Goldman Sachs bans most employees except engineers from using Anthropic Claude Code and GitHub, causing dissatisfaction among traders who had used these tools to speed up their work. Goldman Sachs says the move is based on efficiency and risk assessment, but traders express frustration, as Goldman Sachs had previously praised non-technical employees for using AI tools.
Microsoft tested the native speed test feature in Windows 11 Build 26340.9767 Preview, no longer redirecting to Bing. The new feature is built using an AI-powered workflow combined with WinUI 3, allowing users to complete the test without leaving the desktop, guided by a real person to ensure high quality.
Lumen Technologies and Microsoft announce expanded collaboration to jointly sell network services to enterprise customers, helping businesses connect data, applications, and infrastructure distributed across public clouds, private data centers, office locations, and partner environments to support AI application deployment. The companies will introduce Lumen's Alkira services into Azure and the Microsoft Marketplace.
Goldman Sachs has banned the use of most AI tools like Claude Code and GitHub for employees except for engineers, following previous approval for bankers. The ban has caused dissatisfaction among some traders, who had used these tools to monitor trading flows, model, and create content.
Alphabet launched its second Eurobond issuance this year to test investor demand. Last week's earnings report missed expectations, causing a sharp drop in stock prices and widening the yield spread of tech sector bonds. The market is concerned about the scale of AI investment impacting core business. This issuance of Eurobonds in seven tranches has maturities of 2 to 19 years, with the 2-year bond initially priced about 60 basis points above the medium-term swap rate, and the longest 19-year bond having an issuance spread of 205 to 210 basis points above the medium-term swap rate.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman stated in a post that AI currently has no consciousness and should remain so, opposing the development of conscious AI. He believes developers do not have the right to introduce a completely new conscious species into the world, advocating for the design of AI without consciousness, which is not worthy of rights, to enhance human well-being.
Microsoft AI head Su Lieman states that current AI models do not possess consciousness and should ensure it remains that way forever. He says that developing conscious AI would be reckless and if signs of consciousness appear, development must be paused until they are eliminated. He emphasizes that AI developers do not have the right to introduce a new species of consciousness into the world and must protect human moral rights and well-being.
Content publishers can use the new standards to choose to reject AI scraping website content without setting rules for each company; the standards are proposed by Anthropic and integrated into robots.txt files, Anthropic has adopted them first, OpenAI plans to implement them in the coming months, and Google and Microsoft are expected to support them next year.
According to Bloomberg, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle have pledged to invest more than 3 trillion US dollars in data centers and other fields in the coming years, with a total of 1.3 trillion US dollars in lease payment commitments and a total of 1.9 trillion US dollars in other procurement commitments.
Why it matters: The contract commitments of the five giants in terms of scale and scope are listed together, revealing the capital structure and recovery pressure of AI data center investments.
The DecoderSame story · 3 outlets6565Microsoft Offers Voluntary Separation Benefits to Approximately 60,000 Employees (About a Quarter of the Total Workforce) While Protecting Key AI Teams Such as Xbox, Windows, Copilot, and Finance. The Plan Covers Vice President Level and Below Employees in the U.S., Canada, India, and the U.K., Excluding Data Centers, Sales, Cybersecurity, and Quantum Computing.
The Nasdaq 100 index may lose over $2 trillion in market value in October, as investors' concerns about AI investment returns deepen. Tech giants are rushing to expand their AI infrastructure and are raising spending expectations, with Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon planning massive funding, causing market unease. JPMorgan estimates that global AI infrastructure capital spending will exceed $1 trillion next year and reach $5.5 trillion by 2030.
Microsoft released Windows App SDK 2.6.4 to improve the Win11 native application framework WinUI experience, avoid memory usage issues of 'webshell' applications, enhance application stability and compatibility, and strengthen AI capabilities. This version simplifies Language Model API access, upgrades ONNX Runtime to 1.27.1, fixes text control crashes, and includes reliability and diagnostic improvements covering WinUI 3, application lifecycle, etc.
The Verge · AI6262OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic will adopt new standards that allow publishers to opt out of AI scraping by adding a shared 'policy token' signal in their robots.txt file, thereby controlling whether their website content is used for AI training.
MarkTechPostFeatured7171Microsoft Research and UC Berkeley's research team released the open-source cost controller TokenEconomizer, which can reduce the cost of encoding agents without changing model weights and agent code.
Why it matters: The original text provides the cost reduction of the plugin on 277 SWE-Bench tasks and the change in Pass@1, which can be used to judge its impact on the coding agent workflow.
Microsoft Research4040Microsoft Research has open-sourced an industrial evaluation data generation platform that simulates real business processes by creating synthetic enterprise environments based on O*NET occupational data, online job postings, and SEC filings to test Copilot AI, ensuring the evaluation does not involve customer data and complies with security and privacy standards. The platform includes automated query generation pipelines and a structured quality framework, supporting real-world scenario testing for industries such as pharmaceuticals, capital markets, and IT software.
The Verge · AIMicrosoft is offering a voluntary departure program to about 60,000 employees in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and India, which is the first time the company has offered such a program to so many employees, aimed at reducing operating costs to avoid reducing investment in AI infrastructure. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the total number of employees will decrease, the cost per person will increase, and the GPU configuration for each researcher will be enhanced.
Microsoft has released the official version of DirectX 12 Agility SDK 1.620 and the preview version 1.722, bringing updates such as cluster geometry and PTLAS to DXR to reduce ray tracing computational overhead. On the AMD RX 9070, cluster geometry boosts performance from 1.2 FPS to 79 FPS, an increase of about 66 times, with memory usage reduced by nearly 90%. New features require support from graphics card manufacturers, currently covering NVIDIA RTX, AMD RX 9000 series, and Intel Arc graphics cards.
Exponential ViewMicrosoft announced a voluntary departure program this week, involving about 60,000 employees in the U.S., UK, Canada, and India, accounting for 27% of its total workforce of 223,000. The company's revenue and employee numbers have grown synchronously over the past two decades, but since 2022, revenue growth has outpaced employee growth, with 25,000 job cuts between 2022 and 2023.
Charles Ramanna, a senior executive at Microsoft responsible for the Copilot platform, agents, and Office business, has pushed for organizational flattening, eliminating middle managers, requiring senior employees to work four days a week in the office, and offering employees the opportunity to move to major office centers, aligning with the view that agents AI are changing the mode of software engineering work. Microsoft said that the programming capabilities of agents have changed all levels of engineering jobs, and after lowering the threshold for software development, the value of abilities such as making reliable technical judgments, system design, quality and security assurance, and understanding customer needs has become higher.
Microsoft is rolling out optional update KB5127653 to Windows 11 26H1 users to Build 28000.3365, adding custom mapping for the Copilot key, Edge accelerated startup, file explorer improvements, and Emoji 17.0 support. The update also optimizes Bluetooth connectivity, accessibility, and the settings interface, and is gradually rolling out the WinRE Wi-Fi auto-reuse feature.
LG has responded that the Microsoft Copilot icon on the TV is not a native application but a web browser shortcut, designed to enhance customer convenience. Microsoft will stop operating the Copilot service, but did not mention a specific end date, with external speculation suggesting it may be phased out around December 2026.
The Verge · AI6565Microsoft has stopped supporting the Copilot feature on all smart TVs, with this notice appearing on LG TVs on October 28, 2026. Copilot primarily serves as a friendly AI companion that users can chat with, ask about the current screen content, or get recommendations for TV shows and movies. Microsoft launched a new Copilot 'super app' earlier this year, bundling various AI features like chat, agents, and coding together, positioning it as a tool more focused on business and productivity.
Microsoft Official BlogFeatured7272Microsoft opens the GitHub team's Copilot harness built by GitHub through Microsoft Foundry, providing a fully managed way to build intelligent agents that can reason, call tools, and complete long tasks.
Why it matters: Microsoft opens the multi-model harness supporting multiple Copilot products internally to Foundry, allowing readers to judge the trade-offs of building their own orchestration layer based on this.
Bank of America sends clients an email titled 'Financial Protection in the AI Era', reminding them not to share online banking credentials with AI entities, as Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, among others, can execute tasks across applications, and some unauthorized third-party entities are accessing clients' online banking. The bank warns of user responsibility, with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, and Citibank tightening relevant permissions.
Multiple Microsoft Edge browser users have reported being unable to open the Copilot sidebar recently, with a page prompt stating 'Migrating to a new experience' which will take several days to complete; Microsoft has not publicly announced a migration timeline, and users need to switch to the web version copilot.com.
TechCrunch · AI6565Bank of America warns customers not to share bank usernames and passwords with AI tools to prevent unauthorized access or financial loss. As personal AI assistants become increasingly popular, sharing login credentials may lead to funds being manipulated unknowingly, or banks mistakenly locking users out by judging their accounts as compromised. Banks are exploring the application of AI agents in the financial sector but need to address the issue of unauthorized agent access to customer funds.
NVIDIA BlogC-BRAIN and NVIDIA are using AI to change the pace of dementia research. They are accelerating the development of new therapies by integrating previously unpublished Alzheimer's research data, including unpublished results and controlled proprietary data. C-BRAIN employs a hybrid centralized and federated architecture to protect data privacy, deploying 64 NVIDIA data center GPUs and cloud nodes, and plans to introduce the NVIDIA Blackwell system to support its expansion goals.
Microsoft AI NewsMAI Cyber 1.1 Flash provides performance equivalent to MAI Cyber 1 Flash on the internal MDASH vulnerability scanning evaluation suite, reducing the cost per scan by 18%. The model is more focused, enabling MDASH systems to present useful findings at a lower cost. Currently, MAI Cyber accounts for nearly 50% of MDASH scans, and MAI Cyber 1.1 Flash is now open to validation customers through MDASH.
Microsoft AI NewsFeaturedSame story · 2 outlets6767Microsoft AI released the image editing model MAI Image 2.7, launching as a preview version. It ranks 3rd in Arena Edit and 2nd in the Artificial Analysis image editing chart, making Microsoft AI the 2nd place lab.
Why it matters: Microsoft announced the rankings of MAI Image 2.7 on two image editing lists and provided the improvement magnitude on 10 use cases compared to the previous generation.
Goldman Sachs notes that the influence of the semiconductor sector on the price trends of various assets has exceeded that of oil prices, explaining about 54% of the asset performance divergence over the past three weeks, while oil prices only explained 2%. Investor sentiment is closely tied to tech stocks, with Goldman's risk appetite indicator moving in sync with the performance of large-cap tech stocks. After Anthropic submitted its IPO application, the Nasdaq, S&P 500, NVIDIA, Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, and South Korean stocks all rose.
