Latest news with #PavanDavuluri
Hans India
20-05-2025
- Hans India
Microsoft Integrates Model Context Protocol into Windows, Paving Way for AI Agent Revolution
Microsoft has taken a major step forward in its vision of an AI-first future for Windows, officially announcing native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Often dubbed the 'USB-C of AI apps,' MCP is poised to revolutionise how intelligent agents interact with applications and services on the Windows platform. The move was unveiled alongside the launch of the Windows AI Foundry, an initiative designed to accelerate the development of AI-powered features and ecosystems within Windows. Together, these efforts mark a deeper commitment to transforming Windows into a platform where autonomous AI agents can seamlessly assist users with a broad range of tasks. MCP, introduced by Anthropic in late 2023, is an open-source communication standard that enables AI apps to connect with each other and external services—much like how USB-C connects different hardware devices. By embracing MCP, Microsoft aims to allow developers to build agents that can interact directly with both web services and Windows system functions. 'We want Windows as a platform to be able to evolve to a place where we think agents are a part of the workload on the operating system, and agents are a part of how customers interact with their apps and devices on an ongoing basis,' said Pavan Davuluri, head of Windows, in an interview with The Verge. The idea is simple but powerful: equip AI agents with the tools and protocols to interact intelligently with different components of the operating system. To support this, Microsoft is introducing new developer tools and an MCP registry that acts as a trusted directory of MCP servers. These servers will enable agents to tap into core Windows functionalities such as the file system, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and window management tools. In practice, this means AI assistants on Windows could soon go beyond traditional limitations. For example, during a private demonstration, Microsoft showcased how the AI assistant Perplexity could use MCP to access and query a user's files. Instead of manually selecting folders or uploading documents, users could simply ask, 'Find all the files related to my vacation in my documents folder,' and the agent would handle the task seamlessly. This level of intelligent interaction could extend across the operating system, from simplifying workflows in Excel to streamlining system settings. Microsoft is also preparing Copilot Plus PCs to include an AI agent interface, allowing users to change settings using plain language commands. However, Microsoft is not overlooking the potential security risks. Experts have flagged possible vulnerabilities with MCP, including token theft, server compromise, and prompt injection attacks. Acknowledging these concerns, Microsoft is limiting access to the initial rollout and making the preview version available only to select developers. 'I think we have a solid set of foundations and more importantly a solid architecture that gives us all the tools to start, to do this securely,' said David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft. 'We're going to put security first, and ultimately we're considering large language models as untrusted, as they can be trained on untrusted data and they can have cross-prompt injection.' Despite these challenges, Microsoft's strategy reflects a strong belief in the future of "agentic computing"—a vision where AI agents are as central to digital interactions as the apps themselves. The company sees MCP as a foundational layer for this future, helping create a standardised, secure, and scalable framework for agents to thrive on Windows. With the successful integration of MCP and the establishment of the Windows AI Foundry, Microsoft has sent a clear signal: Windows is not just ready for AI—it's being reimagined around it.
The Verge
19-05-2025
- The Verge
Windows is getting support for the ‘USB-C of AI apps'
Microsoft launched its Copilot Plus PC and Windows AI efforts last year, and now it's going a step further today with native Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Windows and the launch of the Windows AI Foundry. The groundwork is necessary for a future envisioned by Microsoft whereby automated AI agents assist their human companions. Introduced by Anthropic late last year, MCP is an open-source standard that's often referred to as the 'USB-C port of AI' apps. Just as USB-C connects devices from many manufactures to a variety of peripherals, developers can use MCP to quickly let their AI apps or agents talk to other apps, web services, or even now parts of Windows. Microsoft's embrace of this protocol is a big part of its ambitions to reshape Windows and make it ready for a world of AI agents to be able to connect to apps and services in ways that haven't been possible before. 'We want Windows as a platform to be able to evolve to a place where we think agents are a part of the workload on the operating system, and agents are a part of how customers interact with their apps and devices on an ongoing basis,' says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with The Verge. Microsoft is supporting MCP in a big way inside Windows, alongside even broader efforts to power what it calls the agentic web. To evolve Windows to this agentic world that Microsoft envisions, the company is introducing some new developer capabilities to enable this MCP framework for AI agents to expose key Windows functionality that AI agents will be able to access. An MCP registry on Windows will act as the secure trustworthy source for all MCP servers that AI agents will be able to access. 'Agents can discover the installed MCP servers on client devices via the MCP Registry for Windows, leverage their expertise and offer meaningful value to end-users,' says Davuluri. MCP servers will be able to access things like the Windows File System, windowing, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux. In a demo during a briefing for Microsoft's MCP in Windows announcement, the company showed me an early preview of how Perplexity on Windows could leverage MCP capabilities. Instead of having to manually select folders of documents, Perplexity can simply query the MCP registry to find a Windows file system MCP server to connect to. This allows Perplexity to perform file searches on behalf of a user in a more natural way, so you could simply say 'find all the files related to my vacation in my documents folder,' instead of having to add this folder or the documents manually. You could imagine how a world of MCP servers and hosts inside Windows might eventually open the operating system up to a lot more automated app features, especially for querying data from the web inside apps like Excel. We're also starting to see Microsoft make parts of Windows AI-powered through AI agents. Copilot Plus PCs will soon have access to an AI agent settings interface, which lets you control system settings using natural language queries. This type of MCP functionality also opens Windows up to a world of new attack methods from malicious actors. The security risks of MCP have been well documented in recent months, with warnings of potential token theft, server compromises, and prompt injection attacks. Microsoft is well aware of the security risks of embracing MCP at such an early stage, so the company is only making a preview available to select developers to help work on its feature set and secure it fully. 'I think we have a solid set of foundations and more importantly a solid architecture that gives us all the tools to start, to do this securely,' explains David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge. 'We're going to put security first, and ultimately we considering large language models as untrusted, as they can be trained on untrusted data and they can have cross-prompt injection.' In the demo Microsoft showed me of MCP working in Windows, there were also early security prompts to let these AI apps access MCP capabilities. 'Just like a web app asks for your location, you're in control of what you share and we want to make sure that's intentional,' says Weston. This is all early work from Microsoft right now, but the demo did remind me a little of Windows Vista's UAC prompts that would pop-up whenever you needed admin permissions to do things in Windows. Those became very annoying and a subject of mocking ads from Apple. Getting these prompts right will be key for Microsoft here, as they have to balance security and the convenience of using these AI agents and apps. I sure don't want a repeat of UAC or even Apple's copy / paste prompts that are highly irritating in iOS right now. Microsoft is also committing to a variety of MCP security controls that Weston outlines in a blog post today, alongside some security requirements in order for MCP servers to appear in Microsoft's official list, or registry. 'These will prevent classes of attack like tool poisoning while also creating and open and diverseecosystem of MCP servers,' says Weston. 'More information on these requirements will be available when thedeveloper preview is released.' Image: Microsoft Alongside this big MCP push, Microsoft is also positioning its own AI platform inside Windows as the rebranded Windows AI Foundry. It integrates models from Foundry Local and other catalogs like Ollama and Nvidia NIMs, and is designed to allow developers to tap into models available on Copilot Plus PCs, or to bring their own models through Windows ML.
The Verge
19-05-2025
- The Verge
Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open-source
Microsoft is making its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) open-source today, opening up the code for community members to contribute to. After launching WSL for Windows 10 nearly nine years ago, it has been a multiyear effort at Microsoft to open-source the feature that enables a Linux environment within Windows. 'It has been a consistent request from the developer community for some time now,' says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with The Verge. 'It took us a little bit of time, because we needed to refactor the operating system to allow WSL to live in a standalone capacity that then allowed us to open-source the project and be able to have developers go and make contributions and for us to ingest those into the Windows pipeline and ship it at scale.' The WSL code is now available on GitHub, allowing developers to download it and build it from source, participate in fixes, or even add new features. The WSL community hasn't had access to Microsoft's source code in the past, but that hasn't stopped them from making contributions that have helped improve WSL over the years. Davuluri says he's now expecting that developers will use the open-source project to help improve WSL performance, or for more integration into Linux services. It's a major milestone for WSL, which started off life in 2016 as part of the Windows 10 Anniversary update. 'At that time WSL was based on a pico process provider, which enabled Windows to natively run ELF executables, and implement Linux syscalls inside the Windows kernel,' explains Pierre Boulay, senior software engineer at Microsoft. 'Over time it became clear that the best way to provide optimal compatibility with native Linux was to rely on the Linux kernel itself.' Microsoft announced its second major version of WSL in 2019, eventually adding GPU support and then moving to ship the project separate to Windows. 'It eventually became clear that to keep up the growing community and feature requests, WSL had to move faster, and ship separately from Windows,' says Boulay. 'That's why in 2021 we separated WSL from the Windows codebase, and moved it to its own codebase.' In the latest 24H2 update for Windows 11, Microsoft has fully transitioned WSL users to a package that's separate from Windows, instead of the WSL component that was baked into the OS. All of these changes to WSL in recent years have led Microsoft to close off the first ever issue raised on its WSL repo on GitHub, asking 'Will this be open-source?' That answer is very much yes now, and it's a part of making Windows more developer-friendly. 'Our goal is quite simple: we want Windows to be a great dev box for developers,' says Davuluri. 'That's really the ambition.'
The Star
07-05-2025
- Business
- The Star
Microsoft debuts lower-end Surface devices to push AI tools
The Surface line represents a sliver of Microsoft sales, accounting for about 2% of revenue in the most recent fiscal year, and a similarly tiny slice of the global PC market. — Reuters Microsoft Corp is rolling out two lower-end versions of its main Surface devices in a bid to drum up interest in computers that can take advantage of the company's artificial intelligence tools and better compete with Apple Inc's range of slim devices. The 13-inch Surface Laptop and 12-inch Surface Pro two-in-one tablet go on sale this week and will ship to consumers in the US and select markets starting May 20. Both are thinner, lighter and boast longer battery life than their predecessors. They also lack the higher-end processors and storage options of previous Surface devices but sell for the same or higher prices. The laptop can handle up to 16 hours of web browsing on a single charge, the company says, while the tablet is designed to be both portable and capable of handling desktop applications. The Surface line represents a sliver of Microsoft sales, accounting for about 2% of revenue in the most recent fiscal year, and a similarly tiny slice of the global PC market. But it helps showcase Windows devices that were designed to go head-to-head with Apple's high-end laptops and cast a halo over the Windows operating system. For the last few years, those ambitions have centred on AI-branded software that can generate text and images and engage users in conversation. Microsoft last year added a keyboard button that summons its Copilot AI assistant and preloaded such features as email summarization and image generation to Windows applications. Both new Surface devices carry the "Copilot+ PC' designation Microsoft gives to high-end computers with a so-called neural processing unit. It handles things like real-time translation in video calls or image generation, freeing up the CPU – in this case, Qualcomm Inc's Snapdragon X Plus – for other tasks. The Qualcomm chips use the battery-efficient ARM architecture initially designed for smartphones. That can raise compatibility issues, particularly for video games or customized business applications written for the Intel Corp processors that dominated the PC market for decades. On a call with reporters last week, Microsoft Windows and devices chief Pavan Davuluri said the company had addressed compatibility issues for "the vast majority' of customers. The Surface Laptop weighs 2.7 pounds, is 0.61 of an inch thick, has a touchscreen and starts at US$899 (RM3,809). The Surface Pro, 1.5 pounds and less than a third of an inch thick, features the line's typical kickstand and front- and rear-facing cameras. It starts at US$799 (RM3,385) – with a stylus and snap-on keyboard sold separately. During the briefing, Davuluri didn't say whether US tariffs factored into the latest devices' prices, calling the levies "a moving target.' Surface computers on display at a recent media preview were assembled in Mexico. The aluminum casing on both machines will be available in colors Microsoft calls Ocean, Platinum and Violet. They sport 16 gigabytes of RAM and offer either 256 gigabytes or 512 gigabytes of storage. The previous generation of each device offered users the option of up to 64 GB of memory, 1 terabyte of storage, and had more processor cores, allowing them to handle more tasks simultaneously. Business-focused variants of the computers will ship in July, Microsoft said. Surface sales have declined in recent years, part of a broad post-pandemic slump in purchases of consumer electronics. Microsoft doesn't break out quarterly hardware results, but device sales fell 15% during fiscal 2024 to US$4.7bil (RM19bil). The company's in-house hardware groups in recent years have endured layoffs, the sale of the HoloLens augmented reality unit and the loss of former Surface chief Panos Panay to rival Inc. – Bloomberg
Express Tribune
06-05-2025
- Business
- Express Tribune
Microsoft unveils budget AI laptops with Qualcomm chips
Listen to article Microsoft on Tuesday said it will release a new laptop and tablet with chips from Qualcomm at lower prices than before, aiming to get new AI features to a broader set of customers. The newest Surface 13-inch laptop and Surface Pro 12-inch tablet will go on sale on May 20, with the laptop starting at $899 and the tablet starting at $799. Both will feature Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus chips, and they will be priced slightly between competing products from Apple such as its MacBook Air, which starts at $999 and its iPads, where Air Pro models start at $649 and $999. But Microsoft's new offerings will be its lowest-priced yet with support for what it calls 'Copilot+' features that it introduced last year. That bundle of features includes things like the ability to ask how to change the computer's settings as a natural language question rather than sifting through settings menus or the ability to ask for an AI-generated first draft of a word document. Microsoft has set performance computing chip requirements for the new Copilot+ label, which has meant that most of those AI features are only available on machines that cost $1,000 or more. Pavan Davuluri, corporate vice president of Windows and Devices at Microsoft, said the new Surface devices are aimed at getting those features to a broader set of users, especially students or young professionals at the start of their careers. 'We think these new Surface Pro and laptops are for a set of customers for whom affordability is going to be important,' Davuluri told reporters during a press briefing on April 28.
