Microsoft is turning to an old friend and a familiar advantage in search of a new edge in AI. The company and its longtime partner Nvidia on Wednesday started taking orders for a new line of high-end Windows PCs built to run large AI models independent of the cloud. Microsoft also announced what it calls “Windows Hybrid Intelligence,” a set of features that will let its Copilot assistant read the files on a PC, take actions on the machine and opt to run AI models locally instead of in the cloud when it makes sense. It’s not a new concept to users of such programs as Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity and OpenClaw, which already work with the files on a user’s computer. But only Microsoft can build the features into Windows itself, along with security controls that limit what an AI agent can reach on the machine and will keep a separate record of what the agent does. Is Microsoft misusing its operating system dominance ?
