Microsoft

RSA Conference opened its doors in San Francisco on March 23, 2026, and the message was impossible to miss before the first keynote even ended: agentic AI security is now the primary concern of the entire enterprise security industry. For years, RSAC has been the place where the security industry takes collective stock of where threats are heading. This year, every major vendor arrived with the same answer: AI agents are the new attack surface, and the industry is barely ready for it. ...

Microsoft quietly shipped one of the more significant quality-of-life updates for AI-assisted development in VS Code 1.112, released today. The headline feature: a three-tier agent permission system that ranges from cautious confirmation-heavy mode all the way to full Autopilot — where the agent runs without asking for approval and automatically handles retries and responses. This isn’t just a UI preference. It’s a formal architecture for how humans and coding agents share control, and it finally gives developers explicit language and tooling to choose their level of trust in the agent at the workspace or global level. ...

Students using GitHub Copilot’s free student plan woke up this week to a familiar and frustrating experience in the AI industry: their tools quietly got worse without any warning. GitHub has removed GPT-5.4, Claude Opus, and Claude Sonnet from its free Student plan — discovered not through an announcement, but by students mid-session finding their model selections grayed out or unavailable. What Changed The GitHub free Student Copilot plan previously offered access to premium models including GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus and Sonnet alongside the standard model options. Those models have now been removed. ...

If you’ve ever had to manually copy data from a spreadsheet into a presentation and then re-explain the context to your AI assistant all over again, Anthropic just solved that in a way that matters for real enterprise workflows. On March 11, Anthropic launched updates to its Claude add-ins for Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint that allow the two applications to share full conversation context in a single session. The update is available immediately to paid Claude plan users on Mac and Windows. ...

Eighty percent of Fortune 500 companies are already running AI agents inside their organizations. Nearly a third of those agents weren’t officially sanctioned by IT. That’s the uncomfortable statistic Microsoft dropped Monday as it announced the general availability of Agent 365 — a $15/user/month control plane designed to govern the growing population of AI agents operating inside enterprise environments before they become what VentureBeat memorably called “corporate double agents.” The Problem Agent 365 Solves AI agents have crossed from experimental to operational. They’re filing tickets, managing calendars, writing code, processing invoices, and increasingly taking actions with real business consequences. Most organizations deployed them faster than they built governance frameworks around them. ...

Security researchers have documented what they’re calling the first AI agent threat actor in the wild: an autonomous bot named Hackerbot-Claw (also tracked as Chaos Agent) that spent 37 hours in late February 2026 systematically targeting GitHub repositories from Microsoft, DataDog, Aqua Security, and CNCF. The campaign wasn’t noisy. It wasn’t a spray-and-pray attack. It was methodical, multi-technique, and ultimately successful: the bot exfiltrated a GitHub token with write permissions from one of the most widely-used repositories on the platform. ...

Microsoft dropped what may be the most consequential enterprise AI announcement of 2026 today at its Frontier Transformation digital event: Copilot Cowork, a new agentic capability built directly on Anthropic’s Claude, a new enterprise governance platform called Agent 365, and a brand-new Microsoft 365 E7 license tier — all arriving as the company races to stay ahead of the agentic AI wave it helped ignite. From Assistant to Agent: Wave 3 of Copilot Microsoft is calling today’s launch “Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot,” and the distinction matters. Previous waves were about making Copilot smarter and more contextual. This wave is about making it act. ...

The agentic AI capabilities the security community has been building are now being used by adversaries. Microsoft’s Global Threat Intelligence team confirmed this week that criminal groups and nation-state actors are deploying AI agents to autonomously handle attack operations — and the scale is accelerating. What Microsoft Is Seeing In a Thursday interview with The Register, Sherrod DeGrippo, Microsoft’s General Manager of Global Threat Intelligence, described a clear behavioral shift in how sophisticated adversaries operate: ...

The Model Context Protocol just got its most enterprise-important SDK milestone to date. Microsoft’s official C# SDK for MCP has shipped version 1.0, bringing full compliance with the 2025-11-25 MCP specification and — crucially — improved authorization server discovery. For the .NET-heavy enterprise world, this isn’t a footnote. This is the unlocking event that makes serious production MCP deployments viable in environments that have standardized on Microsoft’s stack. What’s Actually New in 1.0 The headline feature is the improved authorization server discovery, which lands just as enterprises are grappling with the identity and access management questions that come with deploying agents at scale. ...

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. ...