Microsoft Launches Copilot Tasks: Autonomous Background Agent With Its Own Browser & Cloud PC
Microsoft just entered the autonomous agent race in a meaningful way. Copilot Tasks — announced today and rolling out in preview — is not an enhancement to the existing Copilot assistant. It’s a fundamentally different product: a background agent that runs on a dedicated cloud PC, with its own browser, that accepts natural language instructions and executes them while you’re doing something else entirely. This puts Microsoft in direct competition with OpenAI’s Operator and Anthropic’s computer-use products. And given Microsoft’s distribution advantages, it’s a competitive move worth taking seriously. ...