Nadella Urges US-China AI Safety Norms as Xi Visits Washington

U.S. IT giant Microsoft announced on the 25th an overhaul of its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot. It is introducing new features such as always-on autonomous AI agents, aiming to counter rivals by expanding its AI capabilities as competition intensifies with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will be integrated into Copilot, allowing users to collaborate in the apps while using Copilot. Code, which can build software from natural-language instructions, adopts the same technology as GitHub Copilot, with availability starting this month for some users and an expanded rollout within the year. Autopilot, an overhaul of the AI agent Scout announced in June, will be released to some customers for early access at the end of September.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the Meta Connect event to unveil the Muse Charm, a standalone pocket device built exclusively for voice interaction with the company's new Muse agent, and to showcase a major shift toward what he called Personal Superintelligence. The hardware push also included the Meta VR Glasses, weighing just 100 grams, roughly one-fifth the weight of Meta's Quest 3, priced at $1,299 with 5K micro-OLED displays, tethered puck processing, and native eye and hand tracking. On the smart eyewear front, Meta debuted the third-generation Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 glasses starting at an entry-level $249, alongside camera-free Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses designed purely for open-ear listening and AI voice interaction. Meta's Muse has amassed over 3.4 million downloads since its September 8 launch, according to new Sensor Tower data obtained by Yahoo Finance, accumulating 2.8 million downloads in its first two weeks, while ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude received 3.7 million, 400k, and 300k global downloads during the same 14-day post-launch period. Meta has added about $234 billion to its market cap in the past five days, and the stock is up over 40% in the past month.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company's new cloud-based Autopilot feature represents the next generation of automation in the enterprise, with high ROI expected for businesses that adopt it. In an interview with Deirdre Bosa, Nadella described Autopilot as an agent with its own identity that completes jobs and hands off work, while the inner agent loop lives inside applications such as Excel. The new Copilot update has three modes: chat, code, and Autopilot, and Microsoft is positioning Copilot as the operating layer for enterprise AI, with adoption at about 30 million customers so far. Nadella said the bet is that companies should not have to track the fast-moving model race, and that Microsoft will serve the right model for each task, using more capable models for hard tasks and cheaper models for easier ones.