal information into the tool. Derbyshire Police approved officers' use of Copilot in May 2025 for drafting reports and summarizing information, but explicitly prohibited inputting operational, sensitive or personal data. The investigation will examine usage between May 2025 and June 2026, and no conclusions have yet been reached.

Microsoft research team publishes test results of AI diagnostic tool on complex cases

On October 23, 2026, the Microsoft research team announced the diagnostic results of an AI diagnostic tool in tests on complex cases. Phoenix Technology reported that day that Microsoft launched the AI diagnostic system Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO), which simulates a joint consultation of physician specialists by orchestrating multiple AI agents; in a simulated evaluation based on complex cases from the New England Journal of Medicine, its accuracy reached 83%, compared with 36% for primary care general practitioners and general internists who could independently consult reference materials, while specialists were not included in the comparison; in an evaluation of common U.S. emergency department cases based on the MIMIC-IV-ED dataset, its diagnostic accuracy was 1.7 times that of human physicians. Cailian Press reported the same day that the tool is powered by GPT-5 and, through a mechanism called the "Diagnostic Orchestrator," simulates multiple clinical experts analyzing collaboratively, deciding step by step which medical histories to ask about and which tests to arrange, and continuously updating diagnostic hypotheses; general practitioners without access to reference materials had an accuracy of about 22%. The research team's next step will be to collaborate with Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to test emergency triage capabilities; Microsoft has not yet stated the timing or form of commercialization.

Cohere announces public beta of Model Vault confidential computing

Cohere announced that the confidential computing feature of Model Vault has entered public beta. The feature is based on the NVIDIA H100 GPU confidential computing capability on Microsoft Azure, providing hardware-level isolation for hosted model inference. According to the Cohere product and research blog, the scope of encryption extends from data at rest and in transit to prompts, documents, responses, and model execution during inference; after application payloads are end-to-end encrypted, they can only be decrypted in a confidential environment that has passed remote attestation. Customers can cryptographically verify the hardware, firmware, and software configuration before sending sensitive data, and the client will refuse to send requests when the security policy is not met. The existing Model Vault API and request format remain unchanged. The feature is currently in public beta.

Cohere launches confidential computing public beta on Model Vault

On October 22, 2026, Cohere launched confidential computing on Model Vault, currently in public beta. The feature runs on NVIDIA GPUs on Microsoft Azure, combining confidential CPU and GPU execution, OHTTP end-to-end encryption of request content, and remote attestation, allowing customers to verify the target environment before releasing sensitive data. Cohere also plans to open-source the confidential inference stack and advance support for NVIDIA Blackwell and B200 GPUs.

Nadella says Volkswagen Group is deploying Copilot company-wide

On October 22, 2026, Satya Nadella said he was pleased to see Volkswagen Group using Copilot across the company. Reports from the same source state that Volkswagen Group has rolled out Microsoft Copilot to more than 330,000 employees, embedding secure AI assistance across its operations and allowing teams to focus on higher-value work. There are currently no follow-up developments; the status of the event remains at the above statements and deployment description.

Microsoft Report Says Storm-0940 Used AI Agent Artex to Launch Cyberattacks

Microsoft released a report stating that the China-linked actor Storm-0940 used the open-source AI agent ARTEX to automate attacks against hundreds of organizations across different industries worldwide. The report notes that ARTEX was released as open source on GitHub and chains together multiple LLM agents, requiring almost no human intervention from reconnaissance to data theft; it uses ConnectWise's Microsoft 365 backup and management application keys to log in, bypassing user login and MFA, and in several intrusions it achieved cloud privileged access from the initial target in under 3 hours. The report also notes that most attack attempts failed, including one password spray that logged 151K+ failures with none succeeding, and that application login alone does not prove data was stolen. There are currently no further developments.

Nadella's shareholder letter proposes matching token costs to business outcomes

On October 22, 2026, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proposed building a frontier ecosystem in the 2026 annual shareholder letter, and put forward "cost-to-outcome" (the business outcomes obtained per unit of token spending) as a new software economics optimization metric. The letter also disclosed that Microsoft's fiscal 2026 revenue was $331.8 billion, up 18% year over year; Azure grew 41% and surpassed $100 billion for the first time; M365 Copilot paid seats exceeded 30 million, and GitHub Copilot users reached 50 million. The letter also stated that interaction is shifting from synchronous chat to asynchronous agents, with Harness separated from models; Foundry offers more than 11,000 models and has over 100,000 customers, and Microsoft Frontier Co. was established, dispatching 6,000 experts to work on-site. Currently, the content of this letter is reported by a single source, with no subsequent independent developments yet.

Apple says developers are optimizing apps and games for iPhone Duo

On October 22, 2026, Apple announced that developers are optimizing apps and games for the first foldable iPhone Duo. According to information published on Apple Newsroom that day, iPhone Duo will go on sale on October 23 (this Friday), the App Store will feature a dedicated editorial collection, and adapted apps will be marked with a Made for iPhone Duo badge. Adapted apps include Netflix, Prime Video, Paramount+, Zoom, Slack, and others; Microsoft Word and Outlook will offer desktop-class experiences in the coming weeks. On the hardware side, the iPhone Duo's inner screen is 50% larger than that of the iPhone 18 Pro Max, it is powered by the A20 Pro, and it supports Split View on an iPhone for the first time. There are currently no subsequent developments.

Microsoft report says Storm-0940 used AI agent Artex to launch cyberattacks

Microsoft released a report stating that the China-linked actor Storm-0940 used the open-source AI agent ARTEX to automate attacks against hundreds of organizations across different industries worldwide. The report notes that ARTEX was released as open source on GitHub and chains together multiple LLM agents, requiring almost no human intervention from reconnaissance to data theft; it uses ConnectWise's Microsoft 365 backup and management application keys to log in, bypassing user login and MFA, and in several intrusions it achieved cloud privileged access from the initial target in under 3 hours. The report also notes that most attack attempts failed, including one password spray that logged 151K+ failures with none succeeding, and that application login alone does not prove data was stolen. There are currently no further developments.

View story:Microsoft Report Says Storm-0940 Used AI Agent Artex to Launch Cyberattacks

Cohere Releases Enterprise Retrieval Model Rerank 5

On October 21, 2026, Cohere released its enterprise retrieval model Rerank 5, available in two tiers: Pro and Fast. According to Cohere's product and research blog, the model is now available on the Cohere API, Model Vault, Microsoft Foundry, and Amazon SageMaker, with Pro priced at $0.05 per 1 million tokens and Fast at $0.02. Cohere states that Rerank 5 Pro leads all tested models on four public benchmarks—ViDoRe V3, nanoMTEB, BRIGHT, and BEIR—ranking first on 39 of 46 composite datasets. A new feature, Context Focus, can return the most relevant text snippets within a document in a single call; in official tests, removing half the context cost only 2 percentage points in answer quality. Follow-up reports add that both tiers support a 32K context window and more than 100 languages, and that upgrading requires no index rebuild; in search agent tests, paired with a default threshold of 0.1, it reduced tokens per task by 19% and raised accuracy from 46% to 57%.