Microsoft announced its third-generation Maia 300 AI chip, which it plans to make the primary inference system for its products and services starting in 2027. Executive Scott Guthrie said the chip delivers 40 percent more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU systems and up to 7x the rack-scale throughput of its predecessor, Maia 200, which launched in January and already powers Copilot, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Foundry.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-12
Microsoft says Windows 11 23H2 Enterprise, Education, and IoT Enterprise editions will receive their final security update in November 2026. This follows the Home and Pro editions of 23H2 losing support in November 2025. Microsoft is urging affected users to move to Windows 11 26H2, which rolled out in September 2026 and will be supported for consumers until October 2029.
bleepingcomputer.com
· 2026-10-12
Microsoft president Brad Smith said AI products face fewer safety requirements than milk or washing machines, and called for global rules including mandatory incident reports for breaches, 'emergency brakes' to halt rogue systems, and independent government evaluators to vet AI before release. He suggested the UK's AI Security Institute could help lead such efforts, speaking on the BBC's Big Boss Interview podcast.
bbc.co.uk
· 2026-10-12
Circana analyst Mat Piscatella reported that US Xbox retail sales have fallen 33% year-to-date, an all-time low for the platform, while PS5 sales dropped 25%, the weakest showing since 2013. Both Microsoft and Sony have raised console prices multiple times over the past two years, with the Xbox Series X now reaching $799.99 and the PS5 Pro priced at $899.99.
hardware.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-12
The Xbox Series S is cheaper than the Series X mainly because it lacks a disc drive, offers less storage, and uses significantly weaker hardware. The Series S has 512GB of base storage versus 1TB on the Series X, only 4 teraflops of processing power compared to 12, and caps out at 1440p resolution versus 4K on the Series X. Both consoles share similar CPU and GPU architecture but differ in clock speed, compute units, and RAM bandwidth, with the Series X outperforming across the board.
engadget.com
· 2026-10-11
Amazon announced it will stop using nondisclosure agreements when negotiating with local governments over new data centers, mirroring a similar move by Microsoft. The announcement appeared within a broader Amazon blog post arguing that data centers benefit the communities where they are built.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-11
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted on X that AI's 'trust architecture' needs rethinking, proposing that models be separated from the systems that orchestrate their actions. He called for tamper-proof logs of every significant model action and for a mechanism allowing an authorized person to pause or shut down a model at any point mid-task.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-10
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted on X calling for advanced AI models to include containment measures, independent human controls, and an 'emergency brake' allowing authorized people to pause or shut down a model mid-task. He said frontier AI models, whether closed or open weight, should be treated like insider risks and surrounded with deterministic system design and industry standards. Nadella listed principles including model diversity, observability, continuous testing, auditability and incident disclosure.
cnbc.com
· 2026-10-10
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted on X that AI systems should no longer be treated as opaque 'black boxes' whose outputs are simply trusted or rejected. He called for containment mechanisms, including an 'emergency brake' that lets an authorized person pause or shut down a model mid-task, plus incident disclosure, independent audits and verifiable data. Nadella said more advanced models will need standardized, more advanced containment technologies.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-10
Microsoft has told IT administrators that security certificates used by Windows Update services will expire on preset dates, and devices that don't install specific updates beforehand will lose access to future updates. Windows 11 24H2 and Windows Server 2025 certificates expire June 19, 2027, requiring the September 2025 update or later; other supported Windows 11, Windows 10, and Windows Server 2022 versions share that expiration but need the July 2026 update. LTSB/LTSC releases of Windows 10 Enterprise 2019 and Windows Server 2016/2019 face an earlier May 17, 2027 cutoff.
techspot.com
· 2026-10-10
Microsoft has released Microsoft-Decision-1, a model built specifically for decision-scoring tasks like routing, classification, prioritization, verification, and workflow control. It is available now through Microsoft Foundry, with OpenRouter access coming soon. Microsoft reports the model topped a 36-benchmark comparison covering nearly 150,000 questions, running 4.5 times faster than the runner-up, Quyet-1.0-Large, and 35 times faster than GPT-6 Sol.
commandline.microsoft.com
· 2026-10-09
Amazon announced it will stop requiring non-disclosure agreements when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following Microsoft's similar policy change earlier this year. The move comes amid growing community opposition to AI infrastructure projects, which has produced hundreds of proposed or enacted moratoriums in places ranging from New York to San Francisco.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-09
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