Microsoft expands AI developer agents with Copilot Cowork GA and VS Code Agents view

Microsoft announced that its Copilot Cowork AI agent, built with Anthropic, is leaving preview and is now generally available to Microsoft 365 Copilot customers on a usage‑based pricing model. The company said more than half of Fortune 500 firms are already using the tool, that it runs on Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 models (with optional OpenAI GPT 5.5 for Frontier users), and that a new fine‑tuned model, Cowork 1, will launch in the coming weeks at lower cost. Administrators can enable the agent, set usage alerts and apply spending limits, and a grace period prevents billing until July 1 2026 for earlier users. Microsoft also previewed a local Edge browser for the agent and announced upcoming third‑party plug‑ins from Adobe, Atlassian, Box, Canva and others.

In parallel, Visual Studio Code introduced an “Agents” view that provides a dedicated workspace for managing multiple AI coding agents. Unlike Copilot’s sidebar or single‑prompt tools such as Codex or Claude Code, the Agents view lets developers assign high‑level project tasks, generate or modify multiple files, run terminal commands and test results directly inside the editor. The feature supports parallel agents, promotes a project‑wide workflow, and is positioned as a more robust, “agent‑first” environment for software development.