tech regulation

Windows is trying to do for AI agents what it once did for applications: make the desktop the obvious place to discover, run, and manage intelligent helpers that can do work for you — not just answer questions — and Microsoft has already shipped the plumbing and the guardrails that will decide...

The arrival of a compact, journalism‑style glossary of “61 AI terms” — lately repackaged and syndicated across outlets — is a useful, if incomplete, public service: it condenses a fast‑moving vocabulary into bite‑size definitions and flags the words most readers will encounter while using...

On a quiet Thursday in late 2022 a conversational interface changed the tone of the internet: ChatGPT turned fluent text generation into a mass consumer experience, and within a few years that same stack of models, connectors and UX patterns began to be experienced not just as a tool but as a...

Microsoft’s new AI Diffusion analysis lands a clear, unsettling verdict: artificial intelligence has reached more than a billion users faster than any prior technology, but its benefits are concentrating in a small cluster of digitally mature countries while large parts of the world risk being...

Australia’s competition regulator has launched a Federal Court action accusing Microsoft of misleading roughly 2.7 million Australian consumers after the company bundled its Copilot generative‑AI features into Microsoft 365 and raised subscription prices — and the case now tests where...

The abrupt end of free, routine support for Windows 10 — and the narrow upgrade path Microsoft has set toward Windows 11 — has created a perfect storm of security, equity, and environmental risks that could convert hundreds of millions of still-functional PCs into liability or landfill. Advocacy...

A fresh telemetry snapshot from remote‑support sessions underscores a stark reality: as Microsoft’s Windows 10 support deadline approaches, a large share of real‑world endpoints remain on an OS that will soon stop receiving routine security patches—creating an urgent migration and...

Rishi Sunak has taken on part‑time senior advisory roles with both Microsoft and Anthropic — a dual appointment cleared by the UK’s Advisory Committee on Business Appointments but boxed in by strict post‑ministerial restrictions and intense public scrutiny. Background Rishi Sunak served as the...

Rishi Sunak’s move into senior advisory roles at Microsoft and Anthropic marks one of the most consequential post-premiership pivots in recent UK political history — a high-profile marriage of political capital and cutting-edge AI ambition that raises urgent questions about the revolving door...

This week’s Prospect Weekly Roundup sketched three stories that converge on power, choice, and the friction between public promises and private capacity: Naomi Bethune’s dispatch from Boston on Mayor Michelle Wu’s runaway re‑election—and what her dominance says about political power at the...

Microsoft just gave Windows 10 users one last lifeline — but the window to grab it is small, conditional, and full of trade-offs you need to understand before you act. Overview Microsoft will stop regular security updates for consumer editions of Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, but it is...

President Trump’s public demand that Microsoft fire Lisa Monaco turned a corporate personnel hire into an immediate national‑security and corporate‑governance crisis, colliding executive power, federal contracting, and cloud policy in a single explosive moment. Background Lisa Monaco is a...

President Trump on Friday publicly demanded that Microsoft remove Lisa Monaco from her role as the company’s president of global affairs, tying his call to national‑security concerns about Microsoft’s government contracts and to recent company actions limiting some services to the Israel...

President Donald Trump’s public demand that Microsoft fire Lisa Monaco — the company’s newly installed president of global affairs and a former senior Justice Department official — escalated a fraught intersection of politics, corporate governance, and national security this week, touching on...

Microsoft’s vice‑chair and president, Brad Smith, announced that the company has “ceased and disabled a set of services” used by a unit inside Israel’s Ministry of Defence after an expanded review found evidence supporting elements of investigative reporting that alleged Microsoft cloud and AI...

Microsoft’s vice chair and president Brad Smith confirmed that the company has “ceased and disabled a set of services” to a unit inside Israel’s Ministry of Defense after an expanded internal review found evidence that parts of earlier investigative reporting were accurate, including the...

A new Principled Technologies (PT) study — circulated as a press release and picked up by partner outlets — argues that adopting a single‑cloud approach for AI on Microsoft Azure can produce concrete benefits in performance, manageability, and cost predictability, while also leaving room for...

Microsoft has disabled specific Azure cloud and Azure AI subscriptions used by a unit of Israel’s Ministry of Defense after an expanded internal review found evidence supporting elements of investigative reporting that alleged the platform was being used to ingest, store and analyze large...

Nscale’s announcement that it will expand UK AI infrastructure in collaboration with Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI marks a significant acceleration in the country’s bid for sovereign, large-scale AI compute — a move that blends private hyperscale investment with geopolitics, national industrial...

Valve’s Steam client will stop supporting 32‑bit versions of Windows on January 1, 2026 — a change that’s technically sensible, strategically predictable, and narrowly impactful for most players, but which carries an outsized risk for the small group still running Windows 10 (32‑bit) unless...