China's AGIBOT sets a Guinness World Record by deploying 110 humanoid robots to dance in sync, showcasing advances in robot coordination and fleet automation.

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Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, including Copilot and Windows staff. Here's what the workforce changes could mean for enterprise IT teams.

The post Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 60,000 Staff in Windows, Copilot appeared first on TechRepublic.

AI psychic apps are drawing pushback from human practitioners, with some advertising AI-free readings. Others are being invited to train digital doubles that could serve clients while they’re offline and share the revenue.

Amazon has unveiled a new Alexa lineup featuring the Echo Show 16, Echo Time smart clock, and Alexa Photo Frame. Two speakers join them: an upgraded Echo Dot with a built-in smart home hub and the Echo Studio with Home Camera, which lets Alexa+ see its surroundings. Both are available now for $99.99 and $249.99, […]

Amazon's other new devices include an upgraded Echo Dot, an Echo Studio with visual intelligence features, and the Echo Show 16.

There are plenty of “robot” projects out there that are really just a small remote control platform of some sort. We often like to think of robots of having some sort of autonomy though. [Luca Fagioli] demonstrates a great example of this with his explorer robot that uses Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) to navigate its environment.

The robot is a built on a small plastic chassis, with one gear motor per drive wheel. Running the show is an Arduino Uno R4 Wi-Fi, paired with the Sensor Shield 5.0 and an L298N motor driver board. There’s also an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor module onboard, mounted atop an SG-90 servo motor so it can be panned around. The ultrasonic sensor determines the range between the robot and surrounding walls, and a map is constructed at the same time as the robot is localizing itself within it. There are also infrared sensors on the bottom of the robot for detecting tape marks on the floor for checkpointing purposes.

Often, SLAM mapping is done with advanced laser rangefinders or time of flight sensors, but there are many ways to go about it as this project demonstrates. We’ve even seen it done in a distributed manner with coordinated drones combining their efforts. Overall, it’s a highly useful technique for robot navigation and wayfinding.

Update, 10/28: Microsoft’s Azure cloud business brought in $33.2 billion in revenue in the September quarter, up 48% from a year earlier, blowing past the company’s own forecast and beating Wall Street’s expectations. Read the full story.

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Microsoft’s earnings report Wednesday will come two days after the company offered buyouts to about 60,000 people, roughly a quarter of its employees. The call gives executives their first chance to say what the offer will cost, and to explain how it fits with the company’s long-term view of its workforce.

Whether or not they go into those details, it’s one of several issues to watch in Wednesday’s report, the first under Microsoft’s new reporting structure. Anthropic’s IPO filing on Monday adds another storyline, showing how much the Claude maker has agreed to spend on Microsoft’s cloud.

Coming into the report, Microsoft’s stock is near its high. Microsoft closed Monday at $532.60, about 2% below its record close of $543.45 on Oct. 13, after gaining roughly $1.4 trillion in market value since late June.

Here are the key numbers and issues heading into Microsoft’s results for the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year, ended Sept. 30.

Core numbers: Analysts expect revenue of $90.75 billion, up nearly 17% from a year ago, and earnings of $4.72 per share, up 14%, according to Yahoo Finance. Microsoft’s own forecast was $89.85 billion to $90.95 billion, so Wall Street is looking for a result near the top of that range.

In July, Microsoft reported $90 billion in revenue for the June quarter, well above the $87.7 billion analysts expected.

A new scorecard: Microsoft announced in September that it would sort its business into two groups instead of the three it had used since 2015. This is the first quarter under the new setup.

The first, dubbed Agents and Infra, includes Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics, LinkedIn’s recruiting and sales tools, and server and productivity licensing. It brought in 81% of Microsoft’s revenue and 88% of its operating income in fiscal 2026, based on figures Microsoft recast under the new structure.

Microsoft expects Agents and Infra revenue of $75.15 billion to $75.75 billion this quarter, which would be growth of about 22% to 23%, by GeekWire’s calculation.

The other group, Devices and Consumer, includes Windows, Xbox and search advertising. Microsoft expects it to bring in $14.7 billion to $15.2 billion, down 5% to 8% from a year earlier.

Azure, in dollars: Microsoft started disclosing Azure’s annual revenue last year, when it passed $75 billion, and topped $100 billion in fiscal 2026. Starting this quarter, it reports the figure every quarter. It also changed what counts as Azure: GitHub’s cloud business and Security Copilot now fall under Microsoft 365, and its healthcare cloud moved to a new industry unit.

Counted that way, Azure brought in $29.4 billion in the June quarter, up 42%. Microsoft expects growth of 44% to 45% this quarter, not counting currency fluctuations, which would put Azure at roughly $32 billion, by GeekWire’s calculation. That compares with the roughly 45% Microsoft projected in July, under the old definition.

Hitting that forecast may not be enough. Investors are looking for about 46%, BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski wrote in a note Monday. In January, Azure beat Microsoft’s own forecast and the stock still fell 10%, because investors had privately expected more.

“Azure moves the stock, but the read that matters is whether capacity is absorbed as fast as it lands,” wrote Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives in a note last week.

Capital spending: Microsoft expects capital expenditures of more than $50 billion for the quarter, which would be a record. That’s up from $41 billion in the June quarter and $34.9 billion a year earlier.

An accounting change reduces what Microsoft reports as capital spending, without reducing its planned investment. Microsoft now assumes its data center buildings will last 25 years instead of 15. As a result, more of its data center leases will be classified in a way that doesn’t count as capital spending, CFO Amy Hood said on the July earnings call.

That change alone lowered Microsoft’s capital spending estimate for calendar 2026 to about $175 billion, from the roughly $190 billion it projected in April. Hood said the company’s actual spending plans hadn’t changed.

Cloud margins: Microsoft Cloud gross margin came in at 65% last quarter, better than expected but down from a year earlier. Microsoft said it expects the figure to be relatively stable this quarter. It also expects operating margins to be roughly flat with a year ago.

Workforce: The new “voluntary exit” offer, announced Monday by Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, covers participating teams in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and India. It has no age or tenure requirement and extends to some vice presidents. Employees have until the first week of December to decide, and Microsoft hasn’t said how much the offer will cost or when it will record the charge.

For the spring retirement program, Hood disclosed the cost on the April earnings call: about $900 million, with roughly $350 million in cost of revenue and $550 million in operating expenses. The charge showed up in the following quarter. About 30% of the 8,750 eligible employees accepted.

The new offer is less generous. It matches Microsoft’s standard severance, without the extended healthcare of the spring program, and the company expects a much smaller share of people to take it. But the pool of eligible employees is nearly seven times larger.

Microsoft says the offer doesn’t mean it needs fewer people. Coleman said in July that the company was studying whether to make voluntary exits a regular part of managing its workforce. It has told investors to expect operating margins roughly flat this quarter and down less than a point for the full fiscal year, even with record capital spending.

Nadella has addressed this before. In a July 2025 memo to employees, after Microsoft laid off about 15,000 people, he acknowledged the “uncertainty and seeming incongruence” of thriving financially while cutting jobs. “This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value,” he wrote.

In his annual shareholder letter last week, he focused on Microsoft’s spending on AI infrastructure. “Based on the demand we see and the efficiencies we are driving, I am confident in the long-term returns on our investments,” Nadella wrote. “We are building against a growing book of business tied to this secular shift.”

Microsoft had about 223,000 employees as of June 30, before it cut 4,800 jobs in July and more in September. The Information reported this month that Azure President Girish Bablani told leaders in his group to find ways to cut costs by at least 20%. Microsoft called the report inaccurate and said Azure leadership had not directed teams to develop cost-cutting plans.

Copilot: Microsoft said in July that businesses were paying for more than 30 million Microsoft 365 Copilot seats, up from 20 million in April. That’s still only about 7% of the more than 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 seats.

The bigger change is in how Microsoft charges for Copilot and its other AI tools. In July it added usage-based billing alongside per-seat pricing. It’s also pushing customers toward E7, a new premium bundle that includes Copilot. Microsoft expects Microsoft 365 commercial cloud revenue to grow about 17% this quarter, not counting currency swings, a number that now includes GitHub.

The BNP Paribas analyst Slowinski, who attended Microsoft’s Frontier Tour event in London last week, wrote that partners are seeing more customers roll out Copilot company-wide. Partners also told him that Microsoft now ties 35% of E7 sales incentives to how much customers use features like Cowork.

Anthropic and OpenAI: Anthropic’s S-1 filing shows the company has committed to spend at least $44.9 billion with Microsoft from November 2026 to May 2033, up from the $30 billion Azure commitment announced last November. That’s well below its minimum commitments to Amazon ($110 billion) and Google ($114.5 billion).

Microsoft agreed last year to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic. Its results for the June quarter included a $3.2 billion gain on that investment.

OpenAI remains the bigger factor. Microsoft’s commercial remaining performance obligation (RPO), the measure of signed contracts it hasn’t yet delivered on, reached $678 billion last quarter, up 84% from a year earlier. Without OpenAI, the backlog grew 25%. OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue approached $50 billion at the end of September, The Information reported, lower than earlier reports of about $70 billion.

Windows: Microsoft expects revenue from Windows licenses sold to PC makers, along with its own devices, to fall a little more than 20%. Higher memory prices are making PCs more expensive, and PC makers are still working through extra inventory.

What’s next: Alphabet also reports Wednesday afternoon, and Amazon reports Thursday, setting up a side-by-side look at Azure, Google Cloud and AWS.

Anthropic is aiming to go public the week of Nov. 16, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Check back Wednesday afternoon for coverage.

Microsoft Copilot Notebooks turns project files into working drafts. Check feature access, source accuracy, sharing permissions, and review time before adoption.

The post Copilot Notebooks Turns Project Files Into Drafts: What to Check appeared first on TechRepublic.

Swedish Government Offices block direct ChatGPT and Claude access but retain Copilot. Learn what the restrictions mean for workplace AI security policies.

The post Swedish Government Offices Block ChatGPT, Claude; Keep Copilot appeared first on TechRepublic.

Nvidia and Agile Robots unveiled Agile ONE SN, a compact humanoid with Jetson Thor computing and Isaac GR00T training tools. Here's what it can do, its specifications, and when it launches.

The post Agile ONE SN Humanoid Robot Bundles Nvidia’s Robotics Stack appeared first on TechRepublic.

Grok Bot can now connect with Calendar, Reminders, Contacts, Messages, and more on your phone, turning the chatbot into a proper assistant.

With AI progressing so fast, it’s only a matter of time before we start getting AI companions like the ones we used to see in movies like R2-D2, Wall-E, or Baymax. Now, Singapore-based OKA Technology has unveiled Mori, a cute little AI companion that looks less like a conventional home robot and more like someone […]

Spyware, tracking and shared accounts need human help. Here’s what to do before trusting a chatbot’s tech-safety advice.

When Stripe co-founder John Collison interviewed Satya Nadella on his company’s podcast last fall, he asked the Microsoft CEO for advice on building a platform business. Collison will soon get to see how Microsoft does it up close.

Collison, 36, the co-founder and president of the Bay Area-based payments platform, has been nominated to Microsoft’s board, the tech giant disclosed Wednesday in its annual proxy statement.

He would fill one of two board seats opening up at Microsoft’s Dec. 8 annual meeting. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman said in June that he would leave, and the proxy reveals that Disney CFO Hugh Johnston, who chairs the board’s audit committee, is not seeking re-election either. Both have served on the board since 2017.

The proxy also notes that former EY CEO Carmine Di Sibio, appointed to the board in May, will stand for election by shareholders for the first time.

Microsoft’s board currently has 13 members, including Di Sibio. With Hoffman and Johnston leaving and Collison joining, it will go back to 12, the same number it had before Di Sibio joined in May.

Microsoft says Collison “brings extensive entrepreneurial and operational experience, along with deep expertise in technology.” He started Stripe with his brother, Patrick, in 2010, and businesses using Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in payments in 2025. Collison does not sit on any other public company board.

The board determined that he is independent, after considering ordinary business dealings between Microsoft and companies tied to its directors. The proxy doesn’t mention any business between Microsoft and Stripe, but the two companies already work together.

Stripe helps power Copilot Checkout, which Microsoft launched in January to let U.S. users of its AI assistant buy from Etsy sellers and other retailers without leaving the chat. In 2023, the companies teamed up to let businesses take card payments for paid events in Microsoft Teams.

The companies’ work together came up in the November episode of Stripe’s “Cheeky Pint” podcast. Collison said Stripe was building a platform business in agentic commerce, in which AI agents shop and pay on behalf of people, and asked Nadella what advice he had for a company building in such an early market.

Nadella said the key would be making it simple for small merchants to sell through AI agents, without asking them to set up servers or adopt a string of new technical protocols themselves.

The relationship goes back years. Nadella said he first visited Stripe’s San Francisco office when he was running Microsoft’s cloud business, before he became CEO.

He said Stripe reminded Microsoft of something it had once been good at, “following the developer, being where the startups are,” and said that thinking “led me even to GitHub,” the code-sharing platform Microsoft acquired in 2018 for $7.5 billion.

Microsoft will remove eight OneDrive Copilot shortcuts from File Explorer starting in November 2026, changing how users access AI-powered file tools.

The post Microsoft Is Removing 8 Copilot Shortcuts From File Explorer — Here’s What Stays appeared first on TechRepublic.

While Hackaday doesn’t maintain a crime blotter, we couldn’t help but start this week’s post off with a bit of civil disobedience — a retired professor from the University of Pennsylvania was arrested earlier this week for standing in front of a delivery robot.

Granted, she was standing there for long enough that the police were eventually called, but still. Previous reporting indicates that Carolyn Marvin has a history of blocking delivery robots as a form of protest, but this is the first time law enforcement got involved. We’re not lawyers here at Hackaday, so we can’t say for sure whether or not blocking the progress of a robot engaged in commercial operation actually violates any laws. But we do know that refusing a lawful request from a police officer will get you in trouble, and that seems to be what Marvin was actually charged with when she refused to move.

From a robot stopped in its tracks to one that keeps on trucking, NASA is reporting that the odometer on the Perseverance Mars rover recently ticked over to 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers). That might not seem like a lot, but it officially makes it the most traveled rover in the solar system, breaking the record set by Opportunity at 28.06 miles (45.16 km). One might expect that the Curiosity rover would hold the distance record as it had been rolling around on the surface for more than a decade before Perseverance dropped into the neighborhood, but the different scientific missions of the two nearly identical rovers have taken them on very different courses.

On the subject of navigation, MapQuest recently announced the availability of the “Surveillance Layer” in their smartphone application. When enabled, it shows the location of known license plate readers and cameras on the map, allowing the user to plan their route accordingly. A note in the application’s user interface mentions that they’re pulling at least some of this data from OpenStreetMap, though it’s not clear currently if other sources such as DeFlock are being used.

Finally, we have an update on the Christie’s auction for the carrier pigeon data packet sent back in 2001 by Norway’s Bergen Linux User Group. The auction house thought the framed datagram might fetch as much as $3,000 USD, but when the hammer finally went down earlier this week the winning bid was a staggering $20,480. Given all the weird gadgets we’ve picked up on a whim, we’re not in a position to lecture anyone else about how they spend their money…but damn.

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See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

"A human defeated two of the three robots he faced in a cage fight recently held in San Francisco," reports the Los Angeles Times, noting that videos of the event drew more than 10 million views on YouTube. But "the humans behind that fight could face a battle of their own — the legal type — if they want to hold another event like 'Human Vs. Robot,' the Sept. 18 competition that placed influencer Frankie LaPenna inside an octagon to battle three humanoid robots that were controlled remotely by a human operator in separate MMA-style fights..." Wearing spiked gloves, a helmet and protective padding, the 5-foot-6, 205-pound LaPenna held his own against all three bots. He dominated his first opponent, referred to at the fight as "the child robot." Next came an imposing "Terminator"-inspired humanoid, which was listed on the fight video as 6-feet and 200 pounds with a kick force of 850 pounds. The robot landed several hard kicks, including one that knocked LaPenna across the mat and another with an impact that brought the humanoid to the ground and caused its head to come off — but the human seemed to gain strength as the match went on and eventually stood triumphantly with his foot on the machine's crumpled body. LaPenna was dominant early in his final match, in which he faced a robot that resembled a "Predator" from the movies of the same name. After landing several punches and kicks and taking his opponent to the ground multiple times, LaPenna eventually became fatigued and called for the match to be ended. "He doesn't get tired. He doesn't stay down," LaPenna said in a postmatch interview. "The crowd of about 100 (humans, not humanoids) was thrilled," writes the New York Times. (After beating his first robot opponent, LaPenna told his interviewer, "Clankers zero, humans one.") But the New York Times adds that "Those who know humanoid robots best highly recommend against fighting them." "It's very unfair to put a human in with a heavily motorized system that's only going to dominate," said Ken Goldberg, a professor who oversees the automation lab at the University of California, Berkeley. "There's nothing surprising about that...." He said he understood the appeal of the fights that Robot Entertainment Kombat (REK) was staging, noting that it tapped "into some of the fear and frustration with robots that people feel.... I mean, they love to see the human kick the robot's gearbox," he said. But the odds of that human fighter getting his gearbox kicked are much greater, Dr. Goldberg said, given that REK's humanoid robots can weigh several hundred pounds and are made of steel. To be fair, it looked like sometimes the robot just fell over. (And the robots were human-controlled, not programmed with split-second reactions...) But "Not everyone is a fan," adds the Los Angeles Times: On Sept. 23, the California State Athletic Commission sent a cease-and-desist order to REK, its CEO Cix Liv and "all persons holding, promoting, advertising or sponsoring unsanctioned human versus humanoid robot cage fight." The letter states that "any boxing or mixed martial arts contest, match, or exhibition, involving any human in the State of California" requires the prior approval of the commission and that it is a misdemeanor to hold such an event without obtaining a license or permit from the state. A spokesperson for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the CSAC, said in a statement emailed to The Times that the commission is "committed to protecting the safety of the public and integrity of combat sports." "Unsanctioned activity puts the physical and financial well-being of all those involved at risk and such activity will not be tolerated," the statement said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Philadelphia newscast reports on a grey-haired lady who allegedly refused to move out of the path of a delivery robot as a form of protest because "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers." She was arrested, but says her actions were protected speech: According to police, Marvin repeatedly blocked the robot's path and ignored multiple commands from officers to move... Marvin said she was protesting the use of delivery robots because she believes they are replacing human workers.... "I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward," Marvin said... Marvin said she has confronted delivery robots on multiple occasions... Ashley Baldwin of West Philadelphia said she witnessed one of those encounters. "I actually thought the robot hit her, so my original question was, 'Are you OK? Did the robot hit you?' And she said, 'No, I have to stop this. They're taking over the world,'" Baldwin said. Asked whether she plans to continue protesting the robots, Marvin said she does. She was charged with disorderly conduct. Uber did not respond to their request for a comment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a story that has drawn international attention for being potentially the first documented instance of a robot being used directly in a sexual assault. According to the Associated Press, German police have opened a sexual harassment investigation after a robot allegedly touched a 16-year-old girl's buttocks and made thrusting motions while two young men reportedly filmed and streamed the incident. Investigators seized the robot and the suspects' phones and are trying to determine whether the movements were preprogrammed or controlled in real time. From the report: Cologne police spokesman Christoph Bermel said the two male teenagers have not been charged but are considered suspects, and investigators were examining whether the robot's movements were preprogrammed or controlled in real time. Police were unfamiliar with this type of incident, he said. "We have not been aware of this phenomenon so far," Bermel told The Associated Press, saying it was "new territory for us." [...] The robot, said to be 120 centimeters (about 3 ft 11 inches) tall, was dressed in a white tank top, black sweatpants and wearing a gold chain and sunglasses. It also had what appears to be a fake mustache. Videos circulated on the internet show two young men escorting the robot toward a group of women, bumping into one and hugging others, on a lively nighttime street.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every so often, we get sucked into a list touting the top regional startups or the most robust entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Well, a startup list released today from Microsoft-owned LinkedIn — titled “The 10 companies on the rise in Seattle” — grabbed our attention, for all of the wrong reasons.

Let’s just say: We know a thing or two about Seattle-area startups around here. And so we had to do a little fact-checking.

First of all, four of the companies on LinkedIn’s list — Anthropic, Auger, Whatnot and Armada — are not even headquartered in the Seattle area.

San Francisco-based Anthropic — ranked #1 on LinkedIn’s Seattle startup list — has a growing engineering center at Dexter Yard North in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. But to think that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his team are cutting deals at the Washington Athletic Club or debating the future of AI over lattes in Kirkland is a hallucination bigger than most AI models could create.

If the LinkedIn team were studying GeekWire’s coverage, they’d also realize that #2 on their list, Auger, is not headquartered in the Seattle area, either. The AI logistics startup, co-founded by former Amazon executive Dave Clark, moved its headquarters to Dallas in August, although it maintains a Bellevue engineering center.

It keeps getting more bizarre from there. The #3 company on LinkedIn’s Seattle list is Whatnot, the heavily funded video-based shopping startup that set up an engineering center in Seattle last year, but is clearly headquartered in the Los Angeles area.

Finally, ranked #9 on the Seattle list is data center upstart Armada — a company that, according to its own LinkedIn profile, is based in San Francisco.

So, just to summarize: Three of the top Seattle startups (according to LinkedIn) have their headquarters in California, and one has its headquarters in Texas.

GeekWire columnist and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald pointed out the flaws in the list, calling it a “half-assed” effort. “For a Microsoft-owned company, you’d think they’d have better insight into where Seattle is actually located,” Fitzgerald said.

The list does include some companies that are actually based in the Seattle area.

Making the top 10 are: Bellevue-based Truveta (#4); Seattle-based Yoodli (#5); Redmond-based Worldscape (#6); Seattle-based Overland AI (#7); Seattle-based Gradial (#8); and Kent-based Stoke Space (#10).

All of those companies (except for Worldscape) are listed on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the top 200 privately held startup companies in the Pacific Northwest. The other companies — Anthropic, Auger, Whatnot and Armada — are listed on our engineering center list.

Notably absent from LinkedIn’s Seattle list is Chainguard, which ranked #42 on LinkedIn’s accompanying report on the top 50 startups in the U.S. Chainguard is headquartered in Kirkland but is a fully remote company. The Seattle ranking counts only employees and hiring in the city, which may explain why a remote company like Chainguard didn’t make the cut.

For our purposes, given that one of the co-founders of the cybersecurity startup calls the Seattle area home, we claim it as a Seattle-area startup.

In its defense, LinkedIn describes a Seattle startup a bit differently than we do here at GeekWire.

According to its methodology, the ranking weighs four factors: employment growth, engagement with company pages, interest in job openings, and the ability to recruit talent from LinkedIn’s list of top companies. The data covers July 2025 through June 2026.

LinkedIn requires privately-held companies to be less than seven years old and headquartered in the United States to qualify for its U.S. rankings, but doesn’t require them to be headquartered in the Seattle area to make the Seattle list. All of which explains how a startup can make a list of Seattle’s top startups without actually being based in Seattle.

We have to admit, this is a new one on us.

As GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop notes: What the heck is going on, LinkedIn?

UPDATE: LinkedIn provided this statement to GeekWire:

“While companies do not need to be headquartered in Seattle to qualify, they must have at least 30 full-time employees based in the metro area. Our city lists are designed to spotlight startups gaining momentum, locally, recognizing that growing companies often have employees and operations across multiple markets. Further, the data for the city lists are reflecting employees based in that city only, versus the entire country.”