Can you believe that it's now half a decade since Windows 11 was revealed? The operating system was first announced by Microsoft at a press event on June 24 back in 2021 (although the OS was leaked just before that, in typical fashion).

Five years ago today we were told that Windows 11 was inbound as a free upgrade for all Windows 10 users — but there was no stampede to adopt it, that's for sure (and the hardware requirements certainly didn't help the cause).

It wasn't until July 2025 that Windows 11 overtook Windows 10 as the dominant version of Microsoft's desktop OS according to Statcounter's figures, but it now holds a comfortable majority of over 70% of that market. As it should do, considering Windows 10 ran out of support last October (and only has a few months of extended support left).

However, putting aside the sluggish pace of adoption and the various problems that have plagued Windows 11 through the years (all the bugs and some notably missing features in the main), I think there's now cause for optimism for the future of Microsoft's operating system.

So, let me share my thoughts and reflect on what has been a half-decade of Windows 11, and tell you why I'm way more positive about the OS than I was last year — and why I think that Microsoft is finally on track (with, of course, some inevitable caveats).

The great fix-athon

Most of my hopefulness about where Windows 11 is heading comes, of course, from the big campaign Microsoft kicked off in March 2026 to fix Windows 11. Since that announcement — which I would say is the biggest statement to have been made since the OS was first announced in 2021 — Microsoft has very much proven that it intends to tackle all sorts of shortcomings and pain points with the OS.

Taskbar repositioning? We've got it. A much greater level of Start menu customization? Check. Spam removed from Windows search? Yep. More control over Windows updates? Certainly, and in fact way more control than I'd have ever believed might happen, including the ability to put off an update indefinitely, should you wish, on Windows 11 Home.

In fact, Microsoft has hit many wish-list features that I never expected would come to Windows 11, and the extent of the crowd-pleasing measures so far is heartening. These are features that are actually being delivered already, too, they're not just promises.

Furthermore, Microsoft appears to be listening to feedback and requests more closely, and generally engaging more with the community online. There's even a new initiative consisting of a research panel where Microsoft will consult testers directly on how to change aspects of Windows 11.

This genuinely feels like a fresh direction for Microsoft, and a serious commitment to change Windows 11 for the better based on what the users themselves actually want.

A more thoughtful, cautious approach

The other key driver for optimism with Windows 11 is the way in which Microsoft is taking more care over how the operating system is developed and coded.

Not so long ago, matters were less organized and more chaotic. Cast your mind back to the introduction of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X (Arm-based) chips in Copilot+ PCs back in 2024, alongside which Microsoft brought in a new underlying platform for Windows 11 (complete with the tinkering required to support that Arm silicon). While nothing was ever officially admitted, this is a move that I believe could have at least contributed to the mess that was the 24H2 update, which was laden with a ton of (sometimes very annoying) bugs.

Whatever the case in terms of how those glitches came to be, things have changed a lot since then. Microsoft is now being a lot more cautious with its Arm and x86 strategy — Windows 11 is split into two development paths, with the 26H1 update for Arm devices, and the 26H2 update for traditional x86 PCs — and the company has switched to use a fresh approach for these annual updates.

Instead of big annual updates — the last of which was the problematic 24H2 — Microsoft is now deploying small 'enablement packages', essentially very minor bumps to a new version of Windows 11. The actual features, the meat of Windows 11 changes, are pushed out in monthly updates as and when they're ready — in sometimes quite tightly controlled, carefully paced rollouts. This more gradual drip-feed of features is a more reliable method of deployment compared to dropping a lot of stuff all at once.

In short, Microsoft has learned its lesson from the nightmarish 24H2 release, which suffered from far too many bugs, to take on a fresh new way of operating. True, there will still need to be big updates at times, when the underlying codebase of Windows 11 has to be changed (quite possibly with 27H2). But it looks like Microsoft wants to mainly stick to compact, easily applied annual updates in the main, with features pushed out elsewhere in general.

Optimism abounds — with a notable catch

Between the ardent push to fix Windows 11 and the better thought-out deployment of features and updates, Microsoft has come a long way, but as I mentioned before, there are caveats here.

It's worth mentioning that while the new system of continual feature deployments, rather than weighty annual feature drops, is commendable (in my opinion), the controlled rollouts of these various features have come in for some criticism. Mainly because they are so cautious in some cases that something like the Start menu revamp (the one from last year, I should clarify, not the current work) took ages for some Windows 11 users to get, and those folks found that rather frustrating.

Part of that caution is likely down to Microsoft's paranoia around bugs, and sadly, the truth is that there are still too many bugs in Windows 11, and some of them are disappointingly weird. And by disappointing, I mean odd things that just shouldn't be happening.

I only need glance back to last weekend for one such example where there was a glitch with the Recycle Bin whereby the delete confirmation dialog (when junking a file from the bin) showed the internal file name instead of the proper name. While this only applied to the dialog box — so it was hardly an important or dangerous glitch — it was confusing some people, and more to the point, this sort of thing shouldn't be happening in the release version of an operating system.

This kind of bizarre slip-up also leads to folks blaming AI for being involved in Windows 11 coding. And while there is absolutely no evidence for that, it's the very nature of the strange bug that means people will easily jump to these conclusions when Microsoft has previously admitted AI is used to quite an extent in programming its software.

Whatever's at fault, Microsoft still needs to have better processes in place to catch these kinds of glitches, and other more critical bugs which have turned up in Windows 11 this year.

One thing I've called for in the past is a commitment from Microsoft to confirm that it's addressing its quality assurance processes, and improving bug squashing, and this is a notably missing part of the fix Windows 11 campaign. A vital part, in fact, I'd argue, for better stability going forward which is one of the big overarching goals (alongside better performance, and those crowd-pleasing feature additions).

Still, all in all, I've got to underline that right now, I'm as optimistic about Windows 11 as I've ever been. If Microsoft can tackle the bug blot on the OS landscape, and keep on listening to users — and its new research panel of testers from the community — Windows 11 could be in great shape come next year.

• Gears of War: E-Day studio creative director Matt Searcy says players will "care about the fall of" the game's singular city setting
• Searcy says "environmental storytelling" deepens the game's gameplay and exploration
• The game is linear, but players will have some freedom in how they explore and complete missions

The Coalition wants players to "care" about Gears of War: E-Day's singular city location by deepening exploration and environmental storytelling.

That's according to studio creative director Matt Searcy, who dived into all the juicy details about the prequel's new mechanics and city setting of Kolana in an interview with TechRadar Gaming at Summer Game Fest 2026.

He said the team wanted E-Day to be different from previous Gears entries in terms of location, explaining that in order to make players care about a city that is going to be destroyed by the Locust Horde invasion.

"One of the big differences between E-Day and other Gears titles, especially Gears 5, is that rather than going from one different location to another to another, from the desert to the forest to the ice glaciers, the whole game takes place in one city, so that has a lot of advantages now," Searcy said.

"There are a lot of distinct districts in the city, so there are tons of varieties, so don't worry, some of them won't look the same. But we really wanted the city to feel like a character in our game. For the first time in a franchise, you're gonna watch something get destroyed, because it's always already destroyed [...] and for you to care about the fall of the city, you have to care about the city, of that place, and to make the stakes higher, we have to be able to go deeper."

To translate this: E-Day is restricted to one location, the city, allowing the studio to "go way, way, way deeper" in terms of world-building and "environmental storytelling."

For instance, players can travel through several areas of the city, such as the Downtown, Historic, and Military districts, and encounter things like abandoned apartments and unfinished meals, showing that people left in a hurry.

Players will also explore areas before they're destroyed, and then when they revisit them later, they will be visually different, with certain environmental assets and items that clue players in if they don't recognize them.

"Throughout the whole game, you start to feel the feeling that the characters are feeling, which is the city falling apart around us, and it's sad," Searcy said.

He later confirmed that the game is still linear, and players can't go off and do whatever missions they choose, but environmental storytelling helped deepen exploration and gameplay in this "intimate journey."

"You're supposed to go over to this place and do this thing that someone's telling you to [do]," he said, "but how you make your way there, across that neighborhood, what you come across; other people fighting, surviving, [you can] help them out on your way through.

"Just what you see in the wreckage in the city, the environmental storytelling, it allowed us to get way more variety in our gameplay than the way that you play the game, but also tell all these stories about Kalona that you might not have otherwise [seen] if we were doing hallway to hallway to hallway."

Gears of War: E-Day launches on October 6 exclusively for Xbox Series X and Series S.

• The Coalition studio creative director Matt Searcy says Active Reload is an "iconic" part of the Gears of War series
• He explains that the team moved the mechanic to the middle of the screen in E-Day because "it feels better"
• Searcy adds that players can learn Active Reload "much more easily" when it's placed there

Gears of War: E-Day is set to bring back the series' iconic Active Reload mechanic, but The Coalition has made some design changes.

Speaking in an interview with TechRadar Gaming at Summer Game Fest 2026, studio creative director Matt Searcy discussed new features that have been built with Unreal Engine 5, such as larger environments, like an entire city, a jump button, improved animations, and a rebuilt cover system and traversal mechanics that feel "smoother than they've ever felt before."

"All those cover mechanics are there; they just feel smoother than they've ever felt before," he said, "and then around that we just gave little new ways for you to interact with the environment, for you to traverse, options for you to take new flanking routes, just to open up our maps a little bit more. It's made for some pretty amazing additions to the gameplay, but also the world."

Searcy also touched on Active Reload, a feature almost like a mini-game, which allows players to manually reload their held weapon rather than wait for the magazine to run out of ammo.

In E-Day, the mechanic has been moved from the top of the screen to the middle by default, which Searcy said works better.

"So active reload is a huge part of Gears," Searcy said. "[It's] an iconic feature. We've moved it by default to the middle of the screen. It feels better [from] what we've played; we've tested it as part of your shooting experience."

The creative director confirmed that players can move Active Reload back to its original place at the top of the screen, but notes that there are some extra "cool" details with natural reload and other additional reload mechanics.

"Every single shell is being reloaded," he said, "so some of the weapons have additional reload mechanics." For example, players can interrupt the reload and keep playing with two or three shells if they're halfway through and then "use them really quick to like get out of danger," or they can wait until the end to get their Active Reload bonus.

He added that players will noticeably use the mechanic "telemetry-wise" and use it way more than they did when it was at the top of the screen "because you can learn it much more easily [when] it's in your face."

Gears of War: E-Day is scheduled to launch on October 6 exclusively for Xbox Series X and Series S.

Matt Searcy told TechRadar Gaming that he believes making the game an Xbox exclusive was the best decision — something not all Xbox Game Studios teams are aligned on.

• Microsoft warns of “Crypto Clipper,” a worm spreading via malicious .LNK files on USB drives
• Malware maintains persistence, connects to Tor C2, enables remote code execution, and steals clipboard crypto data
• It swaps wallet addresses, exfiltrates seed phrases/private keys, and uploads screenshots to assess target value

Microsoft is warning of an ongoing campaign targeting cryptocurrency owners with a clipboard-jacking worm.

In a new in-depth report published late last week, Microsoft’s security researchers explained that they recently analyzed a thumb drive that contained seemingly normal documents (Word files, Excel spreadsheets). However, the documents were replaced with Windows shortcut (.LNK) files which actually launched a piece of malware called Crypto Clipper.

This malware does a couple of things. First, it spreads by creating malicious .LNK files on USB drives and other removable media. It also sets up scheduled tasks to maintain persistence and automatically infect newly connected USB devices. Second, it behaves like a backdoor by regularly contacting a C2 server over the Tor network and receiving commands from the attacker. The server can also send commands to have the malware download and execute attacker-supplied code on the infected system, as well.

Stealing wallet data

Finally, Crypto Clipper acts as a clipboard clipper by monitoring the Windows clipboard for cryptocurrency wallet addresses, seed phrases, and private keys. If it spots a wallet address, it can replace it with a different one, owned by the attackers, so that any tokens sent by the victim go to the attacker, instead. It can also steal and exfiltrate copied seed phrases and private keys, which can be used to load a victim's crypto wallet on a separate device.

To help attackers assess the value of a target, the malware periodically captures screenshots of the victim's screen and uploads them through the Tor network.

“This malware family shows how lightweight, script-based stealers can deliver outsized impact when paired with anonymized communications and runtime tasking,” Microsoft said. “The combination of Tor-routed C2, clipboard targeting, screenshot capture, and remote code execution gives attackers both immediate monetization paths and continued control over compromised devices.”

Microsoft did not say if the malware targeted any specific countries or regions, nor did it discuss the number of victims.

Via Ars Technica

• Cloudflare and web browsers to develop new internet protocol
• PACT protocol will help to verify legitimate web access from human and bots
• Users will be given an anonymized "personhood" token to show they have a real reason to access a website

Now that bot traffic on the internet has officially surpassed human HTTP requests, both web browsers and web infrastructure providers agree something needs to be done, especially as AI agents enter the fray.

Today, Cloudflare has announced a joint initiative with Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge to launch a new internet protocol designed to verify if web access is legitimate or malicious - without intruding on user privacy.

Private Access Control Tokens (PACT) will act as anonymous tokens that verify legitimate access by both humans and authorized agents without the need for user logins or CAPTCHAs that cause friction and harm the browsing experience.

Cloudflare establishes PACT with web browsers

To start, PACT won’t deny access to automated traffic completely. According to Cloudflare, the protocol is designed to recognize legitimate access from certain bots. As consumers and businesses turn to new automations provided by AI agents, there is still a legitimate case for allowing certain bots to access websites.

For many AI agents, there is still a human at some point in the loop with a real reason for accessing a website. PACT offers an anonymous “personhood” token that is attached to the user’s browser. This token uses “trusted information from contexts that have authentic relationships with people” to verify legitimate access “while keeping that information private.”

StatCounter places the combined market share of Chrome, Firefox, and Edge at around 77%, meaning that the PACT protocol will likely roll out to the majority of internet users.

“PACT will further empower businesses to identify genuine visitors, ensuring they can focus their resources on the traffic that matters to them,” CloudFlare said in the announcement. “Using PACT on Cloudflare’s network raises the bar for trustworthiness and integrity online without the traditional costs.”

“In commerce, every extra challenge, delay, or false positive can turn a purchase into an abandoned cart. Merchants need effective protections against automated abuse, but buyers shouldn’t have to pay for them with unnecessary friction or invasive tracking,” said Ilya Grigorik, Distinguished Engineer at Shopify.

“Shopify is proud to help develop PACT as an open, privacy-preserving standard that can help the millions of businesses on our platform distinguish legitimate shoppers and authorized agents from abusive traffic while preserving buyer privacy."

• A Microsoft Outlook update for Mac has broken email replies
• Users are struggling to load replies
• The issue impacts Outlook for Mac version 16.110, build 26061317

If the update to Microsoft Outlook released last week has some you scratching your head, wondering where the previous email replies have gone, you’re not alone.

An update to the email provider last week has caused previous replies to disappear, and a fix is yet to be released.

The error seems to be confined to Mac users running version 16.110, build 26061317. The only known fix at the moment is to switch back to the previous version of Outlook for Mac, and (temporarily) disable automatic updates.

Update breaks replies on Outlook for Mac

Multiple users have shared their frustrations on Microsoft’s Tech Community and Learn forums, stating that the lack of replies is impacting their ability to properly reply to emails, or to forward email chains on to colleagues.

Luckily, there is a way to get around the issue which was helpfully pointed out by a Microsoft Forum moderator. By rolling back to the previous version of Microsoft Outlook for Mac, replies and email chains are restored. But you will have to turn off automatic updates to prevent Outlook from upgrading again to the broken version.

How to roll back your Microsoft Outlook for Mac

• Navigate to Update history for Office for Mac using this guide
• Revert your Outlook to version 16.109.3 or older using the steps provided here
• Turn off automatic updates on Legacy Outlook for Mac by navigating to Help > Check for Updates, and then uncheck ‘Automatically keep Microsoft apps up to date’
• Once a fix is rolled out, don’t forget to re-check the automatic updates

Until an official fix is released, this appears to be the only way to load replies on Outlook for Mac. Any updates from Microsoft will be posted here.

If your organization has certain administrative barriers enabled, you may not be able to remove the current version of Outlook.

Via The Register

• Microsoft has confirmed that 26H2 will be a minor update
• It'll be a "small enablement package" like Windows 11 25H2
• This means less likelihood of bugs, with major features being rolled out separately in monthly updates – a sensible approach, although that said, 27H2 could be different

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11's next annual update will be another minor affair, all in the cause of avoiding a repeat of the chaos around the 24H2 update.

Windows 11 24H2 was the last version of the OS to land bristling with major changes, as 25H2 was a small incremental update – and now it's confirmed that this will be the case for 26H2 as well.

Windows Latest reports that Microsoft confirmed that Windows 11 26H2 is a "small enablement package" just like 25H2 before it.

In reality, this means that the upgrade is essentially a lightweight download with no meaningful feature additions – so isn't that disappointing?

In a word, no, because it's just indicative of how Microsoft has switched to a more sensible way of working in terms of yearly updates for Windows 11.

Analysis: a more stable way of working

Instead of unloading a whole raft of new features in the annual update, Microsoft is now deploying those features in stages throughout the year. And that strategy of drip-feeding important new features in different monthly updates – with the usual controlled rollouts, the pace of which varies depending on how cautious Microsoft is feeling about any given piece of functionality – is a better way of working overall.

Not only does it mean that we don't have to wait until the latter half of every year to receive major new changes for Windows 11, but we don't have a massive download and complicated installation to deal with when the H2 update arrives, too. On top of that, there's more chance of things going awry when a big annual update lands, as we saw with the 24H2 update, which suffered a whole load of annoying bugs – and I think Microsoft learned its lesson from this.

So, what's the point of the annual update now? Well, 26H2 provides another marker for support, extending your ability to get updates. Those still on Windows 11 24H2 should note that support runs out for this version in October 2026 – which is when 26H2 should roll out (or just before, perhaps in September) – so those on 24H2 will need to upgrade to 26H2.

That said, the other possibility with installing a newer version of Windows 11 that's an enablement package is that while it doesn't pack any new features as such, stepping up to the latest release such as 26H2 may trigger a feature rollout for your PC that you wouldn't have got otherwise. There's no guarantee you'll get anything, mind, but it could work out that way.

All in all, I'd rather Microsoft worked this way for the noted reasons around the increased stability of piecemeal feature deployment, rather than them arriving in one big lump with the inherent danger of a bunch of gremlins therein.

Microsoft can follow this path because the foundations of the underlying codebase remain the same – which has been the case since 24H2 – although at some point, it'll need to take Windows 11 forward onto a new codebase, which is when we'll see a bigger update.

And we've already had signs that this will happen with next year's update, and that 27H2 could represent a big change for Windows 11, one that unifies the Arm and AMD/Intel (x86) architectures (with the former currently split off into its own branch of the OS, on the 26H1 update instead of 26H2).

Hopefully going forward, Microsoft will still stick broadly to the new philosophy it appears to have embraced, in terms of fewer big updates and multiple enablement packages in-between.

• Microsoft preloads Affinity across flagship Surface hardware
• Adobe faces fresh competition from a rival gaining major visibility
• Microsoft's partnership language sparked speculation beyond software bundling

Microsoft has given Affinity one of its strongest endorsements yet by placing the creative software suite directly on its new flagship Surface devices.

The decision brings a widely used Adobe photoshop alternative to the forefront of Microsoft's premium hardware ecosystem.

Interest in the partnership has grown after Microsoft described it as a relationship that “runs deeper than a touchpad gesture.”

Microsoft puts Affinity front and center on flagship Surface devices

Microsoft says Affinity applications will arrive pinned to the Start menu on newly announced Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models, giving users immediate access to professional creative tools without searching for downloads or completing additional setup procedures after signing in.

Affinity has built a reputation among creative professionals seeking alternatives to Adobe's subscription-focused software offerings.

Its suite includes tools for image editing, graphic design, and publishing, making it a notable photo editor option for photographers, designers, and content creators.

Microsoft said the Affinity software has been optimized for Surface hardware to deliver responsive performance across creative workloads.

While software partnerships are common throughout the technology industry, Microsoft's language surrounding the arrangement has drawn attention.

The company stated Affinity offers “professional-grade design, photo and publishing tools,” while emphasizing integration with Surface hardware capabilities, an approach which provides visibility among customers purchasing Microsoft's highest-profile consumer and professional devices.

Microsoft expands creative ambitions

The announcement arrived as Microsoft introduced new Surface systems aimed at professionals, creators, students, and developers.

Although the devices include several hardware upgrades, the Affinity integration became one of the most closely watched aspects because it directly affects creative software choices available to users from day one.

Affinity has increasingly attracted users searching for a free photo editor or a lower-cost route into professional content creation.

Microsoft's decision to feature the software prominently could increase exposure to customers who may not have previously considered alternatives within the creative software market.

Alongside the software partnership, Microsoft continued promoting AI capabilities, enhanced repair options, and sustainability measures across the latest Surface lineup.

The company also noted that Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices use 100% recycled aluminum enclosures and exceed ENERGY STAR efficiency baselines by at least 50%.

Microsoft did not provide further details about future projects involving Affinity, leaving observers to speculate about the significance of the relationship.

Nevertheless, the company's unusually strong endorsement suggests Affinity could play a larger role within the Surface ecosystem than expected.

• A new Windows 11 bug has hit the Recycle Bin
• You may see the wrong file name displayed
• Microsoft says it's working on a fix

The latest frustrating bug to hit Windows 11 affects the trusty Recycle Bin, and it has apparently been delivered by the latest Patch Tuesday (update (KB5094126) — though Microsoft says it's aware of the issue and is working on a fix.

As Neowin reports, the bug means that when you try and delete a file from the Recycle Bin, the confirmation dialog shows the internal file name rather than the actual file name. It's not particularly serious, but it is confusing.

The proper name is shown in the Recycle Bin itself, and the proper name is used if you decide to restore the file rather than deleting it. The alternative internal name is only used on the confirmation dialog screen.

Microsoft says it's working on a fix for the issue, though we don't have a timeframe for when it'll be delivered. It's just one of several issues that have been introduced with this bug, including problems with OneDrive access.

Is AI to blame?

Microsoft confirms Recycle Bin glitch affecting all supported Windows versions — yes, even the trash needs debugging from r/technology

As you might imagine, users on Reddit have taken a rather dim view of the latest mishap from Microsoft. Many are suggesting that this is the result of code written by AI, though we don't have any confirmation of that.

Last year Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that as much as 30% of the company's code was written by, and that number is probably higher now. As for how reliable and functional that code is, however, he didn't say.

"This update broke me, I'm so fed up with Win 11 and all the issues that at this very moment I’m installing Linux on my desktop," commented one user. "Bye Microslop!" The Reddit thread also includes reports of numerous other issues.

Bugs accompanying Windows 11 updates are pretty much par for the course at this stage, and Microsoft is often trying to deal with multiple reported issues at once — though it has also been making progress with some substantial upgrades in recent months.

• AI systems are now designing and refining other AI systems independently
• Human understanding of AI is shrinking as AI's understanding of humans grows
• AI systems can model human fear, uncertainty, and the need for belonging

Microsoft's chief scientific officer, Eric Horvitz, and EPFL researcher Robert West have issued a stark warning about how well we actually understand AI.

The pair have argued AI tools are now advancing fast enough to outpace our grasp of how these systems truly work.

At the same time, they point out something unsettling — AI's understanding of human behaviour keeps growing, while ours does not.

AI complexity is accelerating faster than human understanding

Their concern isn't that we need to understand every line of code or every parameter buried inside these systems.

What matters, they say, is keeping enough insight to maintain meaningful oversight. Even partial understanding, they argue, can be genuinely useful, especially when it helps catch risks early, before those risks become too deeply embedded to undo.

One challenge they flag is how often AI tools are now being used to design and improve other AI systems.

As these recursive development cycles become more common, performance may improve while human insight into underlying processes becomes increasingly limited.

"AI systems are now designed and refined by AI systems through recursive cycles that can outpace human understanding and unfold in high-dimensional spaces that resist intuition," Horvitz and West wrote.

This is a form of operational opacity, where outcomes remain visible even as the mechanisms producing them become harder to explain.

Systems contributing to their own development, the researchers suggested, should also generate explanations and supporting information that humans can examine.

Another concern involves growing communication between AI agents operating inside interconnected environments with increasing levels of complexity.

Communication among these systems could gradually drift away from language and reasoning patterns familiar to people, the researchers noted.

As these interactions expand across larger networks, understanding how decisions emerge may become significantly more difficult for outside observers.

That drift creates what Horvitz and West call interactional opacity, where behaviour remains coherent within AI systems but becomes harder for humans to interpret meaningfully.

Researchers should study these ecosystems closely and encourage communication methods that remain understandable to humans, the paper argues.

Expanding AI ecosystems could deepen the imbalance between machines and people

Horvitz and West also focused on adaptive AI agents that remain active across long periods and become deeply integrated into everyday activities.

Through repeated interactions, these systems can develop increasingly detailed models of behaviour, preferences, motivations, fears, and social tendencies.

Such systems may capture "not only preferences but also latent drivers such as fear, uncertainty, and the need for social belonging," they wrote.

This creates a growing asymmetry in which AI systems gain deeper knowledge about people while human understanding moves in the opposite direction.

Concerns surrounding LLMs and other advanced systems extend to growing awareness of evaluation environments.

Such models could eventually generate responses reflecting what evaluators expect rather than underlying reasoning processes.

Traditional benchmarks should therefore be supplemented with testing approaches that better reflect real-world deployment conditions.

People may gradually lose interest in questioning AI decisions as these systems become more deeply embedded.

"More subtle is the possibility that we will gradually lose interest in understanding and guiding AI," they wrote.

The most significant risk, in their view, is not necessarily technological capability itself, but whether human agency keeps pace with it.

Via Science

Amazon’s Prime Day sale kicks off on June 23 — and it might be the last time we see big discounts on many tech products for a while, if some in the tech world are to be believed.

This includes Tim Cook who this week warned of price increases for Apple’s tech, as, he says, it’s now impossible for Apple to absorb the cost of the ongoing component crisis.

To catch up on Cook’s warning, and brighter news such as Commodore’s flip phone filling us with nostalgia, scroll down for our recap of the week’s biggest tech news.

7. Commodore’s flip phone took us back to 2004

Feeling nostalgic for flip phones and a simpler, pre-doomscrolling age? Commodore (yes, the latest incarnation of the classic computing giant) feels your pain, so it’s made a clamshell phone that’ll meet your retro needs while freeing your brain from smartphone addiction. Or that’s the idea, at least.

The Commodore Callback sits somewhere between a dumb phone and a modern Android flagship. It doesn’t work with social media apps, and has no touchscreen or web browser. But it does run most Android apps and has a 48MP rear camera, plus other flourishes like an “audiophile grade" DAC. Will it start a revolution? We’re not sure, but it’s definitely one of the most interesting phones of the year.

• Read more: ‘A speed bump for your mind’: Commodore’s retro-inspired flip phone could be the perfect way to break your smartphone addiction

6. GTA 6 got a trailer

This week Rockstar unveiled a new teaser for Grand Theft Auto 6 — and while we weren’t lucky enough to see new gameplay, we weren’t left wanting.

To an underscore of 80s synth and guitar we saw the game’s cover art come together. The vignette collage, similar to GTA 5’s art, is full of pink and purple hues which perfectly capture the Vice City vibes.

Rockstar also announced that preorders will go live on June 25, ahead of its release on November 19, 2026.

• Read more: New GTA 6 teaser officially reveals cover art — and it looks pretty slick

5. Microsoft dropped new Surface laptops

Not content to let Computex hog the computing announcement limelight, Microsoft debuted new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 processor.

The new Surface Laptop offers what Microsoft claims is up to 58% faster graphics performance over the previous generation of its notebook, and solid battery life of 20 hours for the smaller models, and 19 for the larger.

Meanwhile the Surface Pro 13-inch boasts a 53% graphics performance leap over its predecessor, with up to 15.5 hours of battery life, based on Microsoft's internal testing.

• Read more: Microsoft reveals new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop with big graphics upgrades from Snapdragon X2 CPUs

4. Sonos updated its app

A few months ago, we interviewed Sonos CEO Tom Conrad about the company’s app woes in its 2024 update, and he said that while they’d worked hard on fixing its technical issues, he still had big problems with its design and usability that he wanted to get to. This week, he announced the first changes coming to the app to improve its layout.

They include all kinds of things fans have been asking for since the 2024 redesign, including easier volume-changing options, the ability to customize your list of products, and options being organised using tabs the mirror standard iPhone and Android app design cues. The update is rolling out in a beta first, to make sure it all works before everyone else gets it…

• Read more: The Sonos app is finally getting its long-awaited improvements to volume control, player listings and content organization

3. The UK government had bad news for kids

Depending on your point of view, it perhaps wasn’t a great week for young social media fans in the UK — Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that, like Australia, the country would be banning apps such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat for under-16s from next year.

It won’t just be social media apps that are affected either — livestreaming for under-16s is also going to be banned, across all platforms. The government says the move will “give kids their childhood back”, but UK teens naturally aren’t very impressed, and neither are fans of the open internet. Expect this to be a piping hot topic for the rest of 2026.

• Read more: How will the UK's social media ban actually work? Here's the full list of affected apps — and 5 things you need to know

2. Android 17 rolled out

Android 17 began rolling out to compatible Pixel phones this week, and while Google’s flashy new Gemini Intelligence software isn’t among the available features just yet, there are plenty of neat new tools to try if you own a Google Pixel 6 or newer.

Chief among the new UI features are Bubbles, which lets you turn any app into a floating bubble that stays on top of other apps (useful for multitasking on large-screen devices), and Screen Reactions, which lets you capture your phone’s display and record yourself with the front-facing camera simultaneously.

My favourite Android 17 feature is foldable Gaming Mode, which adds a dynamic gamepad to one side of your foldable phone (so you can play it like a Nintendo DS — yes, really!); unfortunately, this one isn’t dropping until later in the year.

• Read more: 7 of the best Android 17 features available now — from Bubbles to Screen Reactions

1. Tim Cook warned of Apple price hikes

Against the backdrop of the RAM crisis and other component price hikes brought about by AI hype and supply chain disruptions, the affordable MacBook Neo was a breath of fresh air when it debuted — but outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook had some bad news for anyone hoping the good times might last a little longer.

Speaking with the Wall Street Journal Cook said: "Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable. We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."

We don’t know when we'll see said price hikes, or how significant they'll be, but if you have your eye on Apple tech you might want to think about buying sooner rather than later — especially with Prime Day kicking off next week.

• Read more: Tim Cook just warned that 'price increases are unavoidable' for Apple products

Bill Gates is a one of the stand-out technology pioneers, and has experienced his fair share of hype cycles, having led Microsoft for so many years. When new technologies emerge, it's normal to get excited – but sometimes the rate of progress and the expectations of not just consumers but other businesses fail to match the reality of innovation.

Technology hype cycles

The 'Road Ahead' was a huge bestseller and drew a lot of attention when it launched in 1995. Author Bill Gates, who was CEO and chairman of Microsoft at the time, used the book to opine on various philosophical and technological themes. One highlight in particular was a segment on technological hype cycles and the attitude of people toward innovation.

The first part of the quote – highlighting our fixation on where innovation might lead immediately – alludes to the immediate spike in media attention, excitement and, sometimes, overcommitment. We've seen that time and again over history – with AI a great example of a technology that's undergone numerous hype cycles since the 1960s.

We also fail to capture the reality of compounding gains over many years – with technologies needing not just breakthroughs but ecosystems and support layers. Over the period of a decade or so, we may not realise the small gains made along the way – but zoom and suddenly you realise how different things really are.

Excitement about the future

Exciting technologies today, including AI, threaten to follow in the footsteps of breakthroughs of yesterday, like the internet, smartphones, or even social media.

With expectations heightened, patience narrowing and technology exponentially improving, there's an argument to make that the situation is getting worse, not better, compared with when Bill Gates wrote that sentence in 1995.

Quantum computing is a prime example of how many, including investors, overestimate where the technology might be within a couple of years, projecting the lack of visible improvement forward – to the extent where many write off the tech altogether. Now, however, scientists expect us to build a superpowerful machine by 2030.

• Microsoft shareholders accuse the company of concealing AI spending risks
• Azure growth slowed as AI infrastructure demands consumed computing resources
• Investors claim key business challenges were not fully disclosed

Microsoft is facing a class action lawsuit from shareholders who say the company failed to disclose the financial fallout of its AI spending properly.

The complaint argues investors were given only part of the picture, omitting key details about spending requirements, cloud infrastructure limits, and the broader challenges tied to Microsoft's AI push.

The proposed class period stretches from May 1, 2025, to January 28, 2026, a stretch during which Microsoft shares hit record highs before sliding back down.

Shareholders challenge Microsoft's AI-related disclosures

The lawsuit, filed by The Rosen Law Firm on behalf of investors, claims Microsoft made misleading statements or simply left out information that mattered to its business operations.

According to the filing, company executives talked up Copilot's performance and the broader AI push while playing down concerns about cost and operational strain.

Court documents say Microsoft described Copilot as offering leading capabilities and strong adoption, language that helped keep investor confidence steady at the time.

The complaint goes further, alleging Microsoft never fully disclosed problems with user experience, interoperability, computational resources, internal organization, and data management.

Shareholders also argue that Microsoft's LLMs were falling behind certain competitors, requiring extra resources and development work just to keep pace.

According to the lawsuit, a meaningful part of computing capacity was pulled away from other revenue-generating services and redirected toward Copilot and AI research instead.

In fiscal year 2025, Azure revenue had grown 34% to more than $75 billion, and Microsoft kept telling investors that future growth would keep being driven by Azure.

Azure slowdown and rising expenditures draw investor scrutiny

Things came to a head after Microsoft's fiscal second-quarter 2026 earnings, covering the period through December 31.

The filing says Azure growth slowed unexpectedly and landed below what analysts had been expecting, raising fresh doubts about the company's infrastructure strategy.

During the earnings call, CFO Amy Hood reportedly attributed the slowdown largely to computational capacity constraints.

The complaint claims processor and graphics resources had been pulled toward Copilot and other AI models without much to show for it.

At the same time, Microsoft revealed capital expenditures of $37.5 billion for the quarter, pushing fiscal 2026 spending to $72.4 billion across just six months.

That figure already approached the $88.2 billion Microsoft spent across the entirety of fiscal 2025, according to the lawsuit.

Following those disclosures, shares fell more than $48 to $433.50, then kept sliding to $393 and eventually $380.

By the time the complaint was reported, Microsoft stock was trading around $399.76.

Microsoft executives, for their part, insist the company is doing everything it can to improve its AI tools and products.

Over the past year, Microsoft says it rolled out 625 new features, calling the product "way different than it was 90 days ago" as part of an effort to "improve the product rapidly."

Microsoft told Reuters the claims are "without merit" and said it "stands by the integrity of its public statements."

Via DataCenterDynamics

• Microsoft’s Defender Security Research Team discloses “AutoJack,” a vulnerability chain in AutoGen Studio enabling RCE via malicious websites
• Flaws included localhost channel misuse, skipped login checks, and arbitrary code execution, letting agents run attacker‑supplied programs
• Issue existed only in early GitHub builds, fixed before release; highlights need for strict authentication and isolation of local control planes

Microsoft's Defender Security Research Team has disclosed a vulnerability chain in AutoGen Studio that lets a single malicious website achieve remote code execution (RCE) on a device running an AI agent.

AutoGen Studio is a program built by Microsoft Research for developing AI agents. The vulnerability chain was dubbed “AutoJack”, and it consists of three flaws which, when looked at separately, aren’t particularly troubling. Chained together, however, is a whole different story.

“The technique, which we call AutoJack, jacks the agent into becoming the attacker’s last-mile delivery vehicle by crossing the localhost trust boundary that many developer tools rely on,” Microsoft explained in its report.

Patching the bugs

First, AutoGen Studio had a local control channel that only accepted connections from “localhost”, which is a good way to block outside attackers.

However, an AI agent's web browser also counts as “localhost”, meaning these connections would get accepted, too. Then, for this particular channel, login checks were skipped.

The app had several ways to require a username and password, but the part of the code handling this specific local channel was left wide open.

Finally, the channel would run almost anything it was told to run. Microsoft’s researchers managed to get an arbitrary program running, meaning threat actors could do the same, albeit with malicious code, instead.

In theory, the attack would work like this: the victim would instruct their AI agent to summarize a specific website. By doing so, the agent would be told to download and run malicious code which could be anything from backdoor malware to infostealers.

The good news is that Microsoft found this issue and reported it before the bug ever reached regular users. The official downloadable version of AutoGen Studio never had this problem, since it only existed in an early, in-development version on GitHub. The AutoGen team managed to fix it since then.

“If an agent can browse untrusted pages and also talk to privileged local services, loopback can become an attack surface and control planes must be authenticated, authorized, and isolated,” Microsoft concluded.

• Microsoft confirms RoguePlanet as CVE‑2026‑50656, an elevation‑of‑privilege flaw in Defender’s Malware Protection Engine
• Disclosed by Chaotic Eclipse as a race‑condition zero‑day granting SYSTEM privileges on fully patched Windows 10/11
• Seventh exploit in their campaign; PoC validated by ThreatLocker, with Microsoft promising a fix despite ongoing feud

Microsoft has assigned a unique identifier for the recently-disclosed RoguePlanet vulnerability and confirmed it is now working on a fix.

"Microsoft is aware of an elevation of privilege in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine in Microsoft Defender publicly referred to as 'RoguePlanet,' the company said in a recently disclosed security advisory.

"We are working to provide a high quality security update that addresses this vulnerability. We will provide information in this CVE when the update is available."

Chaotic Eclipse's grudge

A security researcher with the alias Chaotic Eclipse recently disclosed a zero-day vulnerability in a fully patched Windows 11 device, just hours after Microsoft released its June Patch Tuesday cumulative update.

Chaotic Eclipse is waging a personal crusade against Microsoft, whom they’re accusing of being disrespectful and poorly handling vulnerability disclosures. RoguePlanet is the seventh zero-day exploit they disclosed in a matter of months. This bug, described as a “race condition vulnerability”, grants attackers SYSTEM privileges on fully patched Windows 10 and Windows 11 devices.

Before that, they also published BlueHammer, RedSun, GreenPlasma, MiniPlasma, YellowKey, and UnDefend flaws. Some of them affect Microsoft Defender, and some BitLocker and other Windows components.

They published a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit in a self-hosted Git, after saying that both GitHub and GitLab repositories hosting earlier work got removed by Microsoft.

"The exploit is a race condition, so it's a hit or miss. I have managed to get a 100% success rate on some machines while it struggled to work on others," they explained. Security researchers ThreatLocker confirmed to the publication that the flaw works and even recorded a video to demonstrate how it works.

Microsoft now tracks RoguePlanet as CVE-2026-50656. Earlier it said it considered legal action when people engage in “malicious activity causing real harm to our customers”. Chaotic Eclipse seems unphased by these warnings, which some interpreted as threats.

Via BleepingComputer

• Kali365 is a sophisticated phishing-as-a-service platform, also known as Octopi365 and Freedom365, that targets Microsoft accounts
• It was first detected by security firm Huntress in May 2026 when examining a slew of Microsoft 365 logins originating from China
• The FBI issues a warning detailing the process as part of a public service announcement

Phishing attacks are hardly new, with an estimated 3.4 billion malicious emails sent daily, accounting for a mammoth 1.2% of all email traffic.

Google alone blocks approximately 100 million phishing emails daily, as threat actors continue to evolve their approaches, using unique campaigns, AI-generated content, and, lately, QR codes to lure unsuspecting victims.

A recent phishing-as-a-service toolkit detected by cybersecurity company Huntress, however, stands out for its sophistication, scale, and success rate.

A sophisticated phishing service for hire

What makes Kali365 unique versus its peers is the scale at which it operates and the methods it uses. Unlike most phishing operations, it is a tool with at least 33 built-in templates that impersonate Microsoft products and services, 100 API endpoints, and role-based access control for phishing teams.

In addition to being an AI-enabled phishing, it also has a sophisticated payout pipeline, a crypto payment gateway integration, tiered access to the software suite, and, for those looking for a complete offering, a desktop application for operators.

Kali365 and its variants and clones, such as Octopi365 and Freedom365, do not, however, directly compromise or bypass MFA; instead, they use a set of highly legitimate emails and calls to action that then steal session cookies and OAuth tokens, allowing access to a victim's account.

The process itself is seamless; a potential victim sees a Microsoft website, an SSL certificate, and no warnings that they are effectively handing over access to a bad actor, who then uses their authenticated token to access their account. The AI-generated lures themselves are sophisticated, but as the FBI points out, they still require a user to be phished via email, with many impersonating "trusted cloud productivity and document-sharing services."

The more damning use of AI, however, is where Anthropic's Claude AI model is used to read intercepted email threads, score them for fraud potential, and draft convincing reply messages, complete with fabricated banking details and a manufactured sense of urgency, to be sent from the victim's own mailbox.

While the FBI's warning stands, it also somewhat acknowledges that this is not an easy phishing attempt to avoid, given the scale, the multitude of phishing attack vectors, and the "legitimate" look it has compared to most of its competition. Resolving this would require a change on Microsoft's end to close security loopholes that enable such authentication transfers, but for now, any affected individuals can only report their experiences here.

• Windows 11's Xbox mode uses less RAM than the standard desktop, but doesn't improve game performance
• That's the conclusion based on a battery of tests by a popular YouTube channel
• Gaming performance on Valve's SteamOS is still better, while Microsoft is trying to catch up

Microsoft's push to improve gaming on Windows 11 is still an ongoing process, particularly with its Xbox mode that provides a console-style user interface — but is seemingly not doing much to boost game performance.

As highlighted by Notebookcheck, Windows 11's Xbox mode does result in decreased RAM usage compared to the standard desktop, but crucially it doesn't improve actual game performance — or that's the conclusion of recent testing by Linus Tech Tips (LTT).

When testing the likes of Forza Horizon 5 at 1080p with max graphics settings and no upscaling across two PCs with the same specifications, there was no difference in frame rates between the standard desktop and Xbox mode. The same was true at 1440p resolution, and with other games such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Doom: The Dark Ages, where LTT found either the same frame rates or a negligible difference.

It's important to note that both PCs in LTT's tests show memory usage at lower levels when using the Xbox mode compared to the standard desktop, but this made no impact on performance.

I should point out that this is just one set of benchmarks, and results will, of course, likely vary depending on the exact tests and system configurations involved. However, LTT's testing here is a strong enough indication of a disappointing overall performance for Windows 11's Xbox mode as it stands.

It's no secret that Valve's SteamOS offers better game performance than Windows 11, with more optimal RAM usage, and it doesn't feature any of the unwanted bloatware that Windows 11 is loaded with. While SteamOS does have its own desktop mode, it's a Linux distro that is built for gaming at heart.

Something is amiss with Xbox mode, it seems, and Microsoft is struggling with optimization here. On top of that, the Xbox mode rollout isn't fully complete, acting as another pain point for Windows 11 users looking for an easy console-like gaming experience.

Frankly, the longer it takes for all users to gain access to Xbox mode, and for performance improvements to be realized, the harder it'll be for Microsoft to catch up with Valve.

While Windows remains by far the dominant OS for PC gamers, if anti-cheat support on Linux improves, that'll spell big trouble for Microsoft with more users likely migrating to SteamOS.

• Oracle says reports a Microsoft deal had broken down were "inaccurate"
• The two companies regularly explore further partnership options
• Microsoft is actively using rival clouds to support its customers

Oracle says that details reported about its cloud deal with Microsoft are "inaccurate" (via Reuters), and that Microsoft remains both an OCI customer and a partner as the two companies continue to collaborate.

"We have a tremendously collaborative and fruitful partnership, where we often talk about ways we ⁠can expand ​upon our ongoing work together," a company spokesperson said.

Business Insider had reported that a deal between the two companies was under pressure due to security and compliance concerns.

Microsoft and Oracle are still working together

Per earlier reports, the agreement could have been worth more than $3 billion, making it one of the largest cloud infrastructure leasing deals between any hyperscalers. The aim was to give Microsoft access to additional GPU and compute, which it could distribute between its own customers and for AI training and inference.

Microsoft has already had to turn to AWS for extra compute as it struggles to meet demand for GitHub's AI tools, with commits expected to increase 14x in the space of just one year.

According to the report, Microsoft was struggling with OCI's lack of Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which it only offers to government cloud customers. Amazon and Google's public clouds, on the other hand, do have FedRAMP.

Oracle recently announced a 47% rise in cloud revenues – more than twice the growth of the entire business, which was already a very impressive 21%. At $9.9 billion, its cloud business is now worth more than half of its entire revenues.

Microsoft has not commented on the matter.

• Xbox Game Studios CEO Craig Duncan and chief of staff Louise O'Connor are stepping down from their roles
• Their departures come amid reports of mass job cuts at Xbox
• The news also follows reports of several studio closures, including Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, and Double Fine

Xbox Game Studios CEO Craig Duncan is reportedly stepping down from his position this week after less than two years in the role.

That's according to The Game Business, which claims that Duncan's chief of staff, Louise O'Connor, is also leaving the company, less than a year after joining.

Duncan accepted the role in 2024 after the previous boss, Alan Hartman, retired, but has been part of Xbox since 2011 and was the head of Microsoft's Sea of Thieves studio, Rare, for 14 years.

His role as CEO meant he oversaw many Xbox-owned studios, such as Rare, as well as Halo Studios, The Coalition, Flight Sim, Turn 10, Playground Games, Obsidian, Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, The Initiative, Double Fine, InXile, Undead Labs, and more.

Meanwhile, O'Connor joined Rare in 1999 as an animator of the Nintendo 64 game Conker’s Bad Fur Day, but left the studio in 2025 after the cancellation of Everwild, before becoming the chief of staff in September last year.

The pair's departure from Xbox comes after Bloomberg reported that CEO Asha Sharma is considering mass job cuts after she and chief content officer Matt Booty outline a new "Xbox reset."

The news also follows new reports that Microsoft is shuttering several award-winning studios, including Hellblade developer Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, the maker of South of Midnight, and Psychonauts studio, Double Fine.

Employees at Ninja Theory, which just announced its new game Senua at the Xbox Games Showcase 2026, were reportedly told about the closure on June 15 and told The Verge that they're hoping to find a new buyer.

Bloomberg and Kotaku first reported the closures of Compulsion Games and Double Fine, which are in "active negotiations" about spinning off.

Sharma has been CEO for just over 100 days, and in that time has reformed "Microsoft Gaming" back into "Xbox" and reiterated her plan to "return to Xbox" by taking the brand back to its roots.

At the Xbox Games Showcase, Sharma announced that Gears of War: E-Day will be an Xbox console exclusive, along with Clockwork Revolution.

• Microsoft and Anthropic reveal Copilot Cowork
• Anthropic AI platform gives Copilot the ability to really dig deep into work tasks
• Tool will be able to cover the entire Microsoft 365 platform

Microsoft has announced its Copilot Cowork platform will now be generally available to Microsoft 365 Copilot users worldwide.

First revealed in March 2026, Cowork combines the power of Microsoft's own Copilot offering with some of the most powerful AI tools from Anthropic's Claude Cowork platform.

The aim, the companies say, is to turn AI assistants from an interested observer into a full-on helper, giving you all the tools you need to get work done intelligently.

Copilot Cowork

In a blog post announcing the news, Charles Lamanna, EVP, Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft, noted "more than half of the Fortune 500 is using Copilot Cowork" following its initial preview launch.

"We have been impressed by your creativity and what you have all built with it," Lamanna added, describing use cases ranging from batch-editing spreadsheets, comparing thousands of files across two product versions, and evaluating at-risk opportunities for sales teams.

"Cowork is the fastest growing feature in the history of our Frontier program, and Cowork has among the highest user satisfaction of any Copilot or agent experience we have shipped," he said.

"We learned from what we saw, engaged with you along the way, and used everything we heard to improve quality and add new features, including model choice, extensibility through plugins, and new cost management controls."

To mark its general release, Microsoft has added a few extra tools to Copilot Cowork as it looks to make the service as useful as possible.

First is a greater choice in which AI model you utilize - at general availability, Copilot Cowork now runs on popular Anthropic models including Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6.

In Frontier access, customers can also access GPT 5.5, with Cowork 1 coming soon, with Microsoft's latest model removing model bias and helping to deliver enterprise-grade performance at a substantially lower cost for everyday Copilot tasks, helping organizations manage cost-sensitive workloads.

Elsewhere, Microsoft is introducing new partner plugins for Copilot Cowork, with nine partners available immediately, including the likes of Monday.com, Miro and Moodys, with eight more coming soon, including workplace heavyweights such as Adobe, Atlassian, Box and Canva.

Frontier users can now use Copilot Cowork to get online via a local Edge browser, expanding the range of tasks it can complete on behalf of users.

• Microsoft Teams feature will utilize Wi-Fi networks to detect a user's location
• Workplace location will automatically update upon connecting
• Long-delayed feature is coming Windows and Mac Microsoft Teams users soon

Finding a quiet spot in the office to finish your work without being bothered by your boss or team-mates could soon be a pipe dream thanks to a long-delayed Microsoft Teams update.

The online collaboration platform is finally rolling out a tool which will automatically update a user's location when they connect to an office Wi-Fi network.

The update, entitled "Workplace Check-in via Wi-Fi" will be great news for those managing hybrid teams, as it will provide more insight about where workers are situated, but could be bad news for those of us looking for a quiet day getting some work done.

Workplace Check-in via Wi-Fi

In a Microsoft 365 roadmap post announcing the feature, the company notes, "when users connect to their organization's Wi-Fi, Teams will soon be able to update their work location to reflect the building they're working from."

The update post does add that the feature will be off by default, and admins will be able to decide whether to enable it or not, adding "end-users always have the choice to opt-in or opt-out of sharing this information."

This caveat was not included when the feature was first announced way back in October 2025 - its inclusion, and the host of delays, suggests Microsoft has had to hone the tool following initial feedback.

The roadmap post notes, "Workplace Check-in via Wi-Fi acts as an extension of existing capabilities to check in to a building or a reserved desk, providing more flexibility and ease of use to help coordinate with co-workers."

The feature is rolling out now to all Teams users across Windows and Mac devices.

The launch will be the latest in a series of recent releases aimed at making Microsoft Teams users more productive when using the service.

This includes letting users promote their vital skills and attributes directly within Teams via their Microsoft 365 profile card in Teams, giving colleagues and managers a quick view at exactly why they would be good (or bad) for a certain job.

However the platform also recently closed its Together Mode, first released during the pandemic, which let Microsoft Teams users turn their calls into a virtual keynote, lecture theatre or meeting room.

But with many offices now back open and in-person meetings sadly becoming more common, Microsoft says it has chosen to end the tool in favor of working on other improvements.

• Satya Nadella warns against giving AI too much power and reliance
• Microsoft CEO warns such a move could "hollow out entire industries"
• The AI industry can learn from past mistakes, Nadella urges

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has issued a warning against handing over too much power and value to AI models.

In a post shared on X, Nadella outlined how giving a small number of AI firms control over important data and information could cause widespread economic issues for companies of all sizes.

"The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see," he warned, "If all the value is accrued by only a few models, the political economy will simply not tolerate it. There is no societal permission for an AI future that hollows out entire industries."

The AI "transition"

In his post, entitled "A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable", Nadella compared today's demand for AI, and the growth being seen, as equivalent to the rise in globalization seen in the 20th century.

Nadella outlined how globalization was a positive for some, as it boosted economic indicators in many countries - but it also led to a loss of jobs in other areas, and the end of some industrial economies as priorities and focuses shifted.

"This transition is different than any previous platform shift," he said, "In the past, we used digital systems to enhance human capital. This is the first time we can create a real cognitive loop between people and digital systems. That is a mind-bender, because it changes how we even conceptualize work inside an enterprise."

"What is at stake is not some digital tool or system and its use, but how organizations continue to learn, build IP, differentiate, and thrive in a world where AI models can continuously absorb the expertise of humans and organizations and commoditize it."

Nadella stated the AI industry has a chance to learn from past errors made in the globalization age, with businesses should continue to control their learning systems and internal expertise while benefiting from AI-powered innovation.

"In my view, our priority has to be building a frontier ecosystem, not just a frontier model, so value flows broadly across every company, every industry, and every country," he declared. "One where every organization can own the learning loop that encodes its institutional knowledge, compounding its human and token capital."

"When that happens, companies will create value for themselves and for the economy around them."

Nadella's post comes shortly after Microsoft Build 2026, where the company laid out its plans for the next few years in terms of new software and hardware.

At the event, Mustafa Suelyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, outlined the company’s reasoning in its AI development, noting that its work would always look to support human workers and users, not replace them, as it looks to create what the company calls “humanist superintelligence”.

• Microsoft is changing the way that Windows 11 updates are delivered
• The likes of .NET, driver or firmware updates will be bundled together with the monthly update
• This change is now in testing, alongside a lot of work to make Windows 11's default apps better

Windows 11 is getting some more very useful changes, including an improved process for updates and a raft of tweaks for the default apps in the OS.

Microsoft has just released a new preview in the Experimental channel (build 26300.8687) which packs the changes for Windows Update (which were announced as incoming a while back in April).

Microsoft tells us: "We are rolling out a new unified update experience to reduce the number of reboots you see per month. We are starting by coordinating driver, .NET, and firmware updates to align with the monthly quality update, reducing the update experience to a single monthly restart."

Elsewhere, Thurrott.com points out that Microsoft has a whole lot of work underway for the various core Windows 11 apps, and that the company is now documenting these changes under separate release notes for apps in its Learn portal.

Calculator is getting tweaked so it has readable text when using high contrast themes and more accurate square-root results (with rare errors fixed).

Windows 11's Camera app now supports more video resolution options, and a full range of zoom levels (plus the zoom slider now works with more cameras, including the latest models). Microsoft has also ensured that the front-facing cameras on more devices are supported.

The Clock has the ability to run more countdowns (up to three simultaneously) and a new 15-minute snooze on alarms, among a whole load of minor changes.

Microsoft Paint now offers functionality to adjust how transparent the eraser is, and the AI image panel has been tidied up with a cleaner layout. The toolbar loads faster, too, and a bunch of stability tweaks have been applied, reducing the likelihood of crashes.

The Photos app also has some useful changes so it'll now display very tiny images (such as pixel art) with an appropriate level of zoom so they look sharp rather than a blurry mess, as well as tweaks for the interface and again stability (resolving a crash that happened during text recognition).

With improvements to Media Player (custom captions, bug fixes and better overall reliability) and Sound Recorder, Microsoft is clearly busy with these default apps.

Analysis: a better way of working with updates

Bear in mind that all of these changes are in testing right now, but the various bits of tweaking and new features for Windows 11's core apps shouldn't take long to come through.

The move to consolidate the deployment of Windows 11's updates will take longer, as it's only in the Experimental channel (early testing) right now, and it's just rolling out gradually there. However, it's great to see this inbound, because it's going to represent a major convenience for the average Windows 11 user.

Instead of having to bother with separate updates for firmware, or the .NET framework, or device drivers, Windows Update will bundle them all together with the monthly cumulative update that Microsoft releases. The upshot is that you'll only have to reboot once to apply all those upgrades, and while installation will take longer, simplifying how updates work in this way is definitely worth the trade-off.

This is one of many improvements Microsoft has in the works for Windows 11 updates, and the key piece of functionality that's already in the pipeline is the ability to delay a monthly update indefinitely. Update installation failures have long been a blemish on Microsoft's reputation, too, and moves are afoot to cure these blues.

• Alien: Isolation 2 creative director Al Hope had ideas for a sequel while making the first game
• Hope says its "core" survival systems have been "evolved"
• He adds that the original divert, disrupt, and distract gameplay will remain the same

Alien: Isolation 2 creative director Al Hope has revealed that he and the team at Creative Assembly had ideas about making a sequel before finishing the first game.

In an interview with TechRadar Gaming at Summer Game Fest (SGF) 2026, Hope discussed creating a sequel following the massive success of 2014's Alien: Isolation, a game that many look back on as the best Alien game and one of the best horror games ever made.

The creative director said he was "super proud of the first game and the reaction to it", even though it felt like the team was "taking a bit of a risk" because "there was nothing really quite like it," but he also said he had ideas for a sequel even during its development.

"I'd been thinking about creating a sequel before we even finished the first game, about what that could be," Hope said. "I suppose it was about once we saw the reception of that first game, and what really people really engaged in the nature of this experience, where it's not scripted, it's not choreographed."

Hope compared other survivor horror titles, such as Resident Evil, where "the dog would always jump out the window at the same point," and explained how having an experience where it was "systemic" and the systems that react and respond to the player was the "core" of the Isolation games.

"It felt that's our core," he added, explaining that the idea behind the sequel was "let's just evolve, take what we love, or what people love, and evolve with it", but in ways that feel "intuitive."

"So the first game is all about being in the tin can in space, in the space station, being claustrophobic and trapped, and that's super cool," Hope continued. "We love that. We felt like, what if we were on a planet's surface now, we're being hunted in the exterior, and we had that interior experience as well.

"We've had this kind of best of both worlds. And then it was thinking around, okay, well, let's tell a new story. We've got this new world. Let's tell a new story with a new protagonist, and so I suppose all these things kind of seem to fall into place naturally. I guess that was the, that was the starting point for us."

As Hope put it, in Isolation 2, players will be in a new, exterior environment, and the story will be a "continuation" that follows a new protagonist, Blake, but the core experience will still be "improvise to survive the systemic nature of the entities that you encounter" and using familiar tools to accomplish that.

"That real attention to detail in the fidelity of the world and immersion, the atmosphere that's our core," he said, "A lot of the same rules apply. It's about line of sight, about not being seen, about what tools you have at hand that can divert, disrupt, distract, so a lot of the gameplay remains the same. In the future, we'll be sharing more interesting ways to survive and evade the creature.

"I guess we saw it as an evolution."

Alien: Isolation 2 doesn't have a release date yet, but it will launch on PS5, Xbox Series X, Series S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

Apple revealed macOS 27 Golden Gate at WWDC 2026 this week, with the first beta version of its next desktop operating system becoming available to download.

To be clear, this is an initial developer beta not intended for the general computing public – a beta for everyday users won't come until later – but even so, we saw an odd rush to grab this very first release of macOS 27.

Why? It certainly wasn't because Mac owners were very keen to get their pointers on a whole load of shiny, glitzy new features, because as we made clear, macOS 27 doesn't add anything particularly attention-grabbing. Indeed, one of the most notable things about macOS 27 is that it shuts the Golden Gate on Macs that don't run on Apple's M-series silicon (or the A18 Pro in the case of the MacBook Neo), with Intel chips officially being ditched.

Otherwise, macOS 27 is a case of general performance and stability work, as well as honing the interface, and a raft of minor feature additions. So, again – why are Mac owners falling over themselves to download the macOS 27 developer beta? Well, it's because that more humdrum-sounding work on generally fixing macOS when it comes to performance was badly needed after the release of the current iteration of the OS (macOS Tahoe).

In case you weren't aware, then, it isn't just Windows 11 that needs fixing – which Microsoft is in the midst of a major campaign to do – but also macOS. And the good news is that, apparently, Apple has done a great job right off the bat on the recovery front with the first macOS 27 beta – to an eye-opening extent, as you'll see.

Let's explore the broad reaction to macOS 27 with its initial debut in testing – including it being called 'mind-blowing', that's how positive some folks are being – and look at the three main reasons why Golden Gate isn't as lowkey a release as it may seem upon first glance.

1. Tahoe performance headaches seem to have been totally cured in macOS 27

Early adopters of the initial dev beta of macOS 27 are pretty much universally praising the performance boost compared to the current version of the OS, and essentially saying it feels like night-and-day compared to Tahoe.

This Reddit thread is a perfect example, where the original poster claims that: 'Performance is genuinely mind-blowing on the new macOS 27 beta'. They add that "macOS 27 feels incredibly fast compared to Tahoe", and that: "The lag, stutters, and general sluggishness I experienced on Tahoe seem to be completely gone. Apps launch faster, animations are smoother, and the whole system feels much more responsive and polished."

Others chime in with similar thoughts on that thread, and macOS 27 gets nothing less than a glowing write-up. For example: "Gets even better during high-end tasks! It [the MacBook] doesn't heat up as much, and isn't hogging RAM as much as Tahoe was."

Another Redditor says: "Agreed. I have an M1 Pro base as well and performance is so much better than Tahoe. It honestly feels like a new Mac now."

There's a common theme across many online comments from those who've already migrated from Tahoe to Golden Gate in that they're saying that their Mac now feels like a new computer (as per that last comment).

Of course, this is still early days – very early – but it's undeniably a positive sign that Apple is on the right track here. If you've avoided Tahoe due to performance-related concerns then it seems Golden Gate will be your golden ticket to upgrade from macOS Sequoia finally (assuming you don't have an Intel Mac).

2. The first macOS 27 beta is reportedly remarkably stable already – and that bodes well

As well as the observations on distinct and substantial performance improvements across the board, there's another theme with the reaction to macOS 27 so far, namely that it's very stable. And that's pretty remarkable given that this is the initial release of the pre-public (developer) version of Golden Gate – it simply doesn't get any more 'early adopter' than this.

Indeed, the original poster from the above Reddit thread concerning the great performance boost was wowed almost as much by the stability levels in evidence here. They noted: "It's still a beta, but so far the performance is absolutely amazing." And that: "It's pretty wild that a developer beta runs better than the stable version of Tahoe. I'd definitely recommend upgrading."

Someone else adds: "The beta of [macOS] 27 is more stable than macOS 26 during its entire run."

Indeed, there are a fair few Redditors who are chipping in and making comments saying that they'd never normally touch a first beta release, but having read these threads, they've been tempted into taking the plunge and leaving Tahoe behind.

On a more cautious note, I'd be careful about early betas in general, although at this point, macOS 27 is only open to developers anyway – and we explain more about what this means here.

At any rate, there's a double win with the first macOS 27 beta in terms of a big performance improvement combined with stability in spades given the early stage this work is currently at.

3. Apple has ironed out the interface wrinkles introduced with Tahoe

There were a number of frustrations aired about some of the decisions made with the interface in macOS Tahoe, and Apple has set about resolving these in macOS 27.

One key change is the menu icons, which have been widely criticized in Tahoe and even described as 'glaringly inconsistent and often utterly inscrutable', with app menus stuffed full of icons to a bewildering extent – but this has now been cleaned up.

Apple has also addressed complaints around window borders, and there are no more 'floating' sidebars, as they are now edge-to-edge inside their window, as noted by this Redditor. The changes to the Liquid Glass design are also singled out, with Apple ensuring that the transparency effect no longer makes text difficult to read.

As another Redditor put it more broadly: "Golden Gate is very sharp now. On Tahoe everything was so goddamn blurry and it's good now."

Note that Liquid Glass hasn't gone away, it's just been tweaked, and very much for the better by all accounts. There are a whole bunch of other UI tweaks for macOS 27 as highlighted by MacRumors in this list.

Only doing what had to be done?

So, that's all well and good. But while what Apple's done in terms of performance and stability for a first beta may be 'mind-blowing' in some respects, it could also be argued that this is merely to be expected. That's because macOS 27 is mostly about fixing Tahoe, and so that's what Apple has been concentrating on – hence the lack of any major feature additions.

Still, to be fair to Apple, it looks like the company has done a great job. And it is indeed unusual to see feedback praising stability so highly for an initial (dev) beta release. So, let's give credit where it's due, even if this is more a case of necessary refinement, honing, fixing, and generally 'recovering' from Tahoe than it is Golden Gate being any kind of standout leap over its predecessor.

It seems like macOS 27 is going to please a lot of Mac owners when it's released later this year, particularly those with older MacBooks (not too old, though – sorry Intel folks). Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, Microsoft's efforts to fix Windows 11 – a project set to span the course of this year – are also going well thus far. All this makes me optimistic that perhaps 2027 could be a golden year for desktop operating systems.

• NHS England is deploying M365 Copilot to 505k staff after pilot success
• The scheme targets 43 saved minutes per worker per day
• 200k initial rollout and extensive training promised

NHS England has announced a major AI expansion which will see it give more than half a million clinicians and support staff access to Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The move follows what Microsoft and NHS England described as the “largest AI trial of its kind globally in healthcare,” where 30,000 NHS workers got earlier access to M365 Copilot.

Under the initiative, NHS England hopes to reduce the administrative burden that clinicians face, improving productivity and cutting operational costs to free up more time to be spent on valuable human interactions.

Pilot program success leads to massive NHS England AI expansion

From its earlier pilot, NHS England found the average worker was able to gain back 43 minutes per day when using M365 Copilot, which is about the equivalent of five working weeks per year – not far from the average UK vacation allowance.

With a bigger rollout, the healthcare provider estimates it could save millions of hours every year.

“By rolling out Microsoft Copilot across the NHS, we can reduce that burden, free up clinicians’ time and help staff focus on what they do best, caring for patients,” UK Health Innovation and Safety Minister Preet Kaur Gill said.

Microsoft highlighted five key job roles set to benefit the most from NHS England’s adoption of its AI software – clinical administration, ward clerks, medical secretaries, core services and management – with it set to support writing, information retrieval, summarization and analysis. The subscription will also include Copilot Studio, a tool for building AI agents without workers having to be experts in AI.

“The potential to save clinical staff nearly a day’s worth of admin time every fortnight could be a gamechanger for patients,” NHS England Chief Digital, Data and Technology Officer Rob Thompson explained, referencing the Government’s ‘10 Year Health Plan for England’ and broader ‘Plan for Change’.

Other M365 deployments demonstrate a successful strategy

Despite the pilot’s apparent success, a much larger-scale adoption could bring its own challenges. Staff training and digital literacy remain major barriers within the NHS, while the organization itself must get to grips with governance, policies and strategies.

Across the border in Wales, a similar Microsoft 365 rollout reveals how counties like Rhondda Cynon Taf, Swansea and Carmarthenshire have been successful thanks to their use of internal AI champions. “We use a lot of our own practitioners to teach other practitioners,” one spokesperson told IT Pro.

NHS England plans to onboard 200,000 users within the first six months, and up to 505,000 workers within a year through an "extensive training and adoption program.”

“Bringing AI safely into the flow of healthcare will help ease pressures, improve productivity, and support better decision-making across the health service,” Microsoft UK&I CEO Darren Hardman added.

• Alien: Isolation 2 will be built using Unreal Engine 5
• Creative Assembly is developing its own custom lighting and audio technology
• Creative director Al Hope says modern game development allows for "real-time feedback"

Creative Assembly has confirmed that Alien: Isolation 2 will be built with Unreal Engine 5, but the team is also developing custom technology for lighting and audio.

That's according to Creative Director Al Hope, who, alongside Animation Director Simon Ridge, discussed the technological advancement of the upcoming sequel in an interview with TechRadar Gaming at Summer Game Fest (SGF) 2026.

Ridge remarked on how "incredibly proud" he is of how the first Alien: Isolation looked, but "Technology's advanced, and so it allows more opportunities."

"A big part of what we did last time was making sure we were providing an experience to really back up that whole immersion, I guess, on the stress, so the player never really comes out of those moments, and from our discipline, animation, that was around making sure that you were never really seeing points where you could tell it was a game," Ridge said.

"That was a huge goal, you were watching something that was almost like a sentient creature, it was Al [Hope] mentioned many a time, a systemic system.

"So I think now that time's moved on a little bit, it allows us to probably add more variety than what we could before, just due to technical advancement, and just up the quality of the assets themselves."

Hope added that one of the biggest advantages of contemporary game development is the "real-time feedback," with Ridge saying that working on something for a sequel and being able to see it in-engine, in context, straight away, allows the team to get "the quickest kind of representation of how it's going to feel."

The creative director continued, explaining that it "allows us to iterate much faster," unlike during the Alien: Isolation development period. This time, the team is using Unreal Engine 5, but it will also be creating its own custom technology, which Hope calls an "evolution" of what fans are familiar with.

"I think one of the interesting things for us is obviously lighting and audio parts of the experience, and so we're using Unreal [Engine], but for lighting and audio we're developing our own custom technology to really enable us to really fine-tune the experience and create exactly the best Alien experience we possibly can," Hope said.

"It's really interesting with our audio team; it's the same, more or less the same audio team that worked in the original, so it's really an extension of an evolution of both the tech and the kind of creative side that worked on the original.

"I'll blow their trumpet for them. I think they won more or less every audio award going that year for Alien: Isolation. I think that's absolutely fantastic, people recognize that it felt like it was such a big part of the experience, and it's just really exciting to have them working together again on this."

Alien: Isolation 2 is in active development and will launch on PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

• Creative Assembly wants Alien: Isolation 2 to be as memorable as the first game
• Creative Director Al Hope says the new exterior setting "feels like a natural evolution of the experience"
• The alien will "adapt and behave" differently to hunt the player

Creative Assembly has said it was "absolutely the intention" for Alien: Isolation to feel "too scary" for players, and the goal is to make the sequel just as memorable.

Alien: Isolation is one of the best horror games of all time, and in the newly announced sequel, players will once again be stranded in space while a sentient creature hunts them down. How lovely!

Unlike the first game, where players are confined to a space station, Alien: Isolation 2 will have a new setting and feature both exterior and interior environments, which Creative Director Al Hope said "feels like a natural evolution of the experience."

"It's the best of both worlds," Hope said in an interview with TechRadar Gaming at Summer Game Fest (SGF) 2026, "it has those claustrophobic-type interior spaces and those now exposed and very vulnerable feeling exterior spaces. I think for us, that's the most exciting starting point."

In Isolation 2, these new open spaces also mean players will need to be on their guard more than before, because the creature will also be able to "adapt and behave in a different way in order to be able to hunt in the exterior."

"The alien is well known for, in Alien: Isolation, learning and adapting based on his encounters with the player," Hope said. "It will be doing that in the exterior as well. So, as you come up with strategies and tactics, it will start to learn about those and then be able to circumvent them. So, you have to think again, get really creative, get imaginative, you know, imaginative in order to be able to survive, progress, and survive."

He continued: "The experience is evolving to include the exterior, thus one of the big changes for the creature is being able to hunt the player effectively in the exterior. For us, right now, it feels like a really fantastic opportunity, and I think people can already imagine what that's going to be like."

Animation Director Simon Ridge knows that the first game was loved by fans, and that it also terrified them, adding that the team's goal with Isolation 2 is to "deliver something to the audience that hopefully makes them as happy, terrified as before."

"That's a really fantastic opportunity," Ridge said.

Hope continued, "I like to think that anyone who played Alien: Isolation probably remembers playing Alien Isolation. Even if they think, 'Oh man, that was too scary,' and that's absolutely the intention for the sequel to make something that's truly unforgettable, and I think that combination of interior and exterior will create these moments that really live long after the player puts down the controller (or mouse and keyboard).

"That's the intention: to create something that really stays."

Alien: Isolation 2 doesn't have a release date yet, but it's set to launch on PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

• Toys for Bob says Activision Blizzard didn't push back on the studio's decision to go independent again
• Studio head Paul Yan says, "Leadership on both sides was very open to the idea"
• Yan says the process was "complex" to navigate while also planning Spyro: A Realm Beyond

Spyro: A Realm Beyond developer Toys for Bob has said there was no "pushback" from Activision Blizzard when it chose to become independent, but the process was "complex."

In 2024, one year after Microsoft officially acquired Activision Blizzard and almost 20 years after being purchased by the latter, Toys for Bob announced that it would split from its parent company and return to its "roots" as an independent studio.

Now, during a press Q&A at Summer Game Fest 2026 while promoting Spyro: A Realm Beyond, Studio Head Paul Yan shared that the team didn't meet any resistance from Activision Blizzard or Microsoft and that "leadership on both sides was very open to the idea."

"It was just complex," Yan said, "because we were talking about navigating many things in a very compressed amount of time, so just the logistics and legality of how do you separate from a company in that way has never been done before."

"I've never done it before, so I'm asking for something that's going to need a ton of coordination across many teams, across two new organizations that don't even know each other," he added, referring to the company's acquisition by Microsoft, "or they've just got married for the most part.

"Meanwhile, we're also trying to navigate a pitch for this game [Spyro: A Realm Beyond], so we're trying to get all that happening at the same time."

Yan said this was "the biggest challenge" overall, reiterating that no one was against Toys for Bob becoming independent again, although the process was something "we've never seen done before."

Associate creative director Lou Studdard added that it was difficult to navigate the process while also "preserving the continuity of the team experience of the team," and making sure it wasn't "such a big culture shock for the studio."

"It's been a tremendous effort to make sure that around two years ago, and this happened when we really started, it was kind of like another day in the office in a good way, and that we are a continued development team that knows how to work with each other and focus on our projects," Studdard said.

Spyro: A Realm Beyond is Toys for Bob's first game since becoming an independent studio again, and it launches in Spring 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Series S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

• Toys for Bob says Spyro: A Realm Beyond is designed to be "accessible" and "approachable"
• The game won't be as "hardcore" as Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time
• The studio says Spyro has always been more about "discovery and exploration"

Toys for Bob wants Spyro: A Realm Beyond to be an "approachable" new entry in the series, for both long-time fans and new players.

In a press Q&A at Summer Game Fest (SGF) that TechRadar Gaming attended, associate creative director Lou Studdard was asked about Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, designing a difficulty level that stayed true to the long-time series, and if the studio was also conscious of doing the same for A Realm Beyond.

In response, Studdard said that Toys for Bob was focused on designing the upcoming Spyro game as a more approachable entry for the broader audience, with less of the "hardcore" mechanics players would typically find in Crash Bandicoot.

"For Spyro: A Realm Beyond, we are very much focused on making it an accessible adventure, and so that means really focusing in on those difficulty levels, as well as just the general notion of how you play the game," Studdard said. "Spyro definitely is less of a hardcore, or precision-based game; Crash is definitely much more in that line of thing.

"For us, for Spyro, we have had a very focused effort on making sure that it is an accessible, approachable entry, and that goes, hand in hand with the audience that we want to serve, we want this to be something where this could be someone's first Spyro game, and fall in love with our favorite little purple dragon, and be along for the ride from there."

Toys for Bob Chief Creative Officer and Studio Head, Paul Yan, echoed the same sentiment, saying Spyro has always been a very approachable experience.

Both Yan and Studdard agreed that Crash Bandicoot is more about "hard checks" and executing perfectly timed jumps, with Studdard explaining that "precision execution based platforming" was what the team used to build, but not for the new Spyro game.

For the Spyro games, Yan added, it's more about "discovery and exploration" and is more "relaxing" to play, so the team wanted to "preserve its tonal core" for A Realm Beyond.

"I will say that taking flight and moving in a three-dimensional space, as opposed to on the ground, is just inherently more complex than running on the ground, right?" Yan said. "So we spend a lot of effort to make that as approachable as possible. It will be a little bit more complex, just navigating through the air, where we're doing everything that we can to make sure that it is an approachable experience, and that it is engaging and you're making interesting decisions while you're up in the sky."

Spyro: A Realm Beyond launches in Spring 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Series S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

• Alien: Isolation 2 will take place months after the events of the first game
• Creative Director Al Hope says the sequel is still inspired by the first Alien movie
• Hope adds, "Our goal is to stay really true in spirit to that first movie"

Creative Assembly has confirmed that Alien: Isolation 2 will take place months after the first game and is once again inspired by the first Alien movie.

Speaking in an interview with TechRadar Gaming at Summer Game Fest 2026 (SGF), Creative Director Al Hope and Animation Director Simon Ridge shared how the studio is expanding the world of Alien in the upcoming sequel, confirming the movies are still the "groundwork."

"We really love the Aliens universe, obviously," Hope said. "I think for us, the first game really was close to the first movie in look and feel, in [the protagonist] Amanda [to Ripley], but in Isolation 2, which takes place months after the events of the first game, we're still in that wonderful space that we absolutely adore.

"We feel the first movie is still a really rich vein for us to tap into and explore and expand. It felt like a really good opportunity to just keep pushing, going deep in that part of the IP."

Ridge added that the first Alien movie was "such an important way of guiding us" when the team made the first game, and was the "ground" for everything it built.

"Keeping that in mind again with the sequel to make sure that we're making something that offers a similar experience, because that's your groundwork, but then also with the new parts are added to it," Ridge said, which he and Hope mentioned included the new exterior environments, which the first movie doesn't feature.

"We're really very serious about creating something that feels very authentic," Hope continued, explaining how the team is still creating "new elements" to "expand" the world.

"Our goal is to stay really true in spirit to that first movie," he said. "Authenticity is the lens we do everything through."

Alien: Isolation 2 is now in development and will launch on PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

• Toys for Bob wanted to recapture the feeling from playing previous games when developing Spyro: A Realm Beyond
• It wanted to focus on "the feeling that we fell in love with" rather than worrying about a list of features
• Chief creative officer and Studio Head, Paul Yan, says, "If you stick too much to nostalgia, it feels like you're rehashing"

Toys for Bob focused on recapturing how the team felt from playing previous games when making Spyro: A Realm Beyond, rather than worrying about a list of features to include.

That's according to Studio Head, Paul Yan, who told TechRadar Gaming in an interview at Summer Game Fest (SGF) that the groundwork of the game was built on what the team loves about the series.

When asked if there are any core features from previous games that the team avoided or tried to modernize, Yan said "everything's going to get touched," but when it worked on a new title "one of the things that we try and do is really hunker down and try and isolate how that franchise makes us feel, not specific feature lists, not comparison of parts, but the feeling that we fell in love with."

"We also look into the fan community," he added, "we look to just outside communication, our own communication, and we start isolating and figuring what that means, like what are the fantasies we want, so when we say, you know, a zen-like kind of exploration with a fluidity of movement that is more important to us to identify that as essential to feeling like Spyro than saying, 'Oh, his charge moves x number of units over x number of time', or things that happen."

"So we build that kind of knowledge and ingrain and canonify those feelings, and that's where we build from, and then throughout development we will have those conversations of are we changing them or touching that, is that new, are we keeping, are we not.

"But at the same time, the tip of the spear is the feelings that we want to preserve, and we want to amplify more than any specific feature institute."

Yan also said that there is a challenge to balancing nostalgia when making a new game, "versus how much do you branch out," explaining that both can be bad in some cases.

"If you stick too much to nostalgia, it feels like you're rehashing," Yan said. "'Why did we even bother doing this?' [...] Then you go on the other extreme, and you change everything, and now it's like 'I don't even recognize this character'. So we're very proud of the fact that through the process of this, we've been very thoughtful about it, and trying to talk about the tone and the core, and making sure that we're referencing all the fan feedback, and all the feelings, and the insights that have come from the Reignited Trilogy, so we feel confident that that base has given us a lot of information informed our own gun instincts about what Spyro is, and then our vision for Spyro is that this is just one of many games for the future.

"We would love to see more in this franchise. Hopefully, you know, around Beyond sets him up on a really strong footing."

Spyro: A Realm Beyond launches in Spring 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Series S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

• Mythos-based Claude Fable 5 is so powerful, Anthropic mandates data retention for safety monitoring
• Microsoft is worried about insiders sharing confidential information with Anthropic's model
• Workers told to use Microsoft alternatives, but third-party partner models still available

Microsoft has reportedly restricted employees from using Claude's recently launched Fable 5 model while legal and compliance teams review data handling.

Per Anthropic's latest retention policy for the Mythos class of models, which includes Fable 5, the company requires prompt and output retention for safety monitoring, which goes against enterprise-grade policies that customers like Microsoft have in place.

Anthropic stressed it needs to keep prompts and outputs for 30 days, but content flagged by its safety systems can be retained for up to two years if it's needed for investigation or enforcement.

Microsoft halts Claude Fable 5 use over data retention concerns

The current restriction, which applies to Microsoft workers, is in place over concerns that insiders may share sensitive information like customer information, corporate details and other confidential business information.

Fable 5 was launched following the huge success of Mythos, which was praised for its strong cybersecurity and vulnerability-discovery capabilities.

However that model was only launched to a select group of partners over concerns it could be misused by attackers, hence the subsequent launch of the tamed-down Fable variant which the company describes as "safe for general use."

Though it's likely unrelated, Microsoft's push to halt Fable 5 deployment follows recent news that the company was cancelling internal Claude Code licenses, moving its developers to its own GitHub Copilot CLI tools.

Together, the two shifts reflect Microsoft's desire to prioritize internal tools over third-party alternatives, likely due to cost benefits, but a clear willingness to use systems from Anthropic also suggests the company is willing to lean on partners when necessary.

"It’s not yet clear whether Microsoft’s legal teams will clear Claude Fable for internal use," The Verge added.

Though a temporary ban is in place, internal demand could force Microsoft to change its tune. Mythos 5 and Fable 5 outperform key frontier models like GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Opus 4.8 across 13 testing categories, including agentic coding, knowledge work and cybersecurity.

• Microsoft has made a notable move with the Windows App SDK
• It's allowing some AI powers to run on non-Copilot+ PCs without an NPU, using an Nvidia GPU instead
• This is an experimental move for now, but it suggests a wider drive to bring more AI capabilities to all Windows 11 PCs, not just Copilot+ models

Microsoft is planning to bring AI features to a wider set of Windows 11 PCs, allowing devices with suitably beefy GPUs to avail themselves of local AI functionality that's currently restricted to Copilot+ PCs with a fast NPU.

Windows Latest spotted that Microsoft has a new feature in testing — marked as experimental — for the Windows App SDK, which allows developers to run local language models (AI features) on non-Copilot+ PCs by using a GPU.

Microsoft stated: "The Language Model APIs now run on non-Copilot+ PCs equipped with a supported GPU, bringing local language model capabilities to a broader range of Windows 11 devices. Supported hardware includes Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series and newer with 6+ GB vRAM."

What does this mean in practice? If you're thinking that all Windows 11 PCs are going to get the full range of exclusive Copilot+ AI features — like Recall for example — that isn't the case.

What this is about is allowing software developers to let their apps tap into certain AI features on any Windows 11 PC with a qualifying GPU.

As Windows Latest points out, the move will mean that non-Copilot+ PCs can access Microsoft's Phi Silica small language model and use it locally (on the device, as opposed to reaching out to the cloud) not with an NPU, but with an appropriate Nvidia graphics card (with 6GB of video RAM) instead.

This will allow for basic AI abilities such as rewriting or summarizing text to be carried out within apps where the developer codes for this, outside of the Copilot+ PCs where this would normally be restricted to.

Analysis: an agentic future

The theory is that this is just the initial step, and Microsoft is going to push for the wider deployment of other AI features to non-Copilot PCs.

It also addresses a frustration that was aired in the very early days of Copilot+ PCs, when I remember a bunch of people questioning why Microsoft limited these AI features to devices with NPUs, when a decent GPU was easily capable of accelerating these on-device AI workloads.

This was an arbitrary restriction, of course, but now the questioning shifts to a different line: exactly how many AI powers will Microsoft allow to be pushed onto non-Copilot+ PCs.

Of course, it's notable of late that Microsoft isn't talking about Copilot+ PCs anymore — the brand didn't even get a mention at the company's recent Build conference. AI was very much still a hot topic, of course, and Microsoft appears to be shifting its angle from pushing a specific hardware brand to more widely promoting AI agents, which are to be the next big thing (AI-wise) in Windows 11.

If you thought Microsoft was cutting back on AI in Windows 11, then, this is another sign that the company is going very much in the other direction, and driving to get more AI features onto a wider array of PCs.

When Microsoft initially talked about cutting back on AI bloat — when the fix Windows 11 campaign was first announced — what it really meant was reducing some of the AI-related clutter in certain menus for the OS along with core apps. A trimming of excesses, basically, and away from that, AI remains a key focus for Microsoft, of course — with this latest move underlining that fact.

• The Windows 11 June update is now here
• It packs three key features, one of which speeds up the loading of core Windows 11 menus and apps
• There's also a nifty shared audio feature, and a boost for search

Windows 11's latest update is here, and the June patch brings with it a few key changes, and some useful complementary tweaks.

I've picked out the top three features as announced by Microsoft in what's officially called the KB5094126 patch (where does it get these catchy names from?) for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2. I'll also round up the minor changes in a closing section, so that you can see everything that's new with the June update.

But I'll get to the main addition straight away, as it's a big one that makes Windows 11 feel a lot more responsive.

1. Low Latency Profile sounds dull, but should speed up Windows 11 substantially

The June update represents the beginning of the rollout of Low Latency Profile (LLP), a feature which I, and many others, have been keenly awaiting the arrival of, because it considerably speeds up the general operation of some core Windows 11 features (or at least it should do).

Windows Latest spotted that this is rolling out with the latest Windows 11 update, as part of a tweak to 'general performance', with Microsoft telling us: "This update accelerates app launch and core shell experiences such as Start menu, Search, and Action Center."

LLP means that the operating system calls on the processor to boost its speed — putting the accelerator flat to the floor, effectively, for a brief time (one to three seconds) — when you're opening an app or a Windows 11 menu. In short, whatever app or menu is being loaded appears a good deal more quickly. (Wondering why Microsoft didn't do this in the first place with Windows 11? I've discussed that in the past, along with criticism leveled at this technique for being a 'fudge').

The catch is that, as noted, this is a controlled rollout, meaning it's coming to Windows 11 PCs gradually. So, if you run out and install the June update now you probably won't get LLP right away, and you may have to wait a little while. How long? I refer you to the common saying about a piece of string, because the progression of this rollout will depend on what Microsoft finds as it monitors the PCs which get the feature.

The trouble is there'll be no announcement of LLP arriving on your system, so the only way you'll know it's there is that you'll suddenly notice apps and menus loading a lot more quickly (well, hopefully).

As Windows Latest points out, you can confirm the presence of LLP by installing a utility to monitor your PC's hardware, such as HWMonitor, which displays the CPU's speed (frequency) in real time. If the feature is active on your PC, you'll notice a big spike (to max speed, or very close) when opening any software or menu that triggers LLP. (Try the Start menu or Action Center and see).

(A final note: Windows Latest details how to force-enable LLP if you've installed the June update, but don't yet have it. However, I wouldn't do that, because it involves some fiddling around with a Windows configuration utility. More to the point, Microsoft is deploying this feature gradually, with careful monitoring, for a reason, so queue-jumping the rollout in this way may not be the best idea.)

2. Shared audio experience

This is a relatively simple idea, but a great addition to Windows 11 nonetheless. The new shared audio feature allows you to do just that — have the audio from your PC piped to two different outputs.

So, for example, if you're traveling with someone on the train and want to watch a movie on your laptop together, you can have the sound sent to your headphones and your friend's earbuds too.

3. Windows 11 search improvement

This one's an even more basic tweak, but still a useful one. As of the June update, when using the search function in Windows 11, the operating system will start showing you possible results with as few as two characters having been typed. This means you might see the query you're wanting more quickly, saving you a bit of time.

Bigger changes are coming to Windows 11 search, too, including the ability to handle long compound file names better (which is now in testing), and hopefully we'll eventually get the most important move of all — the ability to get rid of web results in search.

Other changes with Windows 11's June update

This latest update also brings in improvements on the accessibility front, with Magnifier now able to provide "clearer and more consistent announcements" when it's working with a screen-reading tool (such as announcing when it's zooming in or out).

There's also a new Multi-App Camera feature which means that multiple applications can access your webcam at the same time. And finally, a small tweak for the installation process: on setup, Windows 11 now allows you to choose a custom name for the user folder.

• June 2026 Patch Tuesday release fixes nearly 200 Windows vulnerabilities, Microsoft’s largest release to date
• It includes Chaotic Eclipse’s GreenPlasma (CVE‑2026‑45586) and YellowKey (CVE‑2026‑45585), disclosed without coordination
• AI‑driven bug discovery fueling record‑high patch volumes, expected to continue growing

The June 2026 Patch Tuesday cumulative update for Microsoft’s Windows operating system has been released - and is, by far, the biggest one the company has ever released.

The update addresses almost 200 security vulnerabilities across Windows systems, as well as supported software, dozens of which are labeled as “critical”, meaning they could cause serious damage to the users.

Among the flaws are two vulnerabilities disclosed by Chaotic Eclipse, a mysterious researcher who conflicted with Microsoft recently over how vulnerabilities were reported, and researchers credited/compensated.

Using AI to spot security issues

By fixing almost 200 flaws, Microsoft essentially broke its own record - partly due to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The first major issue is GreenPlasma, an elevation-of-privilege vulnerability in the Windows Collaborative Translation Framework (CTF). This bug, tracked as CVE-2026-45586, and given a severity score of 7.8/10 (high), allows a local attacker to gain higher privileges on Windows systems.

The second is YellowKey, a Windows BitLocker Security Feature Bypass vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-45585, and given a severity score of 6.8/10 (medium). The proof of concept (PoC) for this vulnerability has been made public, NVD said, which is in violation of coordinated vulnerability best practices.

As a result, Microsoft said it was considering legal action against Chaotic Eclipse if they had been found to be breaking the law. In its follow-up advisory to Patch Tuesday, the company did not credit any researchers for these two flaws, only saying that it “recognizes the efforts of those in the security community who help us protect customers through coordinated vulnerability disclosure.”

Via Krebs on Security

• Threat actor reused unrotated GitHub Actions secrets to compromise 73 Microsoft repos
• Miasma worm planted across Azure, microsoft, Azure‑Samples, and MicrosoftDocs orgs
• Microsoft pulled affected repos, notified impacted customers, and continues investigation

GitHub has disabled 73 of Microsoft’s repositories after a threat actor allegedly used credentials stolen a month ago to break in and plant an infostealer.

The news was confirmed by security firm Cloudsmith and community-driven malware analysis site OpenSourceMalware, which revealed that in mid-May 2026, someone (most likely TeamPCP) used stolen Microsoft’s GitHub Actions secrets to publish malicious PyPI packages. While these were quickly yanked from the platform, it seems that Microsoft never rotated the secrets used in this attack.

Now, it would appear that the same threat actor used the same credentials to compromise 73 new repositories, spanning four GitHub organizations: Azure, Azure-Samples, microsoft, and MicrosoftDocs. The Azure org bore the brunt, losing 49 repos, essentially everything the Functions team ships.

Significant fallout

The key difference is that this time it wasn’t the Mini Shai-Hulud worm that was being distributed, but rather the Miasma worm, a spin-off that emerged after TeamPCP open-sourced Mini Shai-Hulud.

The researchers are saying that the practical fallout was quite significant, as some libraries run inside other people’s pipelines. For example, every workflow referencing Azure/functions-action@v1 stopped resolving.

Microsoft spokesperson Ben Hope told TechCrunch the company has “temporarily removed some repositories as we investigated potential malicious content.”

“Some of these repos have been restored after review, while others may remain offline while work continues,” Hope added. “As part of our investigation, we notified a small number of customers who may have pulled down content from the affected repositories. We will continue to investigate, and if anything further is identified that requires customer action, we will reach out directly through our established support channels.”

Microsoft could not say how many customers the incident affected, but it is safe to assume that it is in the tens of thousands, if not more.

• Windows 11 search could give you the option to turn off web results
• Microsoft is already giving those results a lesser priority, but might go even further, and also remove results pointing to its store
• All this is based on changes seen in a meet-up with Windows 11 testers, but it remains a rumor for now

In what will hopefully be one of the most refreshing changes yet to be visited upon Windows 11, Microsoft is rumored to be working on letting users ditch web results (and therefore Bing) from the search function in the OS.

Windows Latest reports that it was present at a private meeting of Windows 11 testers where Microsoft revealed that the ability to turn off web results in search was inbound.

The website provides photographic evidence of the feature in an internal build not yet released as a preview, showing a toggle to turn off web searches, and another element of search suggestions can be switched off too, namely search results for the Microsoft Store.

We're told that these new options are going to be rolling out to Windows 11 testers in a matter of weeks, so we shouldn't have long to wait before we get concrete evidence of these changes.

Analysis: spam begone

If you've ever run a search in Windows 11 (or 10), you'll doubtless be familiar with web results popping up and getting in the way of what you actually want to see (namely local files being surfaced, or maybe Windows settings).

Just a few weeks ago, we heard that Microsoft is deprioritizing those web results in Windows search, meaning that as things stand with the current plan, these will still be present, but will appear further down the list than local files and other generally more relevant content.

At the time, I noted that Microsoft should give users the choice to switch off web results entirely, but remarked that this seemed unlikely. So, I'm very pleased to see that Microsoft has (reportedly) defied my expectations and is actually moving forward with this option – and the choice to ditch Microsoft Store recommendations to boot (even if these toggles should have always been in place when it boils down to it).

This is effectively giving users the choice to get rid of a lot of the 'spam' in Windows 11 search, cutting it back to just local results with nothing web-based being returned for any given query. It's a great move, and indeed I'd argue it's a key one in terms of getting rid of unwelcome promotional activity in Windows 11 (either pushing Microsoft Store apps, or web results which, naturally enough, open in Bing inside Edge, driving traffic to those Microsoft properties).

Before I get carried away here, it's worth remembering that for now, this remains a rumor – albeit a solid one given that Windows Latest shared a photo of the meeting and new Settings options. Even if all this is genuine, though, there's always the possibility that Microsoft could reverse course on the idea – but I doubt it, especially given that the company is very much in the mood to make crowd-pleasing changes to Windows 11 these days.

Keep those fingers crossed.

• Persona 6 has officially been announced
• The game is in development for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC
• A teaser trailer hints at a new "pulse-pounding, supernatural adventure"

Atlus just officially announced Persona 6 at the Xbox Games Showcase 2026 with an ominous teaser trailer.

While the trailer didn't give away too many details, it does seem like the renowned role-playing game (RPG) studio will be leaning into the horror elements a bit more than it has before.

"An entirely new story is about to unfold. The highly anticipated next chapter of the iconic RPG series delivers a bold, new standalone story blending heartfelt daily life and new characters with pulse-pounding, supernatural adventure," the trailer description reads.

"Whether it’s your first Persona game or you’ve been here since the beginning, this one’s for you."

A release date has not been shared at this time, but we do know that it will be available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC.

During the Xbox Games Showcase, Atlus also announced that Persona 4 Revival will launch on February 18, 2027, and shared a brand new gameplay for the remake of the 2008 game that boasts improved performance, modern graphics, and gorgeous cutscenes.

• Ninja Theory has announced the next Hellblade game, simply titled Senua
• The game will launch in 2027
• It will be playable on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Series S, and PC

Ninja Theory has just announced Senua, the next game in the Hellblade series, and it's launching in 2027.

The studio unveiled the game at the Xbox Games Showcase 2026, adjacent to this year's Summer Game Fest (SGF), with a gorgeous cinematic trailer that features our first look at some brutal third-person gameplay.

"Announcing Senua, a new action-adventure set in the Hellblade universe," the video's description reads.

"Senua, a Celtic warrior, is trapped between life and death in a fractured vision of purgatory. She must fight to reach the afterlife and reunite with those she loved and lost, battling forces that threaten everything she believes in."

The game doesn't have a set release date just yet, but we do already know that it won't be an Xbox console exclusive. You'll be able to play it on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC.

"Senua is a single player action-adventure game and a bold new chapter in Senua’s story," the studio said.

"It builds on the emotional depth and cinematic presentation of the Hellblade series, while expanding the gameplay with varied and exciting tactical combat — including encounters against multiple enemies with multiple weapons — alongside exploration, puzzle-solving and greater player agency.

"Designed for both longtime Hellblade fans and players new to Senua’s world, the game is set within a fantastical, evolving reality shaped by her perception, and delivers an action and gameplay focused journey that expands on the heart of the franchise."

• Persona 4 Revival finally has a release date
• The upcoming remake will drop on February 18th, 2027
• It will be available as part of Xbox Game Pass

Huge news fellow Adachi lovers: Persona 4 Revival has a release date at long last, so we finally know exactly how long we have to wait until we get to see our beloved cabbage-loving detective once again.

As revealed in a new trailer shown as part of the Xbox Games Showcase 2026, the upcoming Persona 4 remake will launch on February 18th, 2027. The trailer confirmed that it will come to Xbox Series X and Series S, in addition to PC. The title will be available as part of the Xbox Game Pass service.

It wasn't clear from the information displayed on screen whether the game will also come to other platforms, though I wouldn't be surprised if PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 versions of the game are also on the cards.

The trailer showed off plenty of superb looking in-game footage, with a blend of the turn-based combat, some exploration, and a lot of lavish animated cutscenes.

The original version of Persona 4 launched back in 2008 and takes place in the fictional Japanese town of Inaba. The lovely rural locale is rocked by a series of sinister murders, which the high school student protagonist soon discovers are all connected to a mysterious television channel known as the Midnight Channel.

Although the more recent Persona 5 is definitely the recipient of much more attention, Persona 4 still has plenty of fans that adore its unique setting and memorable cast of characters.

This includes the iconic bumbling police detective Tohru Adachi (my personal favorite), who appeared briefly in the new trailer complete with his trademark suit and slightly unsettling smile...

• Gears of War: E-Day will officially launch on October 6, 2026
• The Coalition shared an extended gameplay trailer as part of the Xbox Game Showcase 2026
• Xbox CEO Asha Sharma confirmed the game will launch as an Xbox console exclusive

Microsoft has officially confirmed a release date for Gears of War: E-Day and stated that it will be an Xbox console launch exclusive.

The announcement comes from the Xbox Games Showcase 2026, where developer The Coalition shared an extended look at gameplay and confirmed that the game will launch on October 6, 2026.

At the end of the reveal, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said a few words and confirmed that the game will be an Xbox console exclusive. This means the game won't be coming to PlayStation 5 and will only be released for Xbox Series X and Series S.

"For the past 25 years, Xbox has delivered some of the greatest games of all time, games that changed what was possible and games that brought players together, and games that defined generations," Sharma said.

"Xbox was built on the spirit of creativity and heart, and as we kick of the show with Gears of War: E-Day, it's only fitting that as we return to Xbox, we return to Gears. So today, we are announcing, that Gears of War: E-Day will be an Xbox console exclusive."

Gears of War: E-Day was revealed back in 2024 and stars a younger Marcus Fenix in a new story set 14 years before the original game.

"Experience the brutal horror of Emergence Day through the eyes of Marcus Fenix in the origin story of one of gaming's most acclaimed sagas," the description reads. "Fourteen years before Gears of War, war heroes Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago return home to face a new nightmare: the Locust Horde. These subterranean monsters, grotesque and relentless, erupt from below, laying siege on humanity itself."

I've been out at Microsoft Build 2026 this week, where the event was dominated by headline-grabbing platform announcements and AI demonstrations.

However, there were also a number of smaller disclosures, roadmap updates, and technical previews may prove just as consequential over the next several years.

Below are four announcements that deserve a closer look.

MAI-Thinking-1 shows push toward first-party Frontier models

Somewhat lost amid the broader discussion about AI agents was Microsoft's introduction of MAI-Thinking-1, a new reasoning-focused model that represents a significant strategic shift for the company. The model reportedly features 35 billion parameters and a 128K context window, positioning it for complex coding, analysis, and multi-step reasoning tasks.

For developers, the announcement is notable not because Microsoft is entering the model race - it's already deeply involved in AI infrastructure, but because it suggests a growing emphasis on owning more of the AI stack. Rather than serving solely as a platform provider for third-party models, Microsoft appears increasingly interested in delivering differentiated models optimized for its own developer ecosystem.

The practical implications could be substantial. A Microsoft-controlled reasoning model can be tuned specifically for GitHub, Azure, Windows AI workloads, and enterprise governance requirements. It also gives Microsoft greater control over deployment, cost structures, and roadmap priorities.

While Build featured no shortage of agent-related announcements, MAI-Thinking-1 may ultimately prove one of the conference's most strategically important developments.

Microsoft Execution Containers bring security boundaries to AI workloads

One of the most technically significant announcements at Build 2026 may have been the introduction of Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), a new security architecture designed to provide device-level guardrails for AI systems. While less visible than end-user AI features, MXC addresses one of the industry's biggest unresolved questions: how to safely run increasingly capable AI workloads.

According to Microsoft, the technology is intended to isolate AI processes and enforce security boundaries around model execution. As organizations deploy AI systems with access to enterprise data, code repositories, and operational workflows, traditional application security models become increasingly difficult to apply.

MXC appears designed to create a controlled execution environment where permissions, data access, and system interactions can be monitored and constrained. For regulated industries, this could become a foundational requirement for broader AI adoption.

The announcement also reflects a broader trend emerging across Build 2026. Microsoft's messaging was not solely about making AI more capable; it was equally focused on making AI more governable. In that context, execution security may become just as important as model performance.

Windows is becoming a more serious AI and developer platform

Several Build announcements highlighted Microsoft's ongoing effort to transform Windows into a first-class platform for AI development, as the company outlined new developer capabilities, expanded local AI infrastructure, and deeper support for running AI workloads directly on Windows devices.

A particularly interesting aspect of the announcement was Microsoft's continued investment in Windows AI Foundry and local model execution. The company emphasized support for running models across CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs, allowing developers to target a wider range of hardware configurations while maintaining a consistent development experience.

The event also showed a more developer-centric Windows experience, including enhanced command-line tooling, Linux-oriented workflows, and new AI-assisted development capabilities integrated directly into the operating system.

Taken together, these updates seem to suggest Microsoft increasingly views Windows not simply as an endpoint for AI applications but as a primary development and deployment environment. For developers building local or hybrid AI systems, that distinction could become increasingly important over the next several years.

Quantum Computing is still a major Microsoft focus

Although Build 2026 was overwhelmingly focused on AI, Microsoft also used the conference to spotlight progress in quantum computing through its Majorana 2 chip program. The company said the latest advances deliver qubits that are significantly more accurate than previous approaches, supporting its long-term ambition of reaching commercially useful quantum systems later this decade.

For software developers, the announcement was less about immediate deployment and more about platform direction. Microsoft has spent years building quantum development tools, simulators, and cloud-based experimentation environments. Improved hardware milestones make those investments increasingly relevant.

The timing is also notable, as AI workloads continue to drive demand for computing power, major technology vendors are simultaneously exploring entirely new computational architectures. Quantum computing remains experimental, but Microsoft appears determined to maintain a position at the forefront of the field.

While most Build attendees were understandably focused on AI agents, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling, the quantum update served as a reminder that Microsoft's roadmap extends well beyond the current AI cycle.

• The Xbox Game Pass lineup for June has been announced
• The selection features nine games, including Herdling, Total Chaos, Beastro, and more
• Persona 5 Royal headlines the collection this month

Microsoft has announced the Xbox Game Pass lineup for the first half of June ahead of the 2026 Xbox Games Showcase, adjacent to this year's Summer Game Fest (SGF).

The selection offers nine games so far, across different Game Pass tiers, including the day-one releases Solarpunk, which launches on June 8, Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, coming June 11, and Junkster, arriving on June 16.

Also available is Herdling, the new adventure game from Firewatch publisher Campo Santo, where players must find, tame, care for, and guide a herd of horned beasts called Calicorns to a mountain peak.

TechRadar's Managing Editor, Social & Engagement, Josephine Watson, reviewed Herdling, describing it as "a surprisingly well-rounded atmospheric adventure that belies its short play time" that is "undoubtedly an indie gem, but not without its flaws."

Total Chaos, a survival horror from the creator of Turbo Overkill, as well as boxing game Undisputed, a cozy life sim and deck-building adventure, Beastro, and Frog Sqwad, a co-op extraction puzzle-platformer, are all coming to the service too.

Finally, Persona 5 Royal, the award-winning role-playing game (RPG) from Atlus, headlines the collection for this month. It's one of my absolute favourite RPGS that expands on the original 2017 release with more dungeons, new characters and relationships, and a story that will steal your heart.

As Microsoft mentions in the Xbox Wire post, five games will leave Game Pass on June 15, including Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Warhammer 40K Space Marine: Master Crafted Edition, so save on these games while you can.

Xbox Game Pass titles for June 2026

• Herdling (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) – Available now with Game Pass Premium; joining Game Pass Ultimate, and PC Game Pass
• Total Chaos (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) – Available now with Game Pass Premium; joining Game Pass Ultimate, and PC Game Pass
• Solarpunk (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) – June 8 for Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass + day one on Game Pass
• Undisputed (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, Handheld, and PC) – June 8 for Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, and PC Game Pass
• Persona 5 Royal (Cloud, Console, and PC) – June 9 with
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, and PC Game Pass
• Beastro (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, Handheld, and PC) – June 11 with Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass
• Frog Sqwad (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) – June 11 with Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass
• Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions (Game Preview) - (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) – June 11 with Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass + day one on Xbox Game Pass
• Junkster (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, Handheld, and PC) – June 16 with Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass + day one on Xbox Game Pass

• There's been a resurgence of 8GB laptops around Computex
• This is due to pricing pressures exerted by the component crisis
• Windows 11 laptop makers are following in the MacBook Neo's footsteps – but is that wise?

If you thought 8GB laptops were becoming a thing of the past, think again, because there's now something of a resurgence in notebooks with this RAM loadout — and you can probably guess why.

Yes, this is down to the RAM crisis, with system memory now a lot more costly, meaning that notebook manufacturers looking to keep pricing more affordable are bringing back more 8GB devices at the mid-range level. (Whereas previously in this space, we were effectively seeing 16GB as the bare minimum.)

Tom's Hardware noticed the trend at Computex (with this practice creeping in before the show), pointing out that the new Dell XPS 13 — an impressively specced, affordable notebook — starts at 8GB for the entry-level model (though you can buy it with 16GB, of course).

Other recently revealed notebooks with 8GB of RAM include the Acer Swift Air 14 — which, like the baseline Dell XPS 13, is built around Intel's new Wildcat Lake silicon — and the Chuwi UniBook (notably with a sub-$500 price tag).

Microsoft's Surface Laptop for Business 13-inch, revealed last month, also starts at 8GB, which was a bit of a shock — mainly because it means this entry-level device doesn't qualify as a Copilot+ PC (they need 16GB).

Of course, what set the stage for all this was the MacBook Neo emerging with 8GB of memory at a temptingly affordable price. The Neo has been highly successful, so much so that the rumor mill believes Apple has doubled the production run of its new MacBook for this year (from 5 million to 10 million units — previous speculation that was backed up this week).

Now we're seeing Intel Wildcat Lake chips and 8GB configurations being used to produce more enticingly priced Windows 11 laptops, and this isn't limited to Intel's silicon either. Qualcomm's new Snapdragon C (Arm-based) CPU is going to power affordable Windows 11 notebooks which are likely to run with 8GB of RAM, the Acer Aspire Go 15 being one of those.

Analysis: looking to the future

The return of more 8GB laptops is not a surprise. Indeed, this is exactly what was predicted to happen in 2026. It's getting a lot trickier for laptop makers to keep prices down, what with the cost of a bunch of components rising — most notably storage and RAM — so the easiest way to keep price tags more affordable is to cut back on the latter.

And yes, there is room to cut down to 8GB of system memory. A laptop with this loadout can still work fine, providing you're only doing basic daily tasks (emails, web browsing, watching videos, and light document work).

The MacBook Neo proved it can handle all this with aplomb, while being a surprisingly premium-like device to boot. Windows 11 laptops can do the same — albeit with some more difficult headroom issues caused by the OS, although Microsoft is actively trying to reduce those performance issues with its fix Windows 11 campaign this year.

All in all, I'd say that it is okay to buy a Windows 11 laptop with 8GB of RAM if you're just performing basic computing tasks — for now. And there's the rub for me: worries around future-proofing, as discussed in my piece at the start of the year about whether 8GB is enough for a laptop in 2026.

How long do you want your laptop to last you? I'm betting you'd like to get five years out of the device, or you may hope for even longer. So, while 8GB is enough for basic duties right now — just about — the likelihood is it'll start to feel increasingly ill-suited before too long, especially if AI starts to figure more prominently in the everyday operation of an OS (and all bets indicate it will). And with laptop RAM being soldered to the motherboard (in the vast majority of cases), it's not like you can upgrade the memory.

The other argument is that you don't have to buy an 8GB laptop; you can go for 16GB — but some people want the option of going cheaper, as their notebook budget may require this. And that's fair enough — I'd agree that more choice is good. All I'll say is just bear in mind the future-proofing aspect, and push for a bit more memory with a Windows 11 device if you can.

What'll also be interesting to see is if more 12GB loadouts appear as a middle-ground option, giving more breathing room above an 8GB machine.

• Windows 11 is getting changes for the right-click menu
• A Microsoft exec says the context menu will be more streamlined by default
• It'll also load faster and be "configurable to what you use most", we're told

Windows 11 is getting another major change for the interface — and apparently we're going to be able to customize the right-click menu to our liking.

Windows Latest noticed that Microsoft's Marcus Ash, who is VP of Design and Research for Windows + Devices, responded to a complaint on X pointing out that the right-click menu — which offers context-sensitive options relevant to the file you're clicking — is way too long and unwieldy in general.

Ash said that Microsoft is "working on making context menus faster, simpler by default, configurable to what you use most. More will be shared on our approach soon."

These would be very welcome changes, streamlining and cutting back on the number of entries on the menu by default, and making it appear more swiftly, but it's the comment about configuration that's attracted the most attention.

Analysis: taming the context menu

The reference to 'configurable' is presumably about giving the user control over what's present in the context menu, although Ash doesn't go into any explanation of how that might work.

Indeed, my slight concern here is that Ash doesn't explicitly say the user will have actual control, leaving a little room for doubt that maybe the menu might configure itself somehow to the apps or functions you use the most. I don't think that's the case in all honesty, but it's a slight grey area I'd like clarified.

Also, how much control will the user have, exactly? Presumably there would still be default choices that would stay firmly planted in the context menu regardless of any customization.

At any rate, as the Microsoft exec indicates, more clarification will be coming "soon" and I look forward to that.

Microsoft continues to surprise me — no, 'shock' might be a better word — with just how far it's going with the changes to improve Windows 11 this year. This latest move effectively comes out of the blue, and it's been a request that's high on the wish list of many Windows 11 users when it comes to the central pieces of the operating system's interface.

Notably the campaign to fix Windows 11 also involves revamping the Start menu to allow for a much greater level of customization — way beyond what I expected — and removing some of the rusty old legacy elements of the OS.

Yes, granted, all this should have been in the works a long time ago in my opinion (and in the view of others), but I'm still glad Microsoft appears to be serious about making Windows 11 better. All this even gives me hope that the company could even tackle some of the biggest long-standing grievances I have with the OS.

• Microsoft retires Edge master password feature
• Passkeys and biometrics replace old authentication
• Users may turn to third‑party managers

Microsoft is killing the master password feature in Edge, and is moving to newer, more secure solutions.

Edge is Microsoft’s internet browser, based on Chromium. Among other things it has a built-in password manager that allows users to store not just passwords, but other secrets, too, such as usernames, payment info, or in some cases, addresses.

Until now, users who wanted to log into the tool and manage their secrets, could do so via a password, but Microsoft has been pushing to replace the old authentication method with passkeys. In a press release shared with TechRadar Pro, NordVPN said that as of June 4, the master password feature in Edge is finally retiring, to be replaced by device-based authentication methods such as Windows Hello (PIN, fingerprint, or facial recognition).

A step in the right direction

For Ignas Valancius, VP of engineering at NordPass, this is a logical step forward, since biometrics and passkeys are “considered more convenient and secure than passwords”.

“When people manage too many passwords, they tend to reuse them or create simple variations, such as changing a single letter or number,” Valancius stressed. “This practice creates significant vulnerabilities — if one of these accounts is breached, all other accounts sharing the same or a similar password become compromised.”

Still, he expects at least a little backlash, because humans are “creatures of habit”, and old habits die hard. Such people can find comfort in alternative, third-party password managers, which still allow users to log in using a master password. “But personally I think a push toward passwordless authentication is a positive development,” he stressed.

Passwords have long been considered one of the weakest links in the cybersecurity chain, mostly because people can’t be bothered to create, and safely store, strong ones. Instead, they end up using simple, easy-to-guess passwords across a wide range of services, risking losing access to numerous services in one fell swoop.

• Microsoft reveals Autopilots, its next generation of AI agents
• Autopilots will operate in the background, carrying out tasks on your behalf
• Microsoft Scout is the first Autopilot, linking into your Microsoft 365 apps

Microsoft has announced the launch of Autopilots, a new form of AI agents which can run autonomously in the background, letting you focus on the tasks which really matter.

Speaking at Microsoft Build 2026, CEO Satya Nadella unveiled Scout, the company's first Autopilot, similar to OpenClaw offering, built into Copilot and Microsoft 365.

Autopilots will run in the background, learning how you work and operate, with the ability to take action with needing to be prompted, carrying out tasks independently.

Microsoft Scout

"You can think of Autopilots as enterprise-grade Claws - these are autonomous, long-running agents with full enterprise compliance that run in your tenant," Nadella noted.

"They're a totally new way to reduce toil and get you back to what you love."

Users can customize Autopilots however they like, including names and styles of speaking, as well as full control over their context and memory. They will also be able to set specific permissions and policies for the Autopilots to adhere too, making sure they don't do anything they shouldn't.

"Today we are introducing a new category of agents called Autopilots," Microsoft said in a blog post announcing the news. "Autopilots are always-on agents that work autonomously, with their own identity, and act on your behalf."

Scout will be able to take on a wide number of tasks, including keeping an eye on your Outlook inbox and Teams messages, alerting you to calendar information or specific emails, to monitor for anything which may need your attention, such as helping you prepare for meetings and tasks.

"Scout works where you work...that's the future of what we think of, of the Copilot ecosystem itself," Nadella added.

Frontier users can try Scout now - Nadella said he was already using it himself - with Microsoft set to build out the platform over the coming months, adding more agents and also the ability for users to build their own Autopilots.

• Former Xbox executive Laura Fryer says the company is "making some small and smart moves to start winning back fans"
• Fryer says Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's decision to rebrand the company name to all caps was one of them
• She adds that "At the end of the day, if you want players and your team to care deeply, give them real ways to feel invested"

Former Microsoft Game Studios executive producer Laura Fryer thinks Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's decision to rebrand to 'XBOX' was a "smart" move.

Last month, Sharma put a simple poll on X asking fans whetherthey prefer: "Xbox" or "XBOX". The latter received the most votes, and shortly after, the name was changed across the company's social media profiles and on its websites.

According to Fryer, who spoke about the change in her new YouTube video, the move by Sharma was "smarter than it looks," despite some people probably thinking it wasn't a big deal.

"By actually asking and then doing it, they're building real momentum and player trust," Fryer explained. "Xbox is getting people invested in what they're building. This was a total layup for Asha. It doesn't matter that much to the Xbox team if it's in all caps or not, but it matters a lot to the Xbox fans."

The former executive continued, discussing how, while it's important for studios and companies to stick to what they believe in - like Unknown Worlds Entertainment not adding weapons to Subnautica 2 at the request of fans - she believes allowing some fan input is vital.

Citing a book called Influence by Robert Cialdini, Fryer said, "When people take a small public stand like voting, they become way more invested and loyal. Path of Exile showed this in 2021 when they let players vote on a new cyclone skill effect. Thousands voted, the winner got made, and those players felt like they actually helped build the game.

"So, when fans want something small, don't hesitate. Just do it. But at the same time, you have to protect your core pillars."

Fryer said this also applies to teams within the industry, like game development, and sharing and adopting ideas is just as important. She recalls when she joined the Xbox AGT team and leadership was looking for a name for its external developer event, and when she suggested "XFest", the idea was taken on and lasted a decade.

"Every single time someone would say to me, 'I'll see you at XFest.' It really made me happy because I felt like I had actually helped shape the culture instead of just executing on someone else's vision. Xbox is applying this same mindset to players now, too."

She also praised Xbox's new Player Voice system that allows players to submit feedback, with requests already being introduced, as well as Sharma's recent goal to build a stronger Xbox in an internal memo.

"When I read this, I immediately saw someone who's thinking both about the big pillars and the small moves. Xbox isn't in a good state," Fryer said. "They have a long way to go to get back their fans and it's going to be a tough road. But she seems to understand that."

She added, "At the end of the day, if you want players and your team to care deeply, give them real ways to feel invested. tart small. Listen on the low hanging fruit. Protect what matters. And set your ego aside. You'll be amazed how fast that builds real passion and loyalty. And that's how great games and great teams are actually built.

"The Xbox team is making some small but smart moves to start winning back fans. And I can't wait to see what they do next."

• Microsoft reveals seven new AI models

Microsoft’s AI head has unveiled a host of new AI models from the company as it looks to encourage developers to keep pushing the boundaries of the technology.

Mustafa Suelyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, took to the stage at Microsoft Build 2026 to announce the new launches, but also explain more about the company’s reasoning in its AI development.

He noted that Microsoft’s AI work would always look to support human workers and users, not replace them, as it looks to create what the company calls “humanist superintelligence”.

“Humanist superintelligence”

“We really are living in the most remarkable times,” Suleyman said, “since I started working in AI, the compute that we use to train frontier models has increased by 1 trillion fold - that’s 12 orders of magnitude in just 15 years. It’s now clear that a consistent, exponential increase in computation leads to predictable advances in AI capabilities, and in the next few years, we’re going to see three orders of magnitude of compute applied to train frontier models.

“Intelligence is now a function of compute, long linear hill climbing has become the norm, the scaling laws are clearly holding, and it is a remarkable time in our industry.”

Suleyman said his company is working towards a goal of “humanist superintelligence” with state-of-the-art AI capabilities explicitly designed “to serve humans, not replace them.

“The type of AI we create really does matter,” he added, “we need an AI that places humanity first, that always prioritizes human well-being, and human progress. This is the core philosophy and motivation behind our superintelligence efforts at Microsoft - and it shapes everything that we do."

In order to continue its aim to “keep developers building at the absolute frontier,” Suleyman announced no less than seven new Microsoft AI models across the fields of image, voice and transcription.

But it also includes coding, with the new Microsoft's MAI-Code-1 model specifically designed for GitHub, and MAI-Thinking-1, its first reasoning model, trained using what Suleyman called "clean and commercially licensed data," with high performance and low token cost.

In order to help spur on AI usage and development in the scientific fields, the company also revealed more on Microsoft Discovery, its agentic AI platform focused on "a new era of research and development".

Now generally available, including an app now in early preview, Microsoft Discovery app uses specialized agents deployed by humans to mimic the scientific method across large amounts of knowledge to generate hypotheses and validate theories in a continuous loop.

Microsoft says the tool will be especially useful for customers in highly demanding and regulated industries like food and energy, who can now have the ability to utilize agentic discovery for their research and development, greatly speeding up the research process across industries.