Microsoft shows Windows becoming an agentic OS with local Copilot

An agentic OS is one that lets AI agents work inside it, opening files, using apps and finishing jobs, with the operating system keeping track of what each agent is allowed to do. Microsoft’s version rests on what it calls hybrid intelligence.

The idea is that Windows decides where each AI task should run. Some work goes to a local model on your PC, and some goes to a more powerful model in the cloud. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri said Microsoft is bringing frontier-class abilities to local PCs, so services such as GitHub can route work intelligently. He framed it as a way for customers to stretch their budgets while keeping access to the AI they need.

CEO Satya Nadella said the company is starting to think about the frontier ecosystem taking slightly different shapes. Much of his pitch focused on security, identity and management, which sounded aimed at businesses as much as at regular users.

Davuluri’s demos covered several pieces of the plan:

• Local coding. GitHub Copilot writing code on the laptop itself, without paying for cloud tokens.
• Local models. A long list of AI models that can now run directly on Windows.
• Third-party agents. Examples including Perplexity, Hermes and OpenClaw running on Windows.
• A smarter Copilot. Copilot in Windows will be able to use context from your PC, take actions for you and tap local models.

For everyday users, the most practical change was a redesigned Windows Search. It is faster, shows results in line, and lets you run actions straight from the taskbar, more like an app launcher than a search box.

Letting software act on your behalf raises an obvious worry: what stops a rogue agent from reading files it should not? Microsoft’s answer is Microsoft Execution Containers, or MXC, now generally available. It is a containment layer that lets IT teams decide which files and resources each agent can reach, and it records which agent performed which action.

Microsoft’s approach separates agent activity from the user’s own activity, so security teams can watch and restrict agents without touching the person’s account. Agents already supporting MXC include OpenAI’s Codex, GitHub Copilot, LM Studio, Replit and OpenClaw. Microsoft says Anthropic’s Claude Code, Perplexity and Manus are among those coming next, and Meta’s Muse is planned as a native Windows app.

The showcase device is the Surface Laptop Ultra, the flagship PC built on Nvidia’s new RTX Spark platform. It pairs an Arm-based Nvidia processor with up to 20 cores, Nvidia Blackwell graphics and up to 128GB of unified memory, a shared pool the processor and graphics can both use, which helps with large AI models. Microsoft says it can run models with up to 120 billion parameters locally.

It has a 15-inch mini-LED touchscreen and starts at $2,599.99 in the US, with 24GB of memory and 512GB of storage. Similar RTX Spark laptops are coming from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI, and some RTX Spark PCs reach $6,999. Preorders opened on the day of the event.

Microsoft built it for developers and creators, many of whom use a MacBook Pro today. For them, the pitch is simple: run big models on your own machine and save on cloud token bills.

If you use your PC for email, browsing and Office, little changes yet. The agentic features that matter today are aimed at people building and running AI, and the hardware that makes local AI shine costs thousands of dollars.

There is also history to weigh. Two years ago, Copilot Plus PCs promised that built-in NPUs (chips for AI tasks) would change how people use AI on laptops. Only a handful of photo, video and productivity tools ended up using them, and the much-hyped Recall feature was delayed by privacy concerns. RTX Spark has Nvidia’s graphics power behind it, which may help, but for agentic Windows to matter to most people, these abilities will need to reach cheaper, less powerful PCs.

The quiet stakes are high for Microsoft. AI agents that run in the cloud on Linux could make Windows less essential. Making Windows the easiest and safest place for agents to work is how Microsoft hopes to keep the PC at the center of computing.