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Microsoft

5 items across 4 editions · appeared in the last 2 editions in a row. First seen Fri 11 Sep, last seen Tue 15 Sep. Traced across 1 weekly review.

How this story has evolved

From the week in review: the connections, developments and open questions filed under Microsoft, newest week first.

Week of 7–13 September 2026

Development · Tue 8 Sep, Wed 9 Sep
Microsoft patches at least 974 flaws, its biggest batch ever, while only 0.8% of 26,153 Claude-found vulnerabilities are recorded as fixed

On 8 September Microsoft issued updates for "at least 974 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, by far its biggest single patch batch ever", Krebs on Security reports. It "obliterates the software giant's previous record set in July, when it released updates for at least 570 security vulnerabilities", and brings 2026's total to "more than 2,600, more than twice Microsoft's previous record-setting patch year in 2020 (1,245) and with three more months to go". Two zero-days under active exploitation, CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880, were fixed; "Fully 113 of the bugs addressed today earned Microsoft's 'critical' rating."

Tuesday, 15 September 2026

Microsoft publishes its draft MAI Code of Conduct, barring exploit code and putting model behaviour under a chain of command UpdateCompany claim

  • Microsoft AI published the draft Code of Conduct for its MAI models on 14 September, saying "Feedback opens today and runs for the next six weeks" and that a revised version is expected later this year. Microsoft describes the text as "a work-in-progress" first draft.
  • SecurityWeek reports the code blocks models from producing "working exploit code, attack tooling, planning and targeting methodologies, intrusion procedures, evasion techniques, operational guidance, or other assistance that would enable or improve a cyberattack", while permitting authorised defensive work including vulnerability discovery, malware analysis and proof-of-concept development.
  • Microsoft says there are "Absolute Constraints, things the models should never do, covering areas like weapons of mass harm, child safety, and harmful manipulation at scale", and that the code is designed so MAI models "will never resist human interruption, correction, or shutdown", will not "widen their own scope, take on goals no human has given them, or hide their reasoning from the people auditing them".
  • SecurityWeek describes a three-tier authority structure — the code itself, then operator policies, then user preferences — in which "tool outputs, file contents, webpages and messages from other AI systems carry no authority on their own". This follows Satya Nadella's statement, covered in an earlier edition, that Microsoft would publish such a document; the contents are the new facts. The draft sets out no consequences for a violation and Microsoft has published no measurement of how often the current models comply.

Monday, 14 September 2026

Nadella backs "deliberate pacing" and says Microsoft will publish a Code of Conduct for its MAI models Company claimUpdate

  • In a post on 13 September, Microsoft chairman and chief executive Satya Nadella wrote: "Any pursuit of superintelligence has to be grounded in the core principle that if the AI we build is not helping humanity and under human control, it's not worth pursuing."
  • Responding to Amodei's essay, Nadella wrote: "we welcome the research, focus, and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right as the design goal. We also welcome ideas like 'embedded evaluators' and the broader efforts to develop the mechanisms to make this more than just talk." He added that this "cannot be controlled by a handful of entities, but must have broad representation across the ecosystem, countries, and fields, including academia."
  • He said Microsoft would publish "the 'Code of Conduct' that underlies our own first party MAI models that we'll publish tomorrow for public consultation". Unite.AI, reporting the post on 13 September, says the document was due on 14 September and describes the MAI family as seven in-house models introduced in June 2026.
  • This is a statement of intent by a company. The Code of Conduct had not been published by the close of this window, so nothing in it can be assessed, and Microsoft has not said whether pacing would change anything about its release schedule.

Microsoft study: bash-only agents beat typed tools by 21.8 to 24.5 points on TheAgentCompany mixedPreprint

  • "Is Bash All You Need? An Empirical Study of Tool Interfaces for Enterprise Digital Worker Agents" (arXiv 2609.11999, submitted 10 September, announced 14 September) compares five tool interfaces on TheAgentCompany and APEX-Agents using Opus-4.8 and GPT-5.5. The corresponding author's address is at Microsoft.
  • The abstract reports: "Bash alone outperforms typed tools on both benchmarks, improving score by 21.8-24.5 pp on TheAgentCompany and 4.8-7.4 pp on APEX-Agents while using 19-72% fewer total tokens."
  • Adding typed tools or persistent agent-synthesized tools on top of bash "produces no detectable pooled score gain", and programmatic tool calling — which restricts actions to a fixed typed catalog — "generally underperforms bash alone in both quality and cost efficiency".
  • Preprint, not peer reviewed. The authors' own recommendation is conditional: bash alone "when arbitrary execution can be isolated", and programmatic tool calling where security or compliance policy requires a fixed catalog — the trade-off the headline number does not price.

Saturday, 12 September 2026

Microsoft invoice-fraud campaign impersonated ServiceNow and asked accounts-payable teams for about $50,000 per payment harmfulCompany claimUpdate

  • The Record reported on 11 September that the early-August campaign targeted more than one million users and solicited payments of roughly $50,000 each from accounts-payable departments, with about 88% of recipients in the United States.
  • Microsoft says the campaign "layered executive impersonation, vendor branding, fabricated invoices, and supporting email conversations into a unified narrative intended to reduce recipient skepticism" — including fabricated correspondence from ServiceNow to build a false invoice chain.
  • Microsoft identified markers "consistent with AI-assisted template development" — extensive HTML comments, structured section labelling and highly uniform template construction — but says it cannot definitively confirm the extent of generative AI use.
  • This adds detail to yesterday's item on the same campaign. Microsoft's caveat is the point worth holding onto: the AI attribution here is inferred from template artefacts, not observed.

Friday, 11 September 2026

Microsoft: AI-assisted invoice-fraud campaign sent over 1 million phishing emails in three days, 87.7% aimed at US targets harmful

  • Microsoft reported on 10 September a business email compromise campaign that sent more than 1 million phishing emails between 3 and 5 August, with 87.7% directed at users in the United States, targeting IT services, business advisory and consumer goods firms. Messages impersonated executives and requested ACH payments of nearly $50,000 per target.
  • Microsoft attributes AI assistance to the template construction rather than to the sending infrastructure, citing extensive HTML comments, structured section labelling, verbose descriptive comments, em dashes, banner formatting and highly uniform templates whose invoice identifiers stayed constant while organisation details changed per target.
  • Named indicators include the ServiceNow-impersonating domain service-nowinc[.]com and domainlify[.]net in reply-to addresses. Recommended mitigations are automatic attack disruption in Defender XDR, Zero-hour Auto Purge, and correctly configured SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
  • Microsoft does not name a threat actor, and the AI evidence is stylistic inference from artefacts left in the templates rather than direct observation of a model in use. No losses are quantified.