Microsoft CEO on rogue AI agents, super laptops and Clippy

Then, the HomeView gets the meme treatment, plus an Old Thing from the days before people did math on screens.

🗓️ Reminder: You'll have to survive without me until next week. Tomorrow, I'm off on a special video shoot. Try to be strong. 🗓️

Every couple of years, I sit down with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, with cameras rolling, to talk about computers. Sometimes we talk about new laptops. Other times, Bing. (Remember when Bing was going to change everything?)

This time, though, the stakes felt higher. With fears growing about rogue AI agents and AI doing more harm than good, Microsoft finds itself right in the thick of it. After all, Windows runs on more than a billion computers worldwide. Not only could those computers become targets for rogue agents, but Windows itself could become the place where those agents do their work.

Which is exactly why Microsoft is reengineering Windows for the AI agent era. It's also teaming up with Nvidia to build a ridiculously powerful laptop that can run advanced AI models right on the machine itself. The new Surface Laptop Ultra, starting at $2,600, is essentially a mini AI data center you can carry around. It also looks so much like a MacBook Pro. 

So I had some questions. I interviewed Nadella (and other Microsoft executives) after the company’s big event last week. We talked about the future of computers, whether we can trust AI agents and, naturally, whether AI is going to kill us. Nadella even showed me his own locally vibecoded app. 

Go watch the full interview here. Here are my three biggest takeaways:

Nadella wants AI agents doing more of the work on our computers. Just one tiny catch: He doesn't think we should trust them.

“I think of all agents as insider risk and treat them as such—or all models as insider risk,” he told me.

It's a striking admission from the head of a company that's building not only AI models but the OS where those potentially risky AI agents will operate. Yet that's Nadella’s big bet: that Windows will become the safest home for them.

Windows is being updated to give agents their own identities, separate from their human users’. They'll operate in isolated environments, have restricted permissions and be monitored by security software.

“They need to be separate,” Nadella said. “They need to be contained separately. They need to be governed separately. Permissioned separately.” 

Windows users know a thing or two about antivirus software. So naturally, I had to ask Nadella: Are we going to need antivirus protection for our AI now? “100%,” he replied, pointing to Windows Defender as the solution.

“My Defender is tracking what the agent is doing behaviorally. And when it tries to do something that is unauthorized or bad, it flags it and sort of shuts it down,” he said.

The new Surface Laptop Ultra is a beast. Starting at $2,600, it’s powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip and has up to 128 GB of memory.

Most AI models today do their thinking in massive cloud data centers. But this machine can run powerful models right on the laptop. As Nadella put it, “last year's frontier is running now on this laptop.”

That means more privacy, offline AI and potentially less reliance on energy-hungry data centers. After some tinkering with GitHub Copilot and OpenClaw, I finally got local models running and watched the GPU usage shoot up.  

But the real treat was Nadella showing me an app he'd built himself using a local AI model. It's a personalized productivity dashboard connecting his email, to-do lists and customer information. (He also made VERY sure we blurred everything on the screen.) His vision is hybrid AI, where agents seamlessly tap local and cloud models depending on the task.

“It's not about the local model or the cloud model. It's this hybrid moment we are in,” he said.

And yes, the Surface Laptop Ultra looks an awful lot like a MacBook Pro. I asked Microsoft's head of Windows and devices, Pavan Davuluri, about the resemblance. He didn't exactly deny it. “Of course, we would welcome folks to jump onto Windows and build on top of the Surface Laptop Ultra,” he said.

Microsoft has spent the last few years putting its AI assistant into every corner of Windows—and not everyone has been thrilled.

“In fact, we've done a lot to make sure that it's only there when you want it,” Nadella said. Microsoft's head of Copilot, Jacob Andreou, told me Copilot now has fewer entry points than before, even as user engagement has increased.

But Nadella acknowledged that the industry's challenges go well beyond annoying software features. As AI systems become more powerful and autonomous, he argued that companies should be more deliberate about how quickly they deploy them.

“There's a lot of science work that needs to be done in a careful way. I love this term that people throw around called ‘pacing,’” he said. “I think of it as when you're growing something new, building something, engineering something that is complex. You take your time, and that's what we're going to do.”

My conversations with tech executives—from Meta's Mark Zuckerberg to OpenAI's Greg Brockman—keep coming back to a future when computers can do more things humans can. Meta is betting on smart glasses. OpenAI seems to be betting on voice and some mysterious new device.

Nadella? He's still a PC guy. While Microsoft is exploring new devices, he called the desktop “a beautiful form factor” for AI agents.

“The future of computers looks like something that I can turn to to have it do things that I always wanted to do but never got around to doing,” he said.

I asked whether he was still alive in this AI-powered future. You know, because the computers hadn't killed him. “I am alive because, you know, I made the computer do things that made this world a better place for all of us.”

At the end of every month, I inevitably get some version of this message from my bookkeeper (let’s call him Booky McBookkeeper): “Joanna, what exactly was this charge, and what project was it for?”

Mercury is trying to eliminate some of that back-and-forth with Mercury Books, its new accounting software built directly into your Mercury account.

That means your banking, invoices, bill pay, receipts and transaction details can all live together. Mercury Books can automatically categorize and reconcile transactions as you go, cutting down on manual work—and, ideally, the number of “What was this?” emails from Mr. McBookkeeper.

And you don’t have to wait for your books to catch up to understand how the business is doing. You can pull current P&Ls, cash-flow reports and balance sheets for a much more up-to-date view.

Basically: fewer spreadsheets, fewer mystery transactions, more useful numbers. I have a feeling Booky McBookkeeper is really going to like this.

As you hopefully know by now (assuming you actually read this newsletter!), Apple announced its HomeView smart hub on Tuesday. You can read my initial impressions here, but what does the internet think? Oh, it has THOUGHTS. And memes. Presenting a special edition HomeView LOLz:

Name: Doug Redding

What's your old thing? Keuffel & Esser Model 4053-3 Slide Rule

What year is your old thing from? Made from 1909-1912 (Patented June 5, 1900 #2,086,502)

Why do you love your old thing? This slide rule belonged to my grandfather Frank (born in 1892). He was an engineer for the Southern California Edison company for 50 years and lived most of his adult life in San Gabriel, CA. According to the National Museum of American History, slide rules are analog calculators that use linear or logarithmic scales to perform calculations—from basic arithmetic to complex trigonometry. From the late 19th century until around 1970, they were the go-to calculating tools for engineers and pretty much anyone whose job involved serious math. No battery required. My grandfather retired about the time I was born, in 1954. He once showed me how to use it but, sadly, I’ve long since forgotten.

This newsletter was written and curated by Joanna Stern and Adele Lowitz.