By Cristian Dina A Puglia-based startup founded by the man behind aircraft maker Blackshape has closed a pre-seed round to build software-defined ships and maritime AI. The ocean, it argues, is the last major physical environment not yet governed by software. Mirai Robotics, a startup headquartered in Puglia, southern Italy, wants to change that. The company has closed […] This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Microsoft has added agentic AI capabilities to Microsoft 365 Copilot to improve its usefulness for office workers — including its own version of Anthropic’s Claude Cowork.

Microsoft’s AI assistant has, so far, failed to attract significant business demand since launching more than two years ago, at least compared to its other products. Only 3% of the Microsoft 365 customer base is subscribed to the paid version of the AI agent, Microsoft said last month, with a total of 15 million paid licenses.

The new features announced Monday are aimed at igniting adoption. Among them is the introduction of Copilot Cowork; it’s built on Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, the AI agent tool that caused SaaS vendor shares to tank earlier this year due to its ability to complete tasks autonomously.

Copilot Cowork “brings together long-running parallel task completion inside of Microsoft 365 Copilot,” Charles Lamanna, president for business apps and agents at Microsoft, said in pre-recorded statement. 

srcset=”https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Copilot-Cowork.jpg?quality=50&strip=all 1706w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Copilot-Cowork.jpg?resize=300%2C190&quality=50&strip=all 300w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Copilot-Cowork.jpg?resize=768%2C485&quality=50&strip=all 768w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Copilot-Cowork.jpg?resize=1024%2C647&quality=50&strip=all 1024w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Copilot-Cowork.jpg?resize=1536%2C971&quality=50&strip=all 1536w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Copilot-Cowork.jpg?resize=1103%2C697&quality=50&strip=all 1103w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Copilot-Cowork.jpg?resize=266%2C168&quality=50&strip=all 266w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Copilot-Cowork.jpg?resize=133%2C84&quality=50&strip=all 133w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Copilot-Cowork.jpg?resize=760%2C480&quality=50&strip=all 760w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Copilot-Cowork.jpg?resize=570%2C360&quality=50&strip=all 570w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Copilot-Cowork.jpg?resize=396%2C250&quality=50&strip=all 396w” width=”1024″ height=”647″ sizes=”auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>Microsoft says its Copilot Cowork offers users “a new way of getting work done.”
Microsoft

The introduction of Copilot Cowork expands Microsoft 365 Copilot’s functionality beyond just chat, he said, with the agent able to complete work in the background so workers can focus on other tasks. “This allows you to amplify your work and be more productive while you multitask and work across all kinds of different Microsoft 365 applications,” said Lamanna.

Copilot Cowork “taps into the growing hype around Anthropic’s Claude Cowork concept,” said J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, and “significantly extends it by embedding the capability across Microsoft 365 applications rather than keeping it as a desktop-centric tool.” 

There are, however, some limitations compared to Anthropic’s tool. “Unlike Claude Cowork, [Copilot Cowork] does not support local computer use, cannot interact directly with local files or applications, and lacks native integrations with third-party tools and services,” Gartner analysts said in a research note. “These omissions constrain Cowork’s autonomy and limit its ability to operate end-to-end workloads outside Microsoft 365.”

There are also risks associated with deploying an agentic tool such as Copilot Cowork in a business setting, said Gownder: “Anthropic transparently suggests that sensitive information shouldn’t be used with Claude Cowork at this time,” he said. “In theory, adding [Copilot Cowork] to Microsoft 365 makes it cloud-enabled and scalable with greater data access…, if it works, which is not a given based on Copilot’s trajectory so far.”

There are also questions about whether the tool can live up to its promise of usefulness to business users. 

“Enterprise leaders tell me that Copilot, though backed by OpenAI’s models, consistently underperforms ChatGPT and ChatGPT Enterprise as part of the Copilot environment,” said Gownder. “Microsoft’s years of overpromising on Copilot mean that there exists a trust gap, so Copilot + Cowork will have a lot of work to do proving its utility.”

Copilot Cowork is available as a “research preview” via Microsoft’s early access Frontier Program. The company didn’t release pricing details.

Microsoft collaborated with Anthropic on the development of Copilot Cowork, another sign of divergence from its partnership with OpenAI. Microsoft also added Claude as an optional AI model to use in the core Copilot chat interface.

In addition, there are new “agentic experiences” for Microsoft 365 Copilot. These allow Microsoft 365 Copilot to act on documents as directed by the user — creating a pivot table, for instance, or slides for a presentation. It’s also possible to direct  actions using the Copilot chat interface, such as asking Copilot to draft an email and then send it without switching tools. 

“We want to really move from a simple prompt and response to Copilot actually doing the work for you,” said Zoe Hawtof, senior technical advisor for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The agent capabilities are available now in Word, Excel and Copilot Chat, and will roll out to Outlook and PowerPoint soon, Microsoft said.

Microsoft also revealed the launch date for Agent 365, the agent management and governance platform announced at Ignite last year. This will be generally available on May 1, priced at $15 per user each month. 

Microsoft said it has already deployed Agent 365 internally, where it’s used to manage 500,000 agents for purposes such as research, sales, and HR self-service. These agents have generated 65,000 responses a day for the past four weeks, Microsoft said.

Microsoft also unveiled its long-rumored E7 payment tier. Dubbed the “Frontier Suite,” E7 bundles all the features of Microsoft 365 E5 — including Entra Suite, Defender, Intune and Purview — with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365 in a single SKU.

Microsoft E7 “Frontier Suite” bundles all the features of Microsoft 365 E5 with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365 in a single SKU.
Microsoft

At $99 per user per month, E7 will sit above E5 as the most expensive SKU available to business customers when it launches May 1. Microsoft said it should save customers money compared to purchasing each product individually. (Although recent reports suggested E7 would include consumption-based pricing, Microsoft said that is not the case.)

Businesses are still largely just getting started on rolling out AI agents, said Jack Gold principal analyst at J. Gold Associates 

“Mass agent deployment is really in a go-slow mode right now, as enterprises remain cautious — as they do with many new technologies,” Gold said. “But there is certainly much experimentation going on, often in ‘shadow AI” modes.’”

Governance and security are “critical factors” that have a bearing on which AI agents to roll out and how to deploy them, said Gold. “We’re in an early stage of agents and so many enterprises are still deciding what standards to put in place and how IT will manage the potentially vast deployments.” 

For Microsoft customers, one of the challenges will simply be navigating the various agent products available. These can often overlap in terms of functionality.

“Microsoft’s ecosystem is gaining all sorts of agents and solutions, and understanding when to use one over the other is already confusing,” said Gownder.

Other AI agent tools with similar capabilities include Researcher, launched last year, and Copilot Tasks, announced just a few weeks ago, he said. Meanwhile “users are creating Copilot Agents that are proliferating into agentic sprawl, but that apparently haven’t solved user problems…, so they’re bringing in Cowork.

“It’s a complicated environment,” said Gownder.

Source:: Computer World

By Moinak Pal Researchers have developed a smart pillow that streams music and podcasts, offering users a relaxing alternative to doomscrolling on smartphones before bedtime.
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By Ana-Maria Stanciuc The camera nods, dances to music, and tracks faces. The rest of the specs are a secret. Something unusual happened at Mobile World Congress this year. A device sat in a glass case at the Honor booth in Hall 3,  present, demonstrably functional, performing little robotic gestures for anyone who stopped to watch,  and yet […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Ana-Maria Stanciuc Caitlin Kalinowski spent 16 months building OpenAI’s physical AI programme. On Saturday, she said the company moved too fast on something too important. The week that began with Anthropic being blacklisted by the Pentagon and ended with OpenAI taking its contract has now claimed OpenAI’s most senior hardware executive. Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined OpenAI in […] This story continues at The Next Web

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Threat actors are trying a different tactic to sucker employees into falling for ClickFix phishing attacks that install malware, says Microsoft.

Rather than asking potential victims to copy and paste a (malicious) command into the Run dialog, launched by hitting the Windows button plus the letter R, they are being told to use the Windows + X → I shortcut to launch Windows Terminal (wt.exe) directly.

Once the terminal is opened, victims are prompted to paste in malicious PowerShell commands delivered through fake CAPTCHA pages, troubleshooting prompts, or verification-style lures designed to appear routine and benign.

Why? Going this route evades defenses looking for unusual run commands, and it bypasses security awareness training that tells employees not to do anything that invokes the Run command.

Microsoft described the tactic in a post on X this week, saying what makes this campaign notable are the post-compromise outcomes. In one case, several Windows Terminal/PowerShell instances are opened that ultimately launch another Powershell process responsible for decoding embedded hex commands.

The decoded PowerShell script then downloads a legitimate but renamed 7-Zip binary and saves it with a randomized file name, along with a zipped payload. The renamed archive utility extracts and runs the malware, which executes a multi-stage attack chain that includes retrieval of additional payloads, establishment of persistence through scheduled tasks, defense evasion through Microsoft Defender exclusions, and exfiltration of stolen machine and network data.

In a second attack path, the victim pastes a hex-encoded, XOR-compressed command into Windows Terminal. This command downloads a randomly named batch file to AppDataLocal that is then invoked through cmd.exe to write a VBScript to %Temp%. The batch script is executed via cmd.exe with the /launched command-line argument, and is then executed again through MSBuild.exe, resulting in LOLBin abuse. The script connects to Crypto Blockchain RPC endpoints, indicating etherhiding technique, and also performs QueueUserAPC()-based code injection into chrome.exe and msedge.exe processes to harvest web and login data.

But is this really new?

However, a number of experts quickly added comments to the Microsoft post complaining that the Windows + X tactic isn’t new.

 Roger Grimes, CISO advisor at awareness training provider KnowBe4, agreed.

“ClickFix attacks using Win+X instead of Win+R have been around for at least six months, if not a year or more,” he said in an email. “What they are doing during execution is not new.”

Regardless, he added, the continuing and increasing use of ClickFix attacks means infosec leaders still need to educate employees about them.

“We’ve long had training content around this type of attack. Users need to know that nothing legitimate will ever ask them to do Win+ whatever keys to paste gobblygook to run code. Anything that does that should simply not be performed,” he said.

“And all Windows computers should already be restricted so that random, unsigned (not signed by the organization), PowerShell commands should not be allowed. Every organization and machine should already have the following PowerShell command setting: ‘Set-ExecutionPolicy Restricted -Force‘ enabled. If not, your organization’s cybersecurity risk is far higher than it needs to be.” 

Payload chain ‘built to last’

Joshua Roback, principal security solution architect at Swimlane, noted the campaign outlined by Microsoft pushes the ClickFix playbook into more trusted, everyday workflows by getting users to run pasted command content inside legitimate Windows tooling that feels routine and safe. That matters, he said, because it slips past the usual mental red flags people associate with sketchy popups, and it can also dodge some of the controls and detections that security teams have tuned to the more obvious ClickFix patterns.

The payload chain is also more built to last than previous variants, he added. Instead of a quick one-and-done retrieval trick, it uses a more layered delivery and persistence approach that helps it blend in, stick around longer, and quietly escalate the damage once it lands. One path adds an additional indirection layer that helps the attacker’s infrastructure blend in and stay reachable, which can make takedowns and straightforward blocking a lot less effective.

For CISOs, he said, the message to employees has to be clear. “Use a simple rule of thumb: never run pasted commands, never approve unexpected sign-ins, and report all incidents through official company support channels.”

How ClickFix works

ClickFix phishing campaigns began in 2024, Microsoft noted in a security blog last year that detailed the campaign’s tactics and indicators of compromise. The attack starts with an employee being asked to click on a link or open an attachment, often with a payment or invoice theme, within an email or text. To evade defenses looking to stop employees downloading unapproved files, the user is told in a popup box to “verify the download” by opening a Run dialog and copying and pasting something into it.

The goal is to get the unwitting victim to download malware such as infostealers (usually LummaStealer), remote access tools such as Xworm, AsyncRAT, NetSupport, and SectopRAT; loaders like Latrodectus and MintsLoader; and rootkits.

In the blog, Microsoft provides tips to defenders for fighting ClickFix attacks, including recommending they enable PowerShell script block logging to detect and analyze obfuscated or encoded commands, which would provide visibility into malicious script execution that might otherwise evade traditional logging.

This article originally appeared on CSOonline.

Source:: Computer World

As more European organizations reconsider their reliance on US technology suppliers amid rising geopolitical and trade tensions, public sector organizations are leading the way in a potential shift to local tech providers. 

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is moving tens of thousands of employees from Microsoft apps Office, Windows and Exchange to open-source alternatives, for example, while Denmarks’ Ministry of Digitalization has begun to phase out Office 365 in favor of LibreOffice. The French government recently announced plans to swap Microsoft Teams and Zoom for its own video conferencing platform for 200,000 employees – potentially saving €2 million a year in licensing costs.

These are exceptions, however, and the European public sector is still heavily reliant on US suppliers. 

The German federal government spends €481 million on Microsoft licenses annually, a figure revealed in a response to a recent written inquiry by Rebecca Lenhard, a member of German Parliament representing the Green Party. That’s only the spending at a federal level, with the total amount across German states “certainly even higher,” said Lenhard, speaking during a roundtable discussion hosted by German open source software vendor, Nextcloud, this week. “It’s a lot of money we are investing in one company that we are completely dependent on.”

The recent surge in interest around European digital sovereignty is driven by a desire to reduce the use of non-European suppliers.  

Not all see it as a positive development. Several tech leaders recently voiced concerns about digital sovereignty strategies, which they claim could increase business costs and slow user adoption of digital technologies in the region, hampering productivity and competitiveness.

Still, the notion of digital sovereignty continues to gain traction among European organizations, a growing number of which plan to increase cloud computing spend with local providers. Sovereign cloud infrastructure-as-a-service revenues are set to triple by the end of 2027, according to Gartner. 

The topic has become a strategic focus at a national government and EU level. Last  November, French and German leaders pledged to increase the use of open-source technologies among government organizations as part of that push. 

Open-source software should be the “default” across Germany’s public sector, said Lenhard, a member of the Bundestag’s Committee on Digital Transformation and Government Modernization.

“Public procurement is one of the critical points where we have to change,” said Kim van Sparrentak, a Dutch member of the European Parliament representing Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance. A “buy European” approach should be favored where possible, said van Sparrentak, “not as prerequisite for all technologies — because it’s maybe not possible yet — but for the critical aspects of government at least.” 

The state can also serve as a “valuable anchor client,” said Lenhard, supporting the growth of a wider ecosystem of European tech and service providers, which is currently dwarfed by the US tech sector. This would give businesses the ability to “plan demand better, [and] invest the money in their products so they become better and better,” she said.

A 2025 report by Cigref — a non-profit that represents French businesses and public administrations — estimates that European organizations spend a total €265 billion on US software and service each year. 

Mirko Boehm, senior director for Community Development at the Linux Foundation Europe, said policy makers should “require that every major IT procurement includes an assessment of strategic dependency.

“If a ministry in one of the member states signs a contract with a hyperscaler, that’s not just an IT decision, it’s an industrial policy decision, a skills development decision, a technology transfer decision, and a digital sovereignty decision,” said Boehm. “These are all costs that are currently not considered in procurement.”

Every euro invested in public sector procurement generates multiples more in subsequent economic activity, said Boeh, a benefit that Europe misses out on by purchasing most of its technologies from US tech companies. 

“When European governments, for example, purchase from non-European hyperscalers, that multiplier effect builds in their innovation ecosystem — not in ours,” said Boehm. “The jobs, the supplier networks, the research and development investments, the tax base — all of that compounds somewhere else.”

Boehm said open-source technologies can provide an alternative for European organizations to “retain this econonic multiplier.

“The dependency that we currently see is basically a choice, a choice we made. It’s not an inevitability,” he said. “We have the options…. We need a political will.”

Source:: Computer World

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