New Delhi: Microsoft used its Build 2026 developer conference to showcase a broad range of announcements spanning artificial intelligence, developer tools,
hardware and quantum computing. In the keynote, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, and other top executives of the company described the latest initiatives in the company’s AI ecosystem and provided additional tools for developers to create and deploy intelligent applications.
The event showcased Microsoft’s emphasis on in-house AI innovation, agent-based computing, and local AI processing. The company explained its ideas for the future of computing, including a new device for developers that will run on the Surface, advanced AI models, and a next-generation quantum chip. There were also a number of announcements regarding developer features to enhance Windows 11 and make the AI agents safer and more capable.
Surface RTX Spark Dev Box targets AI developers
Super excited to announce seven new world-class MAI models today. They represent what we consider a new era in AI designed to keep you in control and on the frontier.
First is our text foundation model, MAI-Thinking-1, exceptionally strong on reasoning and SWE tasks.
– It’s a… pic.twitter.com/bPDq0nQwlh— Mustafa Suleyman (@mustafasuleyman) June 2, 2026
Microsoft has unveiled a small, compact desktop computer designed for AI development, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. It comes with Nvidia’s new Arm-based Spark RTX chip and 128GB of unified memory, which will allow developers to deploy large AI models locally.
The system comes with developer tools including Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot. It also features a streamlined version of Windows 11 Pro, focused on productivity. Though the full specifications and price have not yet been announced, the device will be available in the US later this year, according to Microsoft.
Windows 11 gets new developer features
Microsoft has announced a number of enhancements that it hopes will make Windows 11 more appealing to developers. The company is introducing Coreutils, Linux-style command-line tools, as part of its native support.
The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) will support the creation and management of Linux containers by developers. Also, Microsoft introduced Intelligent Terminal, a new tool to offer context and support to AI-driven coding agents.
Project Solara brings AI agents across devices
The company has also unveiled an early preview of a new Android-based operating system designed to facilitate the seamless collaboration of AI agents on a variety of devices, known as Project Solara.
The platform was in collaboration with Qualcomm and MediaTek, and it is designed to enable AI agents to move tasks across devices and interact with PCs. Microsoft showed off prototype hardware such as a digital badge, which would be worn to display your digital badge, and a hub for a desktop computer, which could also run the operating system.
Scout assistant expands Microsoft’s agent strategy
With Scout, Microsoft brought an AI assistant that runs continuously, whether or not the computer is powered on, and was built using the open-source OpenClaw platform. The assistant can be connected to Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook, OneDrive and Teams.
Scout’s features are intended to assist you with common tasks you’ll face in your work, such as expense reporting, email composing, or calendar management. Today, the assistant is live in desktop preview with Frontier customers in the U.S.
Microsoft debuts its first reasoning AI model
One of the biggest things announced at Build 2026 is the launch of MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft’s first homegrown reasoning AI model.
The model has 35 billion trainable parameters and 128K context windows. It’s designed to handle complex multi-step reasoning, code generation and long-context tasks, Microsoft says. The company also added new features to its wider MAI model range, including voice processing, transcription, and coding capabilities.
GitHub Copilot evolves into an agentic development platform
Microsoft announced on GitHub a new experience for GitHub Copilot that can be used as an entire agentic development environment.
The new platform is seamlessly connected to GitHub’s collaborative workspace and enables developers to collaborate with AI agents during the software development lifecycle. The new approach merges trusted developer workflows with cutting-edge AI support, Microsoft claimed.
New safety controls for AI agents
Microsoft has introduced a new framework, called Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), to enhance AI security, enabling developers to establish secure access policies for AI agents operating on Windows.
The company also announced the introduction of an OpenClaw companion app which enables the deployment and management of AI agents in a sandboxed environment. In addition, Microsoft has two new open-source projects: ASSERT, for policy-based safety testing, and ACS, an agent control specification designed to standardise agent control mechanisms.
Majorana 2 advances Microsoft’s quantum ambitions
6/And, finally, Majorana 2. Majorana 1 proved out the physics of the topological approach, but Majorana 2 is where we start engineering at scale. pic.twitter.com/e22SMzVDyQ
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) June 2, 2026
Microsoft announced its newest quantum computing chip, Majorana 2. The new processor is said to offer a thousand times greater reliability in qubits than its predecessor.
The breakthrough could help speed Microsoft’s path towards a viable quantum computer. Now the company thinks it can do so in 2029, much sooner than first thought.
In addition to the hardware announcement, Microsoft announced the availability of a new platform called Microsoft Discovery, which leverages AI agents for scientific research and experimentation. A local preview version of the app is also now available for developers and researchers.
