#Microsoft

Nebius plans $40 billion in 2027 spending as Microsoft data center delays mount

Nebius laid out $40 billion in planned 2027 spending on its third-quarter earnings call, funded largely by customer prepayments and loans backed by customer contracts. Its Vineland, New Jersey site for Microsoft, under a contract worth up to $19.4 billion, is months behind schedule, with only just over half of the Microsoft capacity now planned for delivery by year-end and the rest in Q2 2027. Nebius cut its 2026 revenue forecast by $200 million to $3 billion and reported third-quarter revenue of $981 million, up 571% year over year, while shares fell 17%.

Microsoft Research Focus Edition #98: AI Translation, KLS Conjecture Proof, and Faster Coding Agents

Microsoft Research Focus Edition #98 highlights AI advances bringing universal translation closer to reality and a new proof resolving the 31-year-old KLS conjecture in high-dimensional geometry. The edition also covers CompactionBench and APEC, which cut coding-agent context compaction costs by up to 25.4% and execution time by 9.6%, plus the Latent Core Tokenizer, which improved tokenization across 104 languages.

How DXC Technology built a multi-model AI substrate on Amazon Bedrock

DXC Technology built the model substrate for its DXC OASIS IT-operations harness on Amazon Bedrock, reaching Anthropic Claude, Amazon Nova, Meta Llama and open-weight models through one managed interface. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails apply content filtering, PII redaction and denied-topic policies uniformly across every model, while AWS PrivateLink keeps inference traffic inside the customer VPC. DXC OASIS has been generally available since March 2026 and cut resolution time by 95% on average across 56 measured use cases.

Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO amid espionage scandal; $1.4 trillion in market value lost

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's CEO, president and board member effective immediately on November 12, 2026, after the Wall Street Journal reported the board planned to fire him over two extramarital affairs, one with a suspected Chinese spy. Nvidia has lost roughly $1.4 trillion in market value since an October 29 New York Times report on possible ties to Chinese intelligence, and CFO Colette Kress is taking over on an interim basis. Harvey C. Jones becomes the first independent board chair, while Huang's departure leaves no clear succession plan and could unsettle the alliance and guarantee structure built around him.

Same event; the pick carries“NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition as Jensen Huang Resigns, Colette Kress Named Interim CEO”

Microsoft researchers describe Lazarus, a backdoor that reprograms dormant neurons in AI agents

Microsoft researchers have described Lazarus, a backdoor technique that reprograms fewer than 10 dormant neurons in an LLM so an agent built on it emits attacker commands when a hidden trigger appears, with no retraining required. The modified model still passes standard evaluations and behaves normally until the trigger, which can be as simple as a date change, and the agent then runs the downloaded code with whatever access it was given. The authors say detection requires diffing against the original weights, and Microsoft Foundry already ties open-weight models to their publishers and scans their containers, while red-teaming harnesses, agent-based weight scanning and signed models with tamper-evident provenance are in development.

Beyond code generation: A developer's guide to agentic engineering

GitHub published a developer's guide to agentic engineering, walking through how Copilot supports the Plan, Build, Verify, and Observe stages of software work. The guide cites GitHub's 1.2 billion commits in one week this October, over 400% more than a year earlier, and a Faros AI study finding pull requests spent 441% longer in review as teams moved from low to high AI adoption. It details features including Copilot in Slack or Teams, Plan Mode, GitHub Agentic Workflows, cloud sandboxes, session continuity, shared memory, Copilot Dreaming, and Copilot Fusion.

Microsoft Research's PDD Kit formally verifies agent-written full-stack web apps

Microsoft Research introduced PDD Kit, a research prototype that turns a developer's plain-language intent into a Verus formal specification, proves the coding agent's Rust code meets it for every input, and falls back to tests where a proof cannot reach. In a demo inside GitHub Next's Chopin, the team used PDD Kit to verify the login logic of Pet Store, a roughly 5,000-line Rust full-stack app, with the developer reviewing the intent artifact rather than the generated code line by line. PDD Kit only verifies Rust today, and its guarantees rest on six developer-approved trusted pieces, including the bcrypt password check and the two database lookups.

Ed Zitron: OpenAI's $11B round and Anthropic's amended S-1 point to AI funding running dry

Ed Zitron argues the AI buildout ends when the money runs out, citing OpenAI raising $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation after tepid interest from large investors, below the $30 billion at $1.4 trillion it reportedly sought. He also reads Anthropic's amended S-1 as showing Q3 revenue near $17 billion against compute costs of $9.9 billion, roughly $895 billion to $1.07 trillion in total obligations and a possible sub-investment-grade rating. He ties this to debt markets shutting out neoclouds, Google's lower search monetization from AI overviews, and OpenAI contributing about 11% of Microsoft's latest quarterly revenue.

Microsoft Research's Mike Walker on the Hacker Mindset and Building Cyber Defense

Microsoft Research Manager Mike Walker, who led DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge, discusses how hacker culture shaped his career building next-generation cyber defense, including the first all-machine hacking tournament. He argues effective security depends on understanding trust and context, and reflects on what competitive hacking taught him about teamwork and collective intelligence.

Microsoft builds synthetic enterprise data platform to evaluate Copilot

Microsoft's Industry Evaluation Data Generation Platform creates full-scale synthetic enterprise environments to evaluate Microsoft Copilot without using customer data. Grounded in public sources such as O*NET occupational data, job postings, and SEC filings, it generates realistic tenants with users, meetings, emails, and documents, plus automated query pipelines and quality frameworks. Microsoft says this establishes the first standardized evaluation baseline for Copilot.

Microsoft Research Focus Edition #97: ForkPilot, CABRA, TeleTune and AI Use at Work

Microsoft Research Focus Edition #97 highlights ForkPilot, a self-improving agentic framework that matches the best existing methods while cutting AI processing demands by up to 59% across six benchmarks. The edition also covers CABRA, a framework showing coding agents still struggle to understand unfamiliar codebases, and TeleTune, which learns reusable skills from user activity logs. It also examines Copilot Chat activity, where document editing exceeded 20% of classified activities.

Ed Zitron argues Anthropic's IPO filing hides slowing growth behind a discounted Q2

Ed Zitron argues that Anthropic's S-1 is timed to present a compute-discounted Q2 2026, when it reported a $974 million profit, rather than the company that will actually go public. He cites roughly $269.4 billion in non-cancellable compute commitments to Google, Amazon, Microsoft and SpaceX, plus a further $125 billion to $150 billion in TPU obligations, and notes Q3 revenue growth slowed to 45% while compute costs rose 76.3%. He also points to 5% to 7% of revenue coming from customers later found to be distilling its models and a lock-up schedule that lets insiders exit quickly.

Microsoft Research releases Flint-interactive, a language for AI-generated interactive data visualizations

Microsoft Research released Flint-interactive, a language built on Flint that lets agents and developers create interactive data visualizations through high-level semantic events and update operators. Flint's compiler handles hit testing, layout, rendering and visual dependencies, so users specify interactions such as linked brushing, highlighting or viewport changes without writing low-level visualization code. It is available through Flint-MCP and MCP Apps in chat environments, the Flint Interactive Canvas for dashboards and data stories, and a programming API for bespoke interactions.

Microsoft Research and co-author prove the 31-year-old KLS conjecture

Microsoft researcher Xinzhi Zhang and a co-author have proved the Kannan-Lovász-Simonovits (KLS) conjecture, a 31-year-old open problem in high-dimensional geometry, showing the bound holds with a universal constant independent of dimension. The proof grew out of a human-directed agentic process in which AI agents explored more than 100 candidate approaches while researchers pruned and redirected the search, and a separate unguided attempt with leading models on a comparable token budget fell short. Two other proofs appeared the same day, and a Lean 4 formalization was subsequently released.

AI Had Better Work Out: Quantifying the AI Bubble's Global Concentration Risk

Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok warned that "this AI thing better work out," and Ed Zitron quantifies how hard that will be. NVIDIA, Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Broadcom, Micron, AMD and CoreWeave make up about 46.5% of the NASDAQ 100, and corporate equities hit 37.9% of US household wealth in Q2 2026, the highest on record since Q4 2000.

Microsoft Research Podcast: Chris White on DARPA, Afghanistan, and Dark-Web Search for Anti-Trafficking

Microsoft Research Catalyst Lab director Chris White recounts leading advanced tech operations in Afghanistan after a DARPA program and later building dark-web search tools to combat human trafficking. In a Microsoft Research Podcast episode with Weishung Liu, White discusses how problem selection shapes innovation and how he stays hopeful after seeing humanity's darkest parts.

How to Continue a GitHub Copilot App Session in VS Code

GitHub Copilot app sessions can now be opened directly in VS Code, carrying over the conversation, code changes, and worktree so developers can review diffs, edit by hand, and test locally without restarting. The tutorial walks through opening a session, reviewing the agent's changes line by line, continuing the same conversation in the Copilot sidebar, and pushing updates to the session's pull request.

GitHub's secret detection model: finding more secrets with less noise

GitHub trained a fine-tuned ModernBERT classifier to replace its previous LLM-based pipeline for generic secret detection, improving owner-weighted alert precision by 11.5% and cutting median post-push scan execution time by 86%. The two-stage pipeline uses regex candidate generation followed by context-aware classification, which also lowered serving cost by more than 98% versus remote LLM calls. The efficiency gain made it practical to extend generic secret detection to push protection, returning results before changes are pushed.

GitHub Copilot for Beginners: Four Ways to Teach Copilot About Your Codebase

GitHub's Copilot for Beginners series explains four ways to give Copilot project context: custom instructions in `.github/copilot-instructions.md` plus path-specific files in `.github/instructions`, agent skills in `.github/skills`, custom agents in `.github/agents`, and MCP servers that connect Copilot to external tools such as Playwright. The post walks through each mechanism and how they combine, and points readers to the community Awesome Copilot collection for ready-made examples.

GitHub launches ModernBERT-based AI secret detection model, expands push protection

GitHub introduced an AI-powered generic secret detection model built with Microsoft Applied Sciences, a ModernBERT classifier that evaluates candidate secrets in context in under two milliseconds and could more than double the number of secrets push protection blocks.

GitHub releases ReviewBench, an open benchmark for AI code review

GitHub released ReviewBench, an open benchmark for AI code review agents built on 219 public pull requests across 19 languages, with language and repository-size distributions modeled on 103.9 million GitHub pull requests. The golden set draws findings from human reviewers, author follow-up commits, static analysis and multiple frontier LLMs, graded by Claude Sonnet 5 under a published rubric, and senior engineers independently re-labeled every finding with 96.6% agreement. GitHub says its offline evaluation of Copilot code review anticipated the direction of a production A/B test, where addressed rate rose 8.0%, recall rose 13.6% and cost per review fell 8.0%.

Microsoft Autopilot is built on OpenClaw, with contributions flowing both ways

Microsoft introduced Autopilot, a persistent personal agent built on OpenClaw, as part of its new Copilot experience, with a private preview expanding to first customers at the end of this month. Autopilot is the new name for Microsoft Scout, announced earlier this year, and Omar Shahine's team says it is working with OpenClaw and the OpenClaw Foundation on an enterprise-grade runtime. OpenClaw highlights upstream contributions from Microsoft engineers, including policy conformance checks, a native Windows companion, and reliability fixes for background jobs, restarts and duplicate replies.