![\"Microsoft](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791524430_3_ImageResizer.ashx.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nMicrosoft has unveiled an AI coding model that can run directly on personal computers and \u2060new security technology \u2060to prevent AI agents from accessing data without permission, challenging Apple’s push to bring more AI into personal devices.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The software company also presented at the event in San Francisco a high-powered Surface laptop called Ultra powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark chips.<\/p>\n
Microsoft\u00a0is seeking to turn Windows into a platform for AI agents to handle tasks such as writing computer code or tackling complex business \u200cprojects on desktops and laptops.<\/p>\n
For Microsoft, the move represents a bet that some work that currently \u200chappens \u200cin its costly Azure cloud computing data centres can shift to high-powered Windows machines in businesses \u200cand homes, a market where the firm retains a stronghold \u2014 and where its customers foot the hardware \u2060bills. It is a market opportunity rival Apple is also chasing with new Mac computers.<\/p>\n
For Nvidia, cracking the Windows PC market could help it go after one of the last major markets dominated by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.<\/p>\n
As a guardrail against increasingly autonomous AI agents that have created security risks, Microsoft said it was releasing Microsoft Execution Containers, a tool to prevent agents from \u200baccessing data and doing unauthorised tasks when running on a laptop or desktop machine. Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia will use the tools, said Pavan Davuluri, executive vice president for Windows and devices.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe needed to make the desktop the most secure \u2060place for agents to execute,\u201d Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said.<\/p>\n
Davuluri\u00a0said new tools would let IT departments set rules for agents and the Windows operating system would enforce those rules on each employee\u2019s machine.<\/p>\n
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who joined Nadella on stage, said Microsoft\u2019s new execution container technology, which goes by MXC for short, “is going to revolutionise how agents are built and deployed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout it, (agents are) a complete nonstarter,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nvidia is\u00a0trying to prevent a repeat of the hack of AI hub Hugging Face, while Apple is looking to tighten up the process for giving AI agents full access to a Mac computer’s hard drive.<\/p>\n
AI moves to the PC<\/p>\n
Microsoft also unveiled AI models that previously required cloud access but can now run locally on high-powered Windows desktops and laptops, including Nvidia’s open-source Nemotron model.<\/p>\n
Davuluri said a version of Chinese AI \u200bfirm DeepSeek’s V4 model can run on machines with at least 60 gigabytes \u2060of memory and outperform OpenAI’s GPT-5 on some coding and reasoning tasks.<\/p>\n
Microsoft is taking a similar \u2060approach with its own Copilot AI assistant, splitting tasks between the cloud and individual laptops.<\/p>\n
\u201cCopilot will still use the cloud for the hardest tasks, but for times when cost or \u200bprivacy matter more, it can delegate down to local models that run directly on your computer,\u201d said Microsoft\u2019s Copilot chief Jacob Andreou.<\/p>\n
Davuluri also said\u00a0Meta’s Muse \u200cpersonal assistant will come to \u2060Windows devices as a native app, using some of Microsoft\u2019s new security tools, and that\u00a0OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent system, can also work with those security tools.<\/p>\n
Price barrier<\/p>\n
One of the key challenges Microsoft and Nvidia face is the steep pricing of these devices after a memory-chip crunch drove up costs.<\/p>\n
The new Surface Laptop Ultra will start at US$2599 ($3733) and \u200crise to US$5899 for a model with a 20-core processor, 128 gigabytes of memory and one terabyte of storage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Apple’s MacBook Pro with a 40-core graphics chip, 128 GB of memory and two TB of storage costs US$6700, although the machines are not directly comparable.<\/p>\n
Microsoft’s entry-level Ultra costs more than Apple’s base MacBook Pro, but comes with 24 GB of memory compared with 16 GB on Apple’s entry-level model.<\/p>\n
When Microsoft \u200boriginally pitched the idea of running AI tasks on PCs two years ago to save costs, the laptops were mostly priced below US$2000, but Nvidia increased the price of an AI desktop machine called the DGX Spark by about 75 percent since its launch to US$6950 amid rising memory costs.<\/p>\n
Two years ago, “the software wasn’t ready, but the hardware was. Now the software \u200cis ready and the \u2060hardware is too expensive to actually run it locally,” said \u200bAnshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.<\/p>\n
“So it’s becoming this thing where only the people who have the budget can really afford to run AI locally.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft has unveiled an AI coding model that can run directly on personal computers and \u2060new security technology…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":921492,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-921491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=921491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/921492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=921491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=921491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=921491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}