How Microsoft is betting on AI agents in Windows, dusting off a winning playbook from the past www.geekwire.com/2025/how-…
A new framework called Agent Launchers, introduced earlier this month as a preview in the latest Windows Insider build, lets developers register agents directly with the operating system. They can describe an agent through what’s known as a manifest, which then lets the agent show up in the Windows taskbar, inside Microsoft Copilot, and across other apps.
Microsoft’s Windows team is betting that agents tightly linked to the operating system will win out over ones that merely run on top of it, just as a new class of Windows apps replaced a patchwork of DOS programs in the early days of the graphical operating system.
Agents are meant to maintain this context across apps, ask follow-up questions, and take actions on a user’s behalf. That requires a different level of trust than Windows has ever had to manage, which is already raising difficult questions for the company.
Microsoft acknowledges that agents introduce unique security risks. In a support document, the company warned that malicious content embedded in files or interface elements could override an agent’s instructions — potentially leading to stolen data or malware installation.
