PowerShell 7.6.2 Released: .NET 10.0.300, AppContainer Support, and Telemetry That Respects Windows Privacy Settings

PowerShell 7.6.2 Released: First Real LTS Engine Update Brings Windows Privacy Compliance and AppContainer Support​

Microsoft's monthly servicing release for the PowerShell 7.6 Long-Term Support branch ships .NET SDK 10.0.300, enables AppContainer hosting, and finally aligns PowerShell's telemetry behavior with Windows-level privacy settings.
Microsoft released PowerShell 7.6.2 on May 21, 2026, the second servicing update to the open-source shell's Long-Term Support branch and the first since the March 18 general availability to deliver actual engine-level changes rather than packaging-pipeline cleanup. The release enables PowerShell to run inside Windows AppContainers, brings the shell's telemetry behavior into alignment with the Windows Diagnostic Data setting, and advances the .NET runtime to the May 2026 servicing band.
PowerShell 7.6.2 is available immediately through GitHub, winget, the Microsoft Store, and the Microsoft package repositories for major Linux distributions. Companion releases on the stable and prior-LTS channels — PowerShell 7.5.7 and 7.4.16 — shipped the same day on the same monthly cadence.

The Privacy Headline: Telemetry Finally Follows Windows Settings​

For Windows administrators standardized on PowerShell 7.6 LTS, the headline change is privacy.
Starting with this release, PowerShell's telemetry honors the system-wide Settings → Privacy & security → Diagnostics & feedback toggle on Windows — not just the POWERSHELL_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable that has been the sole opt-out mechanism since PowerShell Core 6.0 shipped in 2018.
The change is delivered by pull request #27438. Its description is brief but the implication is significant: a user or administrator who has already configured Windows to send only required diagnostic data should expect PowerShell's behavior to match that posture, without a separate environment variable rollout to every endpoint, build agent, or VDI image.
The pre-7.6.2 model — telemetry on by default unless the user explicitly opted out via an environment variable — has been a quiet but persistent point of friction in PowerShell community forums and on the project's GitHub issue tracker since the cross-platform fork launched. With 7.6.2, that friction is removed on Windows.

AppContainer Hosting Goes Live​

The release also enables PowerShell to be hosted inside Windows AppContainers, the operating system's app-sandboxing primitive used by Universal Windows Platform applications, Windows Sandbox, certain Microsoft Defender isolation modes, and increasingly by Microsoft Edge for site isolation.
Pull request #27423 removes the permission and capability assumptions in the PowerShell host that previously caused the shell to fail in those restricted environments. In practical terms, this opens the door to embedding pwsh inside sandboxed UWP applications and to running PowerShell-based automation in stricter container scenarios than the shell could previously tolerate.
A companion change, PR #27437, adds the appLicensing capability to PowerShell's MSIX bundle manifest, completing the Store-side piece of the same enablement.

.NET SDK 10.0.300: The May 2026 Runtime Jump​

The runtime advances from .NET SDK 10.0.202 — the April servicing of .NET 10 that shipped with PowerShell 7.6.1 — to .NET SDK 10.0.300, the May 2026 servicing release. The increment is a full servicing band, not a hotfix, meaning PowerShell 7.6.2 carries every accumulated .NET runtime, JIT, and Base Class Library fix that landed during the .NET team's Patch Tuesday cycle this month.
Microsoft did not enumerate individual CVE fixes in the PowerShell changelog, but the .NET 10.0.300 release notes published by the .NET team list the security and stability fixes that PowerShell 7.6.2 users will inherit. For organizations that track .NET vulnerability remediation in their patch compliance reporting, this is the most concrete reason to deploy the update.

Quieter Changes That Matter for Specific Audiences​

Three further changes are smaller in scope but consequential for the audiences they touch.
Local user config path resolution is now correct. PR #27432 fixes a bug in how pwsh validates the per-user powershell.config.json path. The bug surfaced in edge cases involving non-standard profile paths and unusual access control configurations — the kinds of conditions that arise in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure deployments, roaming-profile environments, and managed enterprise endpoints. Citrix, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Windows 365 Cloud PC administrators should expect cleaner behavior on user logon.
macOS binaries are now code-signed and notarized in-pipeline. PR #27434 integrates Apple developer-ID code signing and notarization into PowerShell's official release process. macOS users on Sequoia and later should no longer encounter the Gatekeeper "unidentified developer" prompt when installing the official .pkg or running the .tar.gz binaries, eliminating a long-standing friction point for cross-platform administrators.
ARM Debian gets a first-class package. PR #27433 introduces a native ARM .deb package for Debian-family distributions, replacing the generic tarball that ARM Linux users were previously forced to use. Raspberry Pi 5 administrators and anyone running PowerShell on ARM-based single-board computers under Debian 12 or 13 now have a proper installation path.
A handful of further changes — removing Azure Linux 2.0 (formerly CBL-Mariner 2.0) from PMC distribution mappings, externalizing the missing-notices target framework selection, and tightening MSIX VPack pipeline behavior — round out the release.

What's Not in PowerShell 7.6.2​

This release ships no breaking changes, no new cmdlets, no experimental feature graduations, and no bundled-module version bumps. PSReadLine remains at v2.4.5. Microsoft.PowerShell.PSResourceGet stays at 1.2.0. Microsoft.PowerShell.ThreadJob holds at 2.2.0. Anything substantively new on the project's master branch is queued for the 7.7.0 preview line, where preview.1 has already shipped and additional experimental features are lined up for graduation.
For environments that have standardized on 7.6 LTS specifically because of its quiet servicing posture, this is exactly the kind of release that should slot into a normal patch window without re-validating downstream scripts.

How to Upgrade to PowerShell 7.6.2​

The cleanest path on Windows is winget:

winget upgrade --id Microsoft.PowerShell

For first-time installations:

winget install --id Microsoft.PowerShell --source winget

Direct MSI installers are available on the GitHub release page:

• PowerShell-7.6.2-win-x64.msi — x64
• PowerShell-7.6.2-win-arm64.msi — ARM64
• PowerShell-7.6.2-win-x86.msi — x86

Existing PowerShell 7.6.1 installations will not be notified about 7.6.2 immediately. The 7.6.1 release introduced a deliberate one-week delay on the in-shell update notifier specifically so that winget, the Microsoft Store, and the packages.microsoft.com repositories have time to converge on the new version before users are prompted. Administrators who want the update sooner should pull manually or through their preferred package manager.

Verify the Download (SHA256)​

The SHA256 hashes for the most commonly downloaded Windows artifacts are:

PowerShell-7.6.2-win-x64.msi    096A6DBB5BB330C5E14559FF1A7081BD274C07C07E2545755B93A93417E32629
PowerShell-7.6.2-win-x64.zip    32E0DD26752483BA3F0E40E9AE44150643CBFF469C13210C93295D158BFD7B26
PowerShell-7.6.2-win-arm64.msi  4DFC686A7AA872FE427D0508B89CEF6069C01861C59D8844AE1FFB4D2D7AE017
PowerShell-7.6.2.msixbundle     F7E61C2D6B3B9492EDF650CE118AA3FB851364874E32ADFEB741663344C9DD95

The complete hashes.sha256 manifest is available alongside the release artifacts on GitHub.

What 7.6.2 Says About Microsoft's Post-GA Cadence​

When the PowerShell 7.6 GA slipped from its original target and ultimately shipped on March 18, PowerShell senior product manager Jason Helmick used the post-mortem on the PowerShell DevBlog to commit to clearer signaling during future release cycles and to better alignment with .NET's monthly servicing rhythm.
Two months into 7.6's LTS life, the cadence is honoring that commitment. PowerShell 7.6.1 in April was packaging cleanup. PowerShell 7.6.2 in May delivers actual engineering content. Both shipped on schedule and tracked the .NET monthly servicing band. The 7.5.x and 7.4.x LTS branches received parallel updates on the same day, the same way they have every month since.
For administrators standardized on PowerShell 7.6 LTS for production automation, the takeaway is unambiguous: the LTS is being maintained the way Microsoft said it would be, and the May 2026 update is the first one with content worth a brown-bag walkthrough for the rest of the team. The privacy-compliance fix alone is worth flagging to anyone responsible for endpoint telemetry posture.
The next milestone to watch is the 7.7.0 preview line, where the next-generation features that were intentionally held back from the 7.6 LTS are queued to graduate.

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Release notes: PowerShell 7.6.2 on GitHub
Project repository: github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell
Support lifecycle: Microsoft Learn — PowerShell Support Lifecycle