Microsoft Build 2026: The 7 biggest announcements Microsoft’s Build 2026 keynote heavily featured AI advancements, including the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box for local AI model development and developer-optimized Windows updates like Coreutils and Intelligent Terminal. The company also previewed Project Solara for cross-device AI agents and launched Scout, an always-on assistant built on OpenClaw. Additionally, Microsoft announced its first in-house reasoning AI model, MAI-Thinking-1, and a more stable quantum computing chip, Majorana 2.

• The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is a new developer device for local AI model execution, featuring an Arm-based Spark RTX chip and 128GB of unified memory.
• Windows 11 is receiving developer-friendly updates, including Coreutils (Linux-like command-line utilities), enhanced Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) for containers, and a new Intelligent Terminal with AI agent integration.
• Project Solara, an Android-based OS, aims to run AI agents across various devices, potentially acting as a PC companion or enabling task handoffs.
• Scout is a new always-on assistant built on OpenClaw, designed to perform background tasks within Microsoft 365 apps for businesses.
• Microsoft introduced MAI-Thinking-1, its first reasoning AI model, boasting 35 billion active parameters and a 128K context window for complex tasks.
• Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC) are introduced to provide guardrails for AI agents running on devices, alongside an OpenClaw companion app for managing agents in a sandboxed environment.
• The Majorana 2, Microsoft’s next-gen quantum computing chip, features qubits that are 1,000 times more accurate, potentially accelerating the path to a practical quantum computer by 2029. Continue reading https://www.theverge.com/tech/941738/microsoft-build-2026-biggest-announcements