Microsoft

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Amazon Drops Data Center NDAs, and AI Agents Want Your Credit Card

Amazon says it no longer signs nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies it works with on data centers, and has pledged more than $1 billion over five years through Built Together. We set out the timeline from Microsoft’s March pledge to Jamie Raskin’s letters, the four gaps in Amazon’s wording (contractors, shell companies, old agreements, private parties), how its water, power and pollution claims hold up, and why AI agents asking for your credit card face the same trust problem.

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Microsoft Brings More AI to PCs as It Challenges Apple

Microsoft used its 7 October Windows and Surface event to bring more AI to PCs and take aim at Apple. The Surface Laptop Ultra on Nvidia’s RTX Spark starts at $2,599, Windows now runs coding and open models locally, and Microsoft Execution Containers sandbox AI agents. Here is what was announced, how the prices and benchmark claims compare with the Mac, and what UK businesses should do next.

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What to Expect at Microsoft’s Windows, Surface and AI Event on October 7

Microsoft’s Windows and Surface event in San Francisco on 7 October brings Satya Nadella, Pavan Davuluri and Jensen Huang on stage. Here is what is confirmed, what is likely and what is rumour: Surface Laptop Ultra pricing, the RTX Spark chip, local AI agents and execution containers, the Dev Box and Project Zenith, Windows 11 K2 work, the fading Copilot+ brand, and what UK businesses should do now.

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Even Americans Who Use AI Every Day Are Worried About It

A Gallup survey commissioned by Microsoft found that 68% of American daily AI users say AI makes them feel worried, compared with 80% of less frequent users and 74% of non-users. The US was the most worried of 37 countries, at 74% of AI-aware adults, ahead of the Netherlands, Canada and the UK. Trust rises with use: 45% of US daily users trust AI’s accuracy against 8% of non-users. This article explains the survey, the “worried West” paradox, the trust gap, the adoption ladder from Singapore to Malawi, three figures early coverage got wrong, and what businesses rolling out AI should learn.

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Nscale’s IPO Will Test Wall Street’s Appetite for Concentrated AI Bets

Nscale Limited filed its Form S-1 on 18 September 2026, seeking a New York listing under the ticker NSCL. Microsoft and Anthropic together account for $88.4 billion of its $103.4 billion contracted book — 85.5% on the company’s own figures — and only $2.6 billion of that total is actually active. The prospectus also discloses that no binding financing commitments exist for the Anthropic deployment, and carries going-concern language resolved by a plan to build less. This article works through the filing, the arithmetic, the peer comparison and what an amended filing still has to add.

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Microsoft Exec Called AI Scraping ‘the Largest Theft of Labor in Human History,’ New Unredacted Filings Reveal

A newly unredacted brief in The New York Times’ copyright case quotes Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, calling AI scraping perhaps “the largest theft of labor in human history”. We look at what the filing actually says, the seven channels of scraping it describes, Microsoft’s own click-through data showing drops of up to 93%, how the quotes map onto fair use, and what publishers and AI buyers should do now.

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NYT Alleges Microsoft, OpenAI Knew Using News Content Was Theft

A 92-page public version of the News Plaintiffs’ summary judgment brief, filed on 17 September 2026, quotes Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht on “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions”. In full, the sentence forecasts how millions of people would see AI training. We read the brief and Microsoft’s own memorandum: the five stages of copying alleged, the datasets and counts, the “horse trading” between Microsoft and OpenAI, Copilot click-through drops of 83 to 93 per cent, the Bloom filter behind the “accidental cover up” line, and Microsoft’s 8.2-million-log defence.

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Microsoft AI Privacy Rules Skip One Crucial Word: Copilot

Microsoft AI privacy rules for American classrooms stopped being a promise and became a signed contract on 7 September 2026, when Brad Smith and Randi Weingarten put their names on a 31-page Memorandum of Agreement. Two days later the American Federation of Teachers, the United Federation of Teachers and Microsoft announced it as the National […]

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Two More News Organizations Sue OpenAI and Microsoft for Copyright Infringement

The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC sued OpenAI, eight affiliated OpenAI entities and Microsoft Corporation on 4 September 2026 in the Southern District of New York, docketed as No. 1:26-cv-07644. The 38-page complaint pleads seven counts — direct and vicarious copyright infringement, two DMCA claims over stripped copyright management information, and federal, Washington and New York trademark dilution — and asks the court to destroy the training datasets and models built on the plaintiffs’ journalism. This is a working read of the filing: the datasets named, the 88-word Boeing 737 MAX passage a model returned verbatim, the 47% referral traffic collapse behind the harm claim, the $300 million licensing market the plaintiffs were left out of, and where the case sits against the consolidated New York Times litigation that reached summary judgment the same day.

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