Microsoft unveiled a range of new artificial intelligence products and developer tools at its Build conference, spanning software agents, in-house AI models, developer infrastructure and quantum computing.
It grouped the updates under three themes: systems built around proprietary business context, greater choice across the software stack, and the use of AI tools in scientific research. Much of the news was aimed at developers and corporate customers building and managing AI applications under tighter governance and security controls.
Context layer
One of the main launches was Microsoft IQ, now generally available across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio. It is a context layer designed to ground AI agents in public and enterprise information.
The offering includes Work IQ, which draws on Microsoft 365 data and other organisational systems, including emails, documents, meetings and external sources. Work IQ APIs are set to provide programmatic access to that data layer. Fabric IQ adds a semantic layer over structured business data, while Foundry IQ is designed to connect enterprise knowledge with live web information.
Microsoft also introduced Web IQ, a web search stack for AI agents. It is model-agnostic and designed to return relevant passages quickly for systems that need live information from the web.
Another addition is Microsoft Scout, a personal work agent being made available to Frontier customers. It is designed to work across products including Teams and Outlook and handle tasks such as meeting preparation, scheduling conflicts and routine actions.
New models
On the model side, Microsoft's AI Superintelligence team released seven new in-house models. The first is MAI-Thinking-1, described as its first reasoning model.
The model was trained from scratch on commercially licensed data and is intended for multi-step instructions, long-context reasoning and code generation. It is available on Foundry in private preview.
The group also announced MAI-Image-2.5 and a flash variant for text-to-image and image-to-image work. Those models are already live in PowerPoint, are rolling out on OneDrive, and are also being added to Foundry.
Other additions include MAI Transcribe 1.5 for speech transcription across 43 languages, MAI-Voice-2 and a flash version with support for more than 15 additional languages, and MAI-Code-1, a coding model tuned for GitHub that is now available in Copilot and Visual Studio Code.
The MAI models will also be available through Fireworks AI, Baseten and OpenRouter. Fireworks AI is now generally available on Foundry, giving customers access to external models within Microsoft's governance and data residency settings.
Security controls
Microsoft paired the model and agent announcements with new security and oversight tools. Agent 365 for local agents extends Entra, Defender and Purview into a single control plane for observing and governing agents across different hosting environments and software frameworks.
It also detailed two open-source projects: Adaptive Spec-driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing, or ASSERT, for policy-based safety testing, and the Agent Control Specification, intended to standardise where controls should be applied inside agent workflows.
In cybersecurity, Microsoft announced Codename MDASH, a multi-model system that uses more than 100 agents to identify exploitable software bugs. The system analyses data flow, business logic and exploit chains, then sends fixes through the Defender portal.
Developer stack
Several announcements focused on local development and infrastructure. Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is a new machine aimed at sustained AI workloads such as local model fine-tuning and agent pipelines. It is based on NVIDIA RTX Spark and includes 128 GB of unified memory.
Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 comes preconfigured on the device with native GPU passthrough and CUDA support, along with tools such as Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot. The move is part of a broader push to position Windows as what Microsoft called an agent-native runtime.
That strategy includes Microsoft Execution Containers, now in preview, which provide sandboxed environments for agents with restrictions enforced by the operating system. The technology is already being used by OpenClaw on Windows. NVIDIA's OpenShell secure runtime uses the same container approach and adds policy management, inference routing and personal data obfuscation.
For cloud use, hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service are also in preview. The service offers isolated execution environments, session-based sandboxes, persistent memory and elastic scale for agent deployments.
Microsoft also announced the GitHub Copilot app in preview as a desktop application for orchestrating multiple agent sessions in parallel. Each session uses git worktrees to keep changes separate while review and integration processes continue.
At the application platform level, Microsoft introduced Rayfin, a backend service for Microsoft Fabric now in preview. It is designed to let developers move from prototype to production through GitHub-based workflows. Integration with Replit is intended to connect prototypes with managed deployment and governance controls.
Microsoft also launched Azure HorizonDB, a managed PostgreSQL service on Azure. Internal testing showed throughput of more than three times that of comparable self-managed setups.
Science push
Beyond software development, Microsoft Discovery is now generally available as an AI platform for research workflows built on Azure. BHP is using it to search for copper-leaching solutions, while Syensqo is applying it in semiconductor research and GSK in drug discovery.
A local version of Discovery for the wider scientific community is available in preview and requires only a GitHub Copilot account. Microsoft also used the event to highlight Majorana 2, its next-generation quantum computing chip, which it said offers an average qubit lifetime of 20 seconds, with some instances reaching a minute, and reliability 1,000 times higher than its previous generation.
"Platforms don't shift on their own; developers build them forward," Microsoft said.