Microsoft has released Microsoft Execution Containers, a tool designed to stop AI agents from accessing data or carrying out unauthorised actions on laptops and desktop machines, the company said in a statement. The tool became generally available on Windows 11 and allows organisations to specify which files and networks agents are permitted to access, with those rules enforced at runtime.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company's aim was to turn the desktop into the most secure environment in which agents could run. Pavan Davuluri, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, said agent rules set by IT departments would be enforced by Windows on every employee's device. The announcement was made at an event held in San Francisco.
Traditional sandboxing tools were not designed for AI agents, whose containment requirements can shift with each request and tool call; MXC was built to address this gap. Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia will use the MXC tools.
Microsoft unveiled a new Surface laptop called the Surface Laptop Ultra, powered by Nvidia RTX Spark chips. Pre-orders opened for new Windows PCs equipped with Nvidia RTX Spark from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI and Microsoft Surface. Microsoft and Nvidia presented RTX Spark in June to support this new category of devices, described as Builder PCs and aimed at developers, creators and enthusiasts running demanding local AI workloads.
Several AI models that previously needed cloud access are now able to run locally on high-powered Windows machines, among them Nvidia's open-source Nemotron model. Davuluri announced that Meta's Muse personal assistant would arrive on Windows as a native app drawing on Microsoft's new security tools.
A shortage of memory chips has driven up costs for high-powered AI PCs and laptops, affecting pricing for both Microsoft and Apple devices. Nvidia's DGX Spark AI desktop price was increased by approximately 75% to US$6,950. Apple is pursuing the same local AI computing opportunity through new Mac hardware, and has separately been developing restrictions on how AI agents gain access to Mac storage.
Australian businesses and IT departments using Windows will gain tools to set and enforce rules governing what data AI agents can access on employee machines. Professionals wanting to run powerful AI models locally on Windows PCs will need to budget for hardware starting at US$2,599 for the Surface Laptop Ultra, with higher-specification models costing considerably more. Copilot users will have the option of routing less sensitive or lower-cost tasks to local models running on their device rather than the cloud.
Official statements: News
Reporting: iTnews, Yahoo Finance, CNA
Written by Pick & Scroll News from the reporting and documents linked above.
