If you thought Windows Recall was creepy, buckle up. Microsoft is about to shoehorn even more AI into its desktop operating system, giving Copilot access to every file on your PC. But don't worry, Redmond insists it's totally secure and safe since the agents powering the functionality will run entirely on your PC — some of the time. Microsoft describes the new functionality, announced alongside a new Nvidia N1X powered Surface Laptop, as "hybrid intelligence." Built atop Microsoft's HydraFusion model router, Windows apps and Copilot features will soon be able to use local models when it makes sense and cloud-based models when it doesn't. For example, Windows might use a local model for simple or privacy-sensitive tasks, or decide complex or performance-sensitive requests need OpenAI's GPT-6 or Anthropic's Claude. Local agents will run in Microsoft's Execution Containers (MXCs), agent sandboxes with fine-grained permissions applied at runtime. According to Microsoft EVP of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri, MXCs mean Windows is now "the most secure platform for agents." (That claim will surely age well because models never escape their sandboxes and routers never misbehave.) To support this hybrid intelligence functionality, Microsoft is extending support for Windows ML, its inference framework built on the ONNX runtime, to Llama.cpp – one of the highest-performing inference engines for local AI inference. By adding support for Windows ML, Llama.cpp should be able to take advantage of a broader range of accelerators. Microsoft is rolling out its hybrid intelligence functionality to GitHub Copilot — its AI code assistant — next week and its Copilot app over the next few months. The new Copilot features look and sound suspiciously like OpenClaw in a business suit. Copilot's agentic functionality will not have access to your entire file system, opening the door to advanced search functionality and productivity tasks through integrations with Microsoft Office. In a demo, Microsoft showed how Copilot could be used to find and organize a user's tax documents, then draft an email with those files attached, addressed to an accountant. Microsoft insists it'll only go snooping through your docs if you ask it to. Windows is also getting AI-enhanced search functionality enabling users to surface settings like dark mode. The OS will also get a conversational interface to perform tasks like sending a text message to a friend. Finally, for those interested in coloring outside Microsoft's agentic lines, the company is rolling out a new onboarding experience to make deploying agent harnesses like OpenClaw a bit easier and more secure. Keeping sensitive tasks on device may help to assuage anxieties over privacy, which have dogged Microsoft since the first Copilot+ PCs arrived in 2024 alongside Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite SoCs. It should also help to reduce the load on Microsoft's servers by keeping low-priority, low-complexity requests on devices. That said, the impact of running these models locally on battery life, fan noise, and workload quality could prove a turnoff for many users. ®
