Microsoft Takes on Frontier AI with Project Solara, OpenClaw, and More at Build 2026 | Diet TBPN

**John Coogan** (0:00)
Microsoft Build is satisfying for a number of reasons. They're in the foundation model game. They train a bunch of models.
MAI code one flash, MAI thinking one, the company's first coding and reasoning models respectively. Several speakers played up as super efficient on a cost per token basis in the ROI race. You gotta be efficient. Microsoft Scout is an agent, they're OpenClaw-pilled now, powered by OpenClaw, open source technology that operates across cloud, desktop and web, connecting to Teams, Outlook, OneDrive and SharePoint. And to the data that powers your day, including chats, emails, calendar, contacts, good news if you're all in on the Microsoft ecosystem. And then we talked about this a little bit with the Jensen announcements from NVIDIA, they're going into the PC market more.
The Surface RTX Spark dev box is sort of the answer to Apple's Mac Mini custom silicon designed for agentic AI. There's also a new Android-based OS operating system designed to run agents instead of apps called Project Solara. And there's a pretty cool demo, so we should play the video. The Verge always does a cut down of these keynotes. They take you through Microsoft Build in 25 minutes, but we're only going to play a couple minutes of this because it's a long presentation.

**Satya Nadella** (1:17)
I'm really excited about in order to tap into all this compute power is to expand the scope of Windows ML and Windows AI. We are also announcing two very cool new models that are all going to run on Windows inbox.

**John Coogan** (1:34)
Okay, let's jump to eight minutes because this is where Satya introduces Project Solara, which Ben Thompson said Project Solara is to be very clear vaporware at this point, although the company did show real devices and has signed up Qualcomm and MediaTek as chip partners. It's also extremely compelling, so Ben Thompson likes it. Let's listen to Satya Nadella introduce it.

**Satya Nadella** (1:55)
Two very broad categories.

**John Coogan** (1:56)
The first is stationary and the second is portable. The first device is designed for your desk and it's built on MediaTek Silicon. Like concept cars or consumer technology. With Hello for Business, just walking up to the device, securely finds you in, giving you direct access to your agents. Amazon and Google Home have similar products at this point, with screens for more smart home. You can think, plan and even act by delegating tasks to your agents with a simple tap or just using your voice. It even supports experiences like handoff between devices. It's still tricky to imagine when you wouldn't want to use your phone for this.
Since people carry their phones everywhere, firing off an agent isn't the most cumbersome thing.

**Satya Nadella** (2:43)
But I do love consumer hardware, so I'm excited to see if there's any unique things that you can do only with this product.

**John Coogan** (2:52)
This is a very interesting thing. It's not a phone. It looks more like a smart key card or badge. Yeah, it even has its face on it, like it's a badge that you wear.
I tap to unlock the device and I have access now to all my agents in a secured manner. And would you look at that, I already have a task. And it says, gather content for your social media post.

**Jordi Hays** (3:14)
Sorry if I missed it. Why would you want this over having an application?

**John Coogan** (3:18)
On your phone? I'm not sure.
Yes, thank you. That's a good question. Does anyone have an answer?

**Jordi Hays** (3:27)
There's a new meme, the two phone meme. Maybe some people feel left out, they want a second device.

**John Coogan** (3:33)
There's like the dumb phone route where you don't want everything in the phone, but you do want to kick off agents that go do things for you. You want to be more like delegating instead of consuming. You're not going to be scrolling TikTok on that thing.
But you might be firing off work tasks that you can come to later on your desktop and sort of lock in on. I don't know.

**Jordi Hays** (3:55)
I could prompt it and say write a 20,000-word message to John, telling him that I would like to hang out on Saturday afternoon. Make sure it's easy enough to digest so his agent can summarize it into a few bullet points.

**John Coogan** (4:10)
Yeah, into ideally just one sentence.
Want to hang out.
Let's see. Ben Thompson broke it down a little bit. He said, first off, note the framing. The PC is old tech with agents. What about new tech uniquely enabled by agents? And note the classic Microsoft hook. Could that new tech sit on top of a new platform? He says, there was one brief moment in the promotional video that preceded his appearance that made the concept click for him. The problem with wearable devices is the interaction model. They are only useful when you are interacting with them, when the human is in the loop. But being in the loop with a wearable is annoying and inefficient. What is being demonstrated here, however, is a brief interaction and then the agent doing work in the background. In other words, the usefulness happens in the cloud but the human needing to be involved because an agent is doing work. That's what Ben Thompson finds compelling. On one hand, you can make the case that of course Microsoft would be interested in a device model that uses the cloud as a platform, given that Microsoft doesn't control a mobile device like the iPhone. What occurs to Ben Thompson, however, is that even if Microsoft doesn't succeed with Project Solara, this model where the cloud is the hub and multiple devices are the spoke, instead of the phone being at the center is clearly a better one for agents. Agents work best in the cloud and across apps and devices. Yes, the phone might be one of those devices, but when it comes to agents, it shouldn't be the hub because it's too locked down. He says, again, this is vaporware and it's very much in Microsoft's interest, so take Project Solara with an appropriate grain of salt. It's a vision of the future, however, that does make a lot of sense, particularly in an enterprise scenario where all of the context and compute is already in the cloud and Project Solara is focused on enterprise, not consumer, so you can mandate effectively that all of your employees carry these as their badges and then they have a sort of secure on-ramp to their enterprise agents in the cloud that all run in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem and the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. He says it's also something completely different from the past and fits Ben Thompson's thesis that in the age of AI, thin is in because the compute is so constrained to the data center. On-device compute is maybe going to happen, but there's a lot that you can do in the cloud that you can't do locally, so just have a very thin client and that little key card device is basically the thinnest client you can have.