Microsoft has introduced AI across several product lines over the past decade. Project Oxford introduced developer-facing AI APIs in 2015, GitHub Copilot launched as an AI coding assistant in 2021, and Bing Chat became Microsoft Copilot in 2023. Microsoft also developed its Phi and MAI model families and expanded AI capabilities in Windows and Microsoft 365.
This Microsoft AI timeline records major announcements, model releases, public previews, general availability dates, product renames, and Microsoft-OpenAI partnership changes from 2015 through October 2026. The chronology also follows Azure AI Studioâs development into Microsoft Foundry and the expansion of Copilot into coding agents and delegated work.
Last updated: October 12, 2026.
Microsoft AI Timeline
2026
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Oct 12 | Microsoft announced Azure Maia 300, with production deployments scheduled to begin in 2027. Microsoft also announced plans to scale the Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027. |
| Oct 12 | Microsoft confirmed that Maia 200 was serving production workloads, including Microsoft Copilot, and supporting MAI model development. GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Foundry workloads were planned to follow by the end of 2026. |
| Oct 9 | Office in Copilot began rolling out to Frontier customers in Chat and Cowork. The integration brings Word, Excel, and PowerPoint creation, editing, and collaboration directly into the Copilot app. |
| Oct 9 | Microsoft introduced Microsoft-Decision-1 in Microsoft Foundry for fast decision scoring, classification, routing, and agent workflow control. OpenRouter availability was announced as coming soon. |
| Oct 7 | Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC) reached general availability with policy-based containment for AI agent workloads, including controls over file and network access. |
| Oct 7 | Microsoft announced Windows hybrid intelligence with local and cloud model routing through GitHub HydraFusion. Experimental support in the GitHub Copilot app, CLI, and Visual Studio Code was planned for later in October. |
| Oct 7 | Microsoft made MAI-Code-1.1-Flash available to download and run locally with 3-bit quantization and a 256K context window. Experimental on-device access in the GitHub Copilot app, CLI, and Visual Studio Code was announced for the end of October. |
| Oct 1 | Microsoft launched MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming for real-time transcription in 60 languages with automatic, continuous language detection. |
| Oct 1 | Microsoft introduced MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash for multilingual text-to-speech across 23 languages and 26 locales, including cross-language voice cloning. |
| Sep 29 | Microsoft Research introduced Quine, an experimental biology research system that combines a multimodal world model with scientific tools, literature, and laboratory feedback. Initial access was limited to the Quine Fellows program and selected research collaborations. |
| Sep 28 | Fabric IQ reached general availability in Microsoft Copilot Chat and Cowork to ground business answers and agent tasks in governed Power BI semantic models. |
| Sep 25 | Microsoft introduced a new Copilot experience centered on Home, Code, and Autopilot. |
| Sep 4 | MAI-Image-2.6 and MAI-Image-2.6-Flash entered public preview in Microsoft Foundry with multi-image editing and web grounding. |
| Sep 3 | Microsoft introduced MAI-Transcribe-2 with transcription across 60 languages, speaker diarization, and word-level timestamps. |
| Jun 16 | Copilot Cowork reached general availability for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers worldwide. |
| Jun 2 | Microsoft AI expanded the MAI family with seven in-house models across reasoning, coding, image generation, voice, and transcription. |
| May 1 | Microsoft Agent 365 reached general availability as a control plane for observing, governing, and securing AI agents. |
| Apr 27 | Microsoft and OpenAI amended their agreement to make Microsoft’s model and product IP license nonexclusive and permit OpenAI products across other cloud providers. |
| Apr 3 | Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 reached production release for .NET and Python to unify work from Semantic Kernel and AutoGen in one open-source agent SDK. |
| Apr 2 | MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2 became available to developers through Microsoft Foundry. |
| Mar 9 | Microsoft announced Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot, expanded model choice, and the May launch plan for Agent 365. |
| Jan 26 | Microsoft introduced Maia 200, its second-generation in-house AI accelerator, and began deploying it for Azure inference workloads. |
2025
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Nov 18 | Microsoft shifted Azure AI Foundry to the Microsoft Foundry brand as its platform for models, apps, and agents. |
| Nov 18 | Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Anthropic announced a partnership that expanded Claude availability through Azure and Microsoft Foundry. |
| Oct 28 | Microsoft and OpenAI signed a new definitive agreement extending Microsoft’s model and product IP rights through 2032 and changing future compute terms. |
| Aug 28 | Microsoft AI introduced MAI-Voice-1 and opened public testing for MAI-1-preview, its first foundation model trained end to end in-house. |
| May 19 | GitHub Copilot coding agent entered public preview, letting developers assign issues to an agent that works in a GitHub Actions environment and opens pull requests. |
| May 19 | Azure AI Foundry Agent Service reached general availability for building and deploying managed AI agents. |
| Apr 30 | Microsoft introduced Phi-4-reasoning, Phi-4-reasoning-plus, and Phi-4-mini-reasoning, extending the Phi family into dedicated reasoning models. |
| Apr 23 | Microsoft expanded Microsoft 365 Copilot around agents, including Researcher, Analyst, the Agent Store, and Copilot Notebooks. |
| Apr 4 | Copilot Search in Bing began rolling out with AI-generated answers, conventional search results, and source links. |
| Feb 26 | Microsoft released Phi-4-mini and Phi-4-multimodal, expanding the small-model family into multilingual text, image, and audio tasks. |
| Jan 21 | Microsoft and OpenAI retained Azure API exclusivity while changing future training-compute capacity to a right-of-first-refusal model for Microsoft. |
| Jan 15 | Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat for commercial customers and added metered agents for eligible organizations. |
2024
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Dec 12 | Microsoft introduced Phi-4, a 14-billion-parameter small language model focused on complex reasoning. |
| Nov 19 | Microsoft introduced Azure AI Foundry as the next stage of Azure AI Studio and announced Azure AI Agent Service as coming to preview. |
| Oct 1 | Microsoft began rolling out its redesigned consumer Copilot experience, introducing Copilot Voice and announcing Copilot Vision access through Copilot Labs. |
| Sep 16 | Microsoft announced Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2, introducing Copilot Pages and expanded agent capabilities. |
| May 21 | Azure AI Studio reached general availability for building, evaluating, deploying, and monitoring generative AI applications. |
| May 20 | Microsoft introduced Copilot+ PCs, a Windows PC category built around neural processing units for local AI workloads. |
| Apr 23 | Microsoft introduced the Phi-3 family, with Phi-3-mini available that day through Azure AI Studio, Hugging Face, and Ollama. |
| Jan 15 | Microsoft launched Copilot Pro and removed the 300-seat minimum for Microsoft 365 Copilot commercial subscriptions. |
2023
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Dec 29 | GitHub Copilot Chat reached general availability in Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio for Copilot subscribers. |
| Dec 12 | Microsoft released Phi-2 and placed the 2.7-billion-parameter model in the Azure AI Studio catalog. |
| Nov 15 | Microsoft announced that Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise would become Microsoft Copilot; the renamed consumer offering became generally available on December 1. |
| Nov 15 | Microsoft introduced Copilot Studio as the successor to Power Virtual Agents for building and customizing business copilots and agents. |
| Nov 15 | Azure AI Studio entered public preview for generative AI application development. |
| Nov 15 | Microsoft announced Maia 100, its first in-house AI accelerator for Azure datacenters. |
| Nov 1 | Microsoft 365 Copilot reached general availability for enterprise customers. |
| Sep 21 | Microsoft introduced a unified Copilot identity across Windows, Bing, Edge, and Microsoft 365, with the first Windows rollout beginning September 26. |
| Jun | Microsoft Research introduced Phi-1, a 1.3-billion-parameter code model that began the Phi model family. |
| May 23 | Microsoft announced Windows Copilot for Windows 11 in preview as an AI assistant integrated into the operating system. |
| Mar 28 | Microsoft introduced Security Copilot, an AI assistant for threat investigation, incident response, and security operations. |
| Mar 22 | GitHub announced Copilot X, extending Copilot beyond code completion toward chat, pull requests, and documentation assistance. |
| Mar 16 | Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and other work apps. |
| Mar 6 | Microsoft introduced Dynamics 365 Copilot for AI assistance in CRM and ERP business applications. |
| Feb 7 | Microsoft launched the new AI-powered Bing and Edge in limited preview with conversational search and chat. |
| Jan 23 | Microsoft and OpenAI announced a multiyear, multibillion-dollar expansion of their partnership covering Azure supercomputing, research, and product deployment. |
| Jan 17 | Azure OpenAI Service reached general availability. |
2022
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Dec 7 | GitHub Copilot for Business became generally available with centralized license management and organization-level controls. |
| Oct 20 | Bing Image Creator began a limited preview using OpenAI DALL·E 2 technology, following the announcement of Microsoft Designer. |
| Jun 21 | GitHub Copilot became generally available to individual developers after its 2021 technical preview. |
2021
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Nov 2 | Microsoft announced Azure OpenAI Service with invitation-only access. |
| Jun 29 | GitHub Copilot launched in technical preview as an AI coding assistant developed with OpenAI. |
2020
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Sep 22 | Microsoft obtained an exclusive license to use GPT-3 in its products and services while OpenAI continued operating its API. |
| Feb 13 | Microsoft Research introduced Turing-NLG, a 17-billion-parameter language model, and released the DeepSpeed library for training large neural networks. |
2019
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Jul 22 | Microsoft announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI and a partnership focused on Azure AI supercomputing and commercial deployment. |
2018
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Jun 4 | Microsoft announced its agreement to acquire GitHub, establishing the developer-platform relationship that later produced GitHub Copilot. |
2017
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Aug | Microsoft unveiled Project Brainwave, a system for accelerating real-time AI inference on cloud infrastructure. |
2016
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Nov 15 | OpenAI selected Microsoft Azure as its primary cloud platform for large-scale deep-learning and AI research. |
| Mar 30 | Microsoft introduced Cognitive Services, expanding Project Oxford into vision, speech, language, knowledge, and search APIs. |
2015
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Apr 30 | Microsoft introduced Project Oxford in beta, with APIs and SDKs for embedding AI capabilities in applications. |
Major Microsoft AI Milestones
From Bing Chat to Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft launched conversational Bing in February 2023 and announced a shared Copilot identity across Bing, Windows, Edge, and Microsoft 365 later that year. The November 2023 Bing Chat rename formalized Microsoft Copilot as the consumer assistant brand. Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot are related products with their own launch histories and release schedules.
Microsoft 365 Copilot began with AI assistance inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. The platform expanded through Copilot Studio, Researcher, Analyst, Copilot Cowork, and Agent 365. In September 2026, Microsoft introduced a new Copilot experience organized around Home, Code, and Autopilot. Office in Copilot began rolling out to Frontier customers on October 9, with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint editing and collaboration inside Chat and Cowork.
GitHub Copilot moves from code suggestions to coding agents
GitHub Copilot entered technical preview in June 2021 and became generally available to developers in June 2022. GitHub Copilot X introduced plans for chat and broader development tasks in March 2023, followed by the general availability of Copilot Chat that December.
In May 2025, GitHub introduced its Copilot coding agent in public preview. The agent accepted assigned coding issues and created pull requests through GitHub Actions. This development established a distinct coding-agent history alongside Microsoft 365 Copilot and the consumer Copilot assistant.
Phi and MAI mark two lines of Microsoft model development
Microsoft Research introduced Phi-1 in 2023, followed by Phi-2, Phi-3, and Phi-4. The family expanded to Phi-4-mini, Phi-4-multimodal, and Phi-4-reasoning variants in 2025, with emphasis on compact models for reasoning and multimodal tasks.
Microsoft AI began publicly introducing the MAI family in August 2025 with MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview. Seven new MAI models followed in June 2026 across coding, reasoning, image, speech, and transcription. The October 2026 releases extended the family with streaming transcription, multilingual speech, and local coding models. Microsoft also introduced Microsoft-Decision-1 in October as a separate decision-scoring model.
Azure AI Studio becomes Microsoft Foundry
Azure AI Studio entered public preview in November 2023 and reached general availability in May 2024. Microsoft introduced Azure AI Foundry in November 2024, with a new portal and tools for model selection, evaluation, applications, and agents. The platform adopted the Microsoft Foundry brand in November 2025.
Foundry Agent Service reached general availability in May 2025. Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 followed in April 2026 as a separate open-source SDK for developing agents in .NET and Python.
Windows AI advances from Copilot+ PCs to hybrid intelligence
The 2024 Copilot+ PC announcement established a Windows hardware category built around neural processing units for on-device AI. On October 7, 2026, Microsoft introduced hybrid intelligence for Windows, including plans to use local and cloud AI models through GitHub HydraFusion. Microsoft planned experimental access for later in October, while new Copilot capabilities for local context and PC actions were expected to roll out in the following months.
Microsoft Execution Containers reached general availability on October 7, 2026. The technology applies file, network, and other policies to AI agent workloads. The containment policies operate outside the agent workload.
Maia advances from custom accelerators to production inference
Microsoft announced Maia 100 in November 2023 and introduced Maia 200 in January 2026. By October 12, 2026, Maia 200 was serving production workloads for Microsoft Copilot and supporting MAI model development. Microsoft planned to add GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Foundry workloads by the end of the year.
Microsoft announced Maia 300 on October 12, 2026, with production deployments scheduled to begin in 2027. The announcement also set out plans to scale the Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027 and make it the primary inference system for Microsoft products and services.
Microsoft and OpenAI partnership changes
Microsoft announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI in July 2019 after OpenAI had selected Azure for large-scale research in 2016. Azure OpenAI Service entered invitation-only access in 2021 and reached general availability in January 2023. That same month, Microsoft and OpenAI announced an expanded multiyear partnership.
The October 2025 agreement extended Microsoftâs model and product IP rights through 2032 and ended its right of first refusal for new OpenAI compute capacity. The April 2026 amendment made Microsoftâs IP license nonexclusive and allowed OpenAI products to be served across other cloud providers, while maintaining Azure as OpenAIâs primary cloud partner.
Related Resources
- OpenAI & ChatGPT Timeline: GPT Release Dates to GPT-6.1 (2026)
- AI Model Release Calendar: Latest AI Model Releases by Date
- GitHub Copilot Cheat Sheet: CLI & Slash Commands, Variables, and Shortcuts
