Microsoft Build 2026: AI development with, under, and for Windows

Microsoft is hosting its developer conference MS Build 2026 on June 2nd and 3rd, 2026. The company is particularly addressing developers who create software for the Windows ecosystem. As in previous years, Artificial Intelligence is high on the agenda again this year. However, there is hardly any concrete Windows further development.

Again, development with the help of AI and AI-based assistants is at the top of the list. The "Microsoft AI Superintelligence Team" is releasing a total of seven new AI models into the world. Among them is Microsoft's first reasoning model, MAI-Thinking-1. MAI-Image-2.5 and a flash variant of it master text-to-image; they are intended to outperform Google Nano Banana Pro. MAI-Transcribe-1.5 transcribes audio in 43 languages, but streaming is only expected to be added soon. MAI-Voice-2 and a flash variant of it support 15 languages and have received new voice options. MAI-Code-1 assists with programming on GitHub. Microsoft does not mention OpenAI in this context.

Presentations will cover topics such as building, deploying, and scaling AI agents with the Cloud PC Windows 365. A presentation on the Windows Subsystem for Linux promises news. In fact, all of the few Windows-specific presentations so far have dealt with the use of AI tools for development under Windows and with operating AI bots like OpenClaw. One presentation stands out a bit: it describes how developers can increase their productivity with the Windows Terminal.

Platforms, Tools, Trust

Microsoft's marketing department describes in flowery terms what developers need to offer solutions. Finally, it distills down to the fact that they need security for infrastructures and apps, as well as accelerated and simplified development. And not just for partial problems but full-stack, with tools, models, and processes according to the developers' ideas.

Windows is naturally intended to be the ideal platform for this; with all the focused contributions on the development of and with AI, one almost gets the feeling that the operating system has become completely decoupled and irrelevant. However, Microsoft is announcing a new developer configuration for this: it is intended to provide more flexible and seamless shell and terminal experiences. In addition, agents can be moved into local sandboxes: Microsoft speaks of making Windows a native agent runtime. The sandboxes, called Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), are available as a preview version and are intended to be enterprise-ready – for example, to run OpenClaw with "security restrictions."

The preview of the GitHub Copilot app is intended to make agentic development a native desktop experience for a much wider target audience: interested users should simply describe an idea or an existing problem, and the app will get started, running multiple agent sessions in parallel and keeping track of changes. Each session is based on git trees, so the parts remain separate. Developers retain control while Copilot handles execution. Developers should be able to create apps in seconds this way.

Microsoft also offers a Backend-as-a-Service for accessing databases and services, the preview of the Project Rayfin platform. It is intended to enable development from prototype to production level without developers having to worry about infrastructure management.

Microsoft also has new AI hardware to offer: the Surface RTX Spark is a developer box for continuous workloads. Training, agentic AI pipelines, and local finetuning of models, all of this is intended to be done with a load of 100 watts. As the name suggests, it features an Nvidia RTX Spark with up to a Petaflop of AI computing power (unspecified precision) and 128 GB of RAM (unified, i.e., shared with the processor). The machine is said to be able to run models with up to 120 billion parameters locally.

Microsoft provides Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) with native GPU passthrough and full CUDA support pre-configured. In addition, Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, and numerous other popular dev tools are said to be pre-installed. Small catch: this developer box will only be available later in the year – and for now, only in the United States.

(dmk)