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Microsoft will enable access to Anthropic's Claude models by default for UK Microsoft Copilot tenants next month, giving administrators a deadline to decide whether US-based processing fits their compliance requirements, The Register reported on Tuesday.

From December 9, UK tenants whose administrators have not already chosen a setting will have Claude access enabled. In this arrangement Anthropic operates as a Microsoft subprocessor, and Claude models are already on by default for most customers in Microsoft's commercial cloud.

Microsoft's documentation states that Anthropic processes the relevant data in the United States. Microsoft is also retiring the setting that restricts Claude access to Microsoft 365 alone.

For UK Copilot admins this is a practical deadline, not just a product note: review the access settings before December 9 if your organisation has rules about where Copilot data is processed.

Microsoft has rolled out connector write actions as generally available across Copilot Chat and Cowork, Windows Report reported on November 9. Until now Copilot's connectors were mostly read-only — find information, summarise conversations. With write actions, Copilot can also create, update and delete records in connected third-party applications, turning a conversation into completed work in the app where the data lives.

Microsoft says Copilot does not automatically execute every requested change, and that write actions will also arrive in Copilot across the Office apps soon. No list of which connectors support writes at launch was published in the reporting.

This is a practical shift for the app everybody uses at work: a Copilot that can only read is a search box with better manners, while one that can write back into Salesforce, ServiceNow and the rest is an agent. The control question — which writes need a human confirm — is the part to watch as the Office-app rollout lands.

Microsoft announced on November 5 that Claude processing in Copilot is planned to move inside the EU Data Boundary for organisations in the European Union and the European Free Trade Association by the end of 2026. It is a future target, not a completed migration, and the announcement names no US-specific rollout.

The planned change covers Claude models across Copilot experiences, including Copilot Chat, Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps, Copilot Cowork and Copilot Code. Microsoft says organisations in the EU and EFTA already using Claude will transition automatically once the processing change is available.

Enabling Claude and moving its processing are separate steps. Claude is off by default in the EU and EFTA: an AI Administrator or Global Administrator enables Anthropic in the Microsoft 365 admin centre and assigns access to everyone or to selected users and groups. The EU Data Boundary is a regional commitment covering the EU and EFTA as a whole — different from Microsoft's separate in-country data-residency option for data at rest in 10 EU and EFTA countries.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence published research on November 5 describing threat actors who have used ARTEX, an open-source agentic offensive framework, since August 2026 to search public GitHub repositories at volume. The queries pair a target organization's name with keywords for exposed credentials, application secrets, cloud services and AI inference keys.

In at least one case, Microsoft says, an agent went from scanning GitHub for a client secret to exfiltrating data from Azure Key Vault in five minutes. Follow-on activity from October 28 used valid application credentials for successful service-principal sign-ins across dozens of applications in multiple tenants, then read Key Vault and Storage accounts, enumerated App Service, Kubernetes and SQL resources, searched Azure DevOps for more secrets, and corrected its own failed API calls within roughly 28 to 80 seconds — machine tempo, not human. Censys separately counted 1,465 exposed ARTEX consoles as of November 4, while noting that authorized testers also run the framework.

Microsoft attributes the activity to no named group and says it overlaps a campaign security firm Todyl tracks as Key Eater, run from the same infrastructure. Its advice is blunt: treat any publicly exposed secret as compromised even after the commit is deleted, rotate the keys, and move applications off secret-based authentication toward managed identities.

Microsoft is extending its fair-use limits in Copilot Chat, the AI chat bundled at no extra charge into Microsoft 365 business plans, to more features for employees who do not have a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. It told partners in its Partner Center on November 4, without saying which features are capped or at what thresholds. Until now the limits applied only to a few features, such as image generation.

The cuts took effect on November 2 for organisations with up to 2,000 seats, and reach larger organisations from November 9. Anyone who hits a limit sees a notice saying when the feature will be available again — an answer already being written is not cut off — and in most organisations the notice includes a button to ask the admin for the paid licence. The change covers Copilot Chat on the web, desktop and mobile.

Admins cannot look up or change the caps: Microsoft says it does not publish them because they may change, and that they shift during the day. Computerworld reports analysts warning that unpredictable limits may cut productivity and push staff toward AI tools the company has not approved.

Microsoft is replacing the standalone Word, Excel and PowerPoint agents in Microsoft Copilot with document-creation and editing capabilities built directly into the Copilot app, according to admin message centre notice MC1536062 published November 3. Users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence will ask Copilot Chat to create or refine a document, workbook or presentation directly, instead of Copilot invoking a separate agent for each app.

The change affects every user with a Microsoft 365 Copilot user subscription licence who currently has access to the standalone agents. Microsoft says the update introduces no changes to data processing.

The rollout is staged: worldwide general availability begins in mid-November 2026 and is expected to complete by late December 2026. It is the latest step in Microsoft's consolidation of Copilot into a single app and a single chat surface, following the August merger of the consumer Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot apps.

Goldman Sachs has restricted advanced AI coding tools, including Anthropic's Claude Code and Microsoft's GitHub, to its engineers, ending months in which bankers and traders were allowed to experiment with them. Bloomberg reported the change on November 2, citing internal guidance issued in October; traders had used the tools to monitor client trading flows, model market changes and create written and graphic material.

The reversal is notable because Goldman's own leadership promoted exactly that experimentation. In July, Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti praised non-technical staff 'vibe coding' solutions and handing them to one of the firm's 12,000 engineers to refine. Some traders are reported to be frustrated by losing access, while the firm's 'strats' — staff who combine quantitative research, software and trading — keep theirs.

Goldman frames the move as the end of a trial, not a retreat from AI. Spokesperson Nick Carcaterra told Bloomberg the firm makes certain tools available so employees can find the best use cases, then, after assessing productivity and risk management, puts them 'in the hands of those who are best suited to leverage them for the long term.' No incident or audit behind the decision has been made public.

The National AI Safety & Privacy Standard that Microsoft developed with the American Federation of Teachers and the United Federation of Teachers took effect on November 1. Announced on September 9, the 31-page standard is not a law: any US school district can add it to a new or existing Microsoft agreement without renegotiating the whole contract, and once added its terms are binding contract language rather than a vendor promise on a webpage.

The substance is specific. Student and educator data may not be used to train AI models, sold, or used for advertising; AI companion features designed to foster emotional attachment or keep students engaged past the learning task are banned; consequential decisions require human oversight; providers must explain their products in plain language, report breaches within 72 hours, and submit to third-party audits. Districts that adopt the standard gain contractual remedies, including termination and damages.

So far it binds one company. The agreement is structured as a memorandum between Microsoft and the AFT-affiliated National Academy for AI Instruction, with signature slots left open for other providers, and the teachers' unions say OpenAI and Anthropic have expressed willingness to sign. It says nothing about whether classrooms should use AI at all — the UFT's president has said AI use in grades K-8 is not appropriate right now — only the terms for districts that do.

Microsoft has confirmed that Bing's Copilot Search now has two distinct experiences: AI Mode, a conversational experience for researching topics in depth, and AI Overview, AI-generated summaries shown alongside regular search results. The distinction is set out in the FAQ on Microsoft's Search with AI page, spotted by Search Engine Watch, which also includes a seven-step walkthrough of the two experiences.

Microsoft says it introduced the names to help users understand the difference, and that the underlying Copilot technology is unchanged. AI Mode answers draw on web information and include source links; users can start a conversation in Bing but are directed to the Copilot app to reach their chat history.

The new AI Mode branding has also reached the Bing Android app, where tapping the Copilot icon opens a screen reading 'You're now in Bing AI Mode.' The naming mirrors Google Search, which already uses AI Overviews for quick answers and AI Mode for conversational search — the two search giants now describe their AI search products in the same words.

Big Tech's earnings week turned into a referendum on AI spending on Friday, October 30. Amazon, Google and Microsoft are set to lose a combined $900 billion in market value after their quarterly results, according to the Financial Times, as investors recoil not from weak sales but from the sheer size of the cash burn attached to the AI infrastructure race. The Nasdaq Composite fell roughly 3% on Friday and the S&P 500 about 1.8%, capping the worst week for the Nasdaq since April.

The numbers behind the nerves are large: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta are planning a combined $660 billion in capital expenditure in 2026, up 60% from $410 billion in 2025. Amazon alone guided 2026 capex to about $200 billion, roughly $50 billion more than expected, and its shares fell; Microsoft has dropped sharply since reporting even though cloud revenue rose, with data-center spending up 66%.

Alphabet has posted two straight quarters of negative free cash flow for the first time on record as AI spending outpaces revenue growth, and Meta recently disclosed its first negative-free-cash-flow quarter since 2012. Analysts quoted in the coverage say the burden is now on the hyperscalers to prove the spending earns attractive returns.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic all said on October 30 that they will honor a single shared robots.txt policy token, __usage_ai-training, so a website can opt out of AI training by every participating company in one entry instead of blocking each crawler separately. The signal comes from an IETF Internet-Draft authored by Kevin Kelley of Anthropic, building on the IETF's AI Preferences working group.

The token covers training only. It does not block crawling, search indexing, or AI answers that quote a site's pages, and it does not remove material already collected into existing training sets.

The timelines differ sharply. Anthropic says it has already started implementing support, OpenAI says it aims to implement the signal in the coming months, Microsoft targets February 1, 2027 — and says it will add separate page-level controls for training and AI grounding — and Google targets 2027, treating an opt-out as equivalent to blocking Google-Extended unless that is set directly. The underlying draft is not yet a formal standard and expires in May 2027 unless updated.

Microsoft announced on October 29 that it is expanding Copilot for finance teams with more than 25 new finance skills and partner-built plugins across Microsoft Copilot, building on the finance skills it first brought to Copilot in Excel in June. The new accounting capabilities — reconciling accounts, comparing balances and transactions, drafting journal entries and analyzing performance against plan — are available in Frontier for Copilot in Excel and Cowork.

Work no longer has to start in Excel. With Office in Copilot, Excel is embedded directly in the Copilot app, so users can analyze, edit and co-author workbooks from Chat or Cowork, and Cowork can assemble close packages, forecast reviews and investment committee memos. Microsoft says that in seven days of limited Insiders availability, more than 8,000 users invoked the accounting skills more than 44,000 times.

Copilot also connects outward: a Dynamics 365 ERP apps plugin and Fabric IQ bring Microsoft's own systems in, and partner plugins cover accounting tools such as QuickBooks, Xero and Zoho Books, plus data providers including FactSet, Morningstar, LSEG and S&P Global. Availability varies by component — some pieces are generally available, while the accounting skills remain Frontier and partner plugins are beginning their rollout.

Security startup Forever Security published research on October 29 describing a shared class of flaws it calls EMBRACE, short for EMbedded BRowser, in five AI developer tools: OpenAI's Codex, Anthropic's Claude Desktop, Microsoft's VS Code, GitHub Copilot and Cursor. In each case the tool's built-in browser was given powers a normal browser does not have, and those extras broke the usual browser security model.

The effects differed by product. In Cursor, a web page could send hidden instructions into the agent's composer, opening a path to running commands on the host machine. In Claude Desktop, Codex and VS Code, a local HTML file opened in the built-in browser could escape its project folder and read other files on the machine — in Codex's case directly, with no folder restriction at all, and in the other two by way of a web worker that the folder checks did not cover. In GitHub Copilot 1.1.27, a page could spoof the address bar, showing an address such as github.com/login over a fraudulent page underneath.

The patch picture is uneven. Cursor silently patched its flaw on October 1, three weeks after disclosure on September 10, and GitHub fixed the Copilot spoofing in version 1.1.29 on October 13, independently of the researchers. Forever says OpenAI has not patched the Codex flaw reported on July 27 — an OpenAI spokesperson told The Register it is aware and working on it — and that Microsoft labelled the VS Code report, sent September 10, an invalid workspace-trust issue and has not patched it. Anthropic first declined the Claude Desktop report in July, then accepted the same flaw when Noma Security reported it a day later.

LG smart TV owners began seeing an on-screen notice on October 28 saying Microsoft has decided to end support for Copilot functionality on all TVs, including the Copilot-enabled feature on LG TVs — the feature is described as no longer available and may stop functioning shortly. The affected features include Copilot's parts of Voice Search and AI Concierge; Samsung's 2025 TVs and smart monitors also carried Copilot.

That date has since firmed up. Microsoft's own support documentation now states that Copilot 'is being retired from TVs and will no longer be available on Samsung and LG TVs on December 1, 2026,' Broadband TV News reported on October 30 — confirming the December 1 date one earlier report had put forward but LG's on-screen notice did not include. Copilot remains available on web, desktop and mobile platforms, and Microsoft has not given a reason for the withdrawal.

The TV integration arrived after LG and Samsung announced Copilot partnerships at CES 2025, and it had a rocky run on LG sets: a December 2025 webOS update added a Copilot shortcut users could not remove, drawing widespread complaints before LG allowed it to be deleted.

Microsoft said on October 28 that it is making the Microsoft Copilot harness available through Microsoft Foundry, extending a runtime it says already powers Copilot across its own products. The company framed the move as a way for developers and enterprise customers to build agents that can reason, use tools and complete longer-running tasks.

With the Copilot harness, Microsoft runs the agent loop and sandbox, with governance and optimization built in from the start. Developers bring the instructions, skills, tools and model choice, and Microsoft says the platforms remain open and interoperable, so other harnesses and frameworks can still be brought in.

Microsoft says the SDK is available to download, or the harness can be run in the cloud, all managed by Foundry. Because agents built in Foundry can run on the same harness Microsoft has adopted internally, its continuous harness improvements should benefit those agents too.