Microsoft's AI leadership stumbles as competitors gain ground in coding and agentic tools.

Microsoft's stock has been down this year while competitors' valuations and share prices have soared. The company's workplace AI products (called Copilot) have had disappointing uptake, and Anthropic has grabbed the lead in coding tools with its agentic approach.

GitHub, a Microsoft subsidiary, has experienced unprecedented downtimes. According to Scott Hanselman, a Microsoft VP on GitHub's technical staff, incoming traffic and usage includes as many bots as people, putting the platform under tremendous pressure, though he characterizes the issue as a "hiccup moment."

Microsoft announced Scout, a product built on OpenClaw (an open-source agentic tool), at its Build developer conference. Hanselman brought OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger into the process and helped integrate the technology, positioning it as Microsoft's response to Claude Code's success in coding agents.