We believe in the strength and talent of the American workforce. That is why the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans.

We look forward to providing the Administration with additional information. For example, of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees. These were not to hire new people. The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country.

Microsoft only files H-1B petitions for those who meet the rigorous standards of this visa category. We pay our employees some of the highest compensation in the tech sector, and our wages are among the highest of all H-1B filings. We pay our H-1B employees the same as any other employees doing comparable work.

Microsoft succeeds as a global technology leader by developing the world’s best technology workforce. We do this by strengthening this country’s talent pipeline, hiring American workers, and attracting the best talent from around the world.

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Microsoft has served the Middle East since it began operations in the region in 1991. Since then, we’ve steadily expanded our presence and investments, growing from a local technology provider into a long-term partner to governments, businesses, educational institutions, and civil society organizations. Today, Microsoft is reaffirming that commitment through a new framework focused initially on Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.  

We are expanding our investments in the Middle East with confidence in the region’s future as it pursues one of the world’s most ambitious AI transformations. We will add to our local partnerships across the region. We will build on the work we have done to stand by these countries’ governments and people through a period of significant challenges. As we look to the future, we will invest further in technology, digital resilience, and the people across the region.   

From now until 2030, we will pursue the following initiatives with our partners in the region:  

Technology

We will expand cloud and AI infrastructure across the Middle East 

Microsoft will continue to invest in cloud and AI infrastructure across the region, expanding capacity, launching new capabilities, and delivering long-term infrastructure commitments. We plan to invest more than $10 billion in capital and operating expenses between now and 2030 in the region.  

We will deepen our partnerships through national AI champions 

Microsoft will deepen strategic partnerships with governments and national AI champion organizations to translate AI ambition into economic growth, modern public services, and global competitiveness. This builds on work with organizations including HUMAIN, G42, QAI, and the Government of Kuwait, alongside digital-government initiatives such as TAMM in the UAE, SDAIA’s ALLaM in Saudi Arabia, TASMU in Qatar, and Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption across the Government of Kuwait. 

These partnerships will support responsible AI adoption, sovereign-ready cloud services, Arabic and multilingual AI, and the use of AI to improve services for citizens and businesses. They will be supported by capabilities including Microsoft Sovereign Public Cloud, Sovereign Private Cloud, and Project Digital Shield, where relevant and available. 

We will invest in subsea and terrestrial connectivity 

Digital resilience depends on strong and reliable networks. Protecting subsea and terrestrial connectivity requires sustained cooperation between governments and the private sector, but the foundation of continuity is redundancy.  A diverse network of high-capacity routes allows traffic to be rerouted around disruptions, minimizing latency and maintaining critical data flows.  

Microsoft has helped expand both the capacity and reliability of digital connectivity across regions through investments in major international subsea cable systems, including SeaMeWe-6, which has landings in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as operating a global network spanning more than 275,000 miles of terrestrial and subsea fiber. During network disruptions, Microsoft has demonstrated the value of redundancy by rerouting traffic through Middle East corridors and maintaining service continuity with minimal impact on customers.  

Building on this foundation, Microsoft plans to invest more than $400 million in subsea and terrestrial connectivity across the Middle East by 2030. This investment will expand capacity, strengthen regional data flows, and support Microsoft’s growing cloud and AI infrastructure footprint across the region.  

We will build AI infrastructure with the planet in mind

As we expand our cloud and AI infrastructure in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, we will do so with a focus on responsible growth. Guided by Microsoft’s global goals to address carbon, water, waste, and ecosystems, we will work with our lessor partners to ensure that the cloud infrastructure supporting our services advances Microsoft’s water-positive ambitions, including by prioritizing zero-water cooling technologies where feasible. 

Water resilience is particularly important across the Middle East. Building on Microsoft’s global experience advancing water stewardship through water reuse, replenishment, and innovative water management solutions, we will work with governments and local stakeholders to identify opportunities that advance responsible water stewardship across the region. 

As AI accelerates economic opportunity across the Middle East, expanding access to clean energy will be essential to ensuring this growth is sustainable. We will also collaborate with regulators, utilities, and our lessor partners to help create the market conditions needed to expand carbon-free electricity procurement and stimulate new clean energy investment. By combining infrastructure investment with local partnerships and innovation, we aim to support the region’s energy and water priorities while helping build the sustainable foundations needed for long-term AI-led economic growth. 

Digital resilience

We will launch a new Middle East digital resilience initiative 

Conflict in the Middle East has reinforced the connection between digital resilience and digital sovereignty. Microsoft has worked with customers to support business continuity through resilience options tailored to different operational and regulatory needs. Going forward, Microsoft will make digital resilience a cornerstone of its Middle East strategy, helping organizations strengthen continuity and recovery through digital resilience assessments, reference architectures, readiness guidance, continuity planning, and enablement programs that help identify vulnerabilities, protect critical data, and build tested recovery capabilities.  

We will strengthen data protection, privacy, and business continuity 

Microsoft will expand our existing commitments on data-protection sovereignty and business continuity to eligible governments and customers in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. These are designed to give organizations greater confidence in how their data, systems, and operations are protected while maintaining continuity in times of uncertainty. They will be complemented by Microsoft’s growing sovereign-cloud portfolio, including Sovereign Public Cloud and Sovereign Private Cloud capabilities, together with Project Digital Shield and other capabilities that support security, privacy, transparency, and operational resilience. 

 We will expand and strengthen cybersecurity cooperation 

As Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE accelerate their digital transformation, cybersecurity has become a core pillar of national and economic security. As governments, critical infrastructure, and economies become more connected, cyber threats and influence operations can have consequences that extend far beyond physical borders.  That’s why we are announcing that we are deepening our partnerships with the cybersecurity authorities in these countries.  

A network of dedicated Microsoft cybersecurity champions in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE will help governments translate these resources into action and connect national priorities with expertise across Microsoft. Stronger cybersecurity benefits far more than individual networks. It helps build trust to ensure digital transformation will succeed.  

We will advance responsible AI through governance, assurance, and inclusion 

Microsoft will work with governments, businesses, researchers, and civil society organizations across the Middle East to help people and institutions benefit from new technology. As AI advances, realizing its full potential will require not only access to powerful technology, but the governance, assurance, and skills required to deploy it confidently and responsibly.  

We will help strengthen AI governance capabilities across the region and support practical approaches to testing, evaluating, and assurance systems. We will also expand collaboration with the Responsible AI Future Foundation (RAIFF), co-founded with G42 and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), to support the development and sharing of responsible AI practices and evaluation tools that can be applied across high-impact AI use cases in the Middle East and beyond.  

By helping organizations align with emerging international practices, we aim to strengthen confidence in AI systems, support responsible innovation, enhance global competitiveness, and ensure that the Middle East plays an active role in shaping the future of AI. 

We will advance AI for Good research and innovation 

Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab will continue to support the region through research and partnerships focused on food security, low-resource language development, and climate and disaster resilience. This includes work through initiatives such as the LINGUA program, which supports the development of language technologies for underserved communities.  

In partnership with governments, NGOs, nonprofits, and research institutions, the AI for Good Lab will continue developing and scaling AI solutions that address real-world challenges across the Middle East and beyond.  

People

We will prepare the next generation for the AI economy 

We believe AI should enhance human ambition, strengthen human capability, and help prepare workers to thrive in a changing economy. That is why Microsoft will continue to invest in AI skills, workforce readiness, public-sector capability building, and inclusive talent development across Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, building on existing commitments to help skill more than 4.2 million people by 2030.

This work includes training for public-sector leaders, students, and workers; initiatives focused on expanding opportunities for women; and partnerships with educational institutions across the region. This work builds on programs such as Saudi Arabia’s AI Global Leadership Program, AI Skills 4 Women programs in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and the Women’s Datacenter Academy in Saudi Arabia. Microsoft will also engage with workforce coalitions that can support national talent strategies and policy recommendations. 

We will help education communities prepare learners for the AI era 

Microsoft is working with governments, educators, institutions, and partners across the Middle East to develop responsible AI principles across primary, secondary, and tertiary education. This includes supporting AI literacy, helping educators integrate AI into teaching and learning, and sharing practical guidance for responsible AI use in educational settings. Across Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, we will work with local partners to ensure students and educators can benefit from AI safely, responsibly, and effectively and will engage educators, policymakers, industry leaders, and civil society to support practical approaches to AI implementation that reflect local priorities. 

We will help empower workers in the AI economy 

We will partner with governments, employers, workers, education providers, and other stakeholders to help people adapt to changing workplace demands. Our focus is on practical skills development, workforce readiness, and leadership development that helps countries build competitive economies and create new opportunities for workers in an AI-enabled future.  

We will support local and national AI talent priorities across the Middle East 

Microsoft is partnering with governments, academic institutions, and civil society organizations to support national talent priorities by advancing AI skills, leadership development, and workforce readiness programs for public-sector leaders, students, underrepresented talent, and people across the Middle East. The goal is to help countries build globally competitive workforces, accelerate innovation, and unlock new economic opportunities in the AI era.  

From ambition to impact

While no one can predict the future, one thing is certain: Microsoft has been part of this region’s journey for more than 35 years, and we are committed to being a partner for the long term. We look forward to continuing to work alongside governments, businesses, educators, and communities to help build that future together. 

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Microsoft has disrupted EvilTokens, a powerful cybercrime platform that used AI at every step of the attack chain—from compromising email accounts to designing intricate roadmaps for financial fraud and scams. While EvilTokens helped cybercriminals access email accounts, at the center of the service was an AI-style chatbot that could analyze a victim’s inbox and help criminals identify trusted relationships, payment authorizations, and sensitive responsibilities, as well as other circumstances where fraud was most likely to succeed. The platform could even recommend fraud strategies, including drafting messages that impersonated trusted contacts to help criminals trick victims into taking action. 

In short, AI was not simply helping attackers write more convincing messages. It helped them decide who to target, who to impersonate, and how to most effectively exploit the relationship to extract as much money as possible.   

Within months of launching in February 2026, EvilTokens had been linked to more than 12,000 compromised email inboxes across over 10,000 organizations worldwide, showing how quickly the service gained traction. Microsoft observed the highest concentrations of victim activity in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and France. Affected organizations ranged from wholesale distribution and construction to financial services, real estate, higher education, and healthcare. Working with partners, Microsoft seized 50 websites used to operate the service and disabled more than 150 additional domains tied to its supporting infrastructure. In the United Kingdom, the Metropolitan Police Service’s cybercrime team arrested two men on suspicion of offenses connected with the alleged operation of EvilTokens.  

But the significance of EvilTokens extends beyond its rapid growth and global reach. It offers an early warning of what happens when cybercriminals combine stolen access with AI capable of understanding how an organization works. 

From account access to financial fraud

EvilTokens helped criminals gain access to email accounts by tricking victims into entering an authentication code on Microsoft’s legitimate sign-in page. By completing the normal authentication sign-in process, victims unknowingly gave criminals access to their email accounts without revealing their passwords. That access could persist even after a password reset if the associated sessions and tokens were not also revoked. Microsoft Threat Intelligence provides additional technical details about the operation, how device-code attacks work, and steps customers can take to protect themselves here. 

Once inside an account, criminals have traditionally needed time and experience to sift through thousands of messages, identify decision-makers, understand payment processes, and find opportunities for fraud. 

EvilTokens began automating that work. Its AI tools could summarize and translate emails, surface financial conversations, map organizational roles, identify trusted relationships, and recommend potential targets. Preset prompts offered to find wire-transfer discussions, identify the organization’s “money movers,” locate vendor invoices, and determine the best people to impersonate.

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Why LinkedIn is challenging an overbroad government demand—and why Congress must make secrecy the exception

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit heard oral argument in LinkedIn’s (a Microsoft subsidiary) appeal challenging a government demand for user records and a related secrecy order that is preventing LinkedIn from notifying those users that the government is seeking their data. The appeal asks important, constitutional questions about whether service providers may challenge demands that sweep in records unrelated to an investigation, and when the government may prevent a provider from notifying the user of a request.  

This appeal continues Microsoft’s longstanding work to ensure that secrecy orders remain the exception, not the rule. LinkedIn’s appeal asks courts to enforce meaningful limits on both the scope of government demands and the secrecy that can accompany them. 

We recognize law enforcement’s important role in protecting public safety and investigating crime, and sometimes that does need to be done covertly. We respond to lawful legal requests. At the same time, customers and users deserve meaningful limits and independent oversight through an adversarial process. And, customers deserve to be notified when the government seeks their data, unless the government clearly establishes the need for secrecy under statutory and constitutional standards. 

Those safeguards fulfill basic constitutional rights. The Fourth Amendment protects the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. That right applies to papers kept in a desk, and it also applies when personal and business records are stored online. Online service providers, like LinkedIn and Microsoft, also have a First Amendment right to speak to their customers when the government obtains an order to search their private information. Secrecy may sometimes be justified—but it should be tailored to demonstrated needs and subject to meaningful review.  

This particular case arose after LinkedIn received a court order seeking user records together with a secrecy order preventing LinkedIn from informing anyone about the order. The details remain under seal, including the nature of the information the government seeks and the people who own that information. But the Fourth Circuit partially unsealed LinkedIn’s opening brief in July, allowing the public to understand some of the core issues. LinkedIn argues that the demand is overbroad, the secrecy order is unconstitutional, and the government has violated LinkedIn’s due process by withholding evidence from LinkedIn. 

Three amicus briefs from a broad coalition support LinkedIn’s position. The American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Virginia argue that users’ privacy interests must inform whether a demand is reasonable and that providers may be the only practical means of challenging unlawful process because users often receive no notice. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press warns that overbroad demands, delayed notice, and secret evidence can expose confidential sources and chill newsgathering. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and X emphasize that cloud providers are uniquely positioned to identify irrelevant requests and that secrecy orders require case-specific evidence rather than boilerplate assertions. Together, these briefs show why cloud providers must be able to test both the scope of government demands and the need for secrecy. 

Microsoft has a long record of standing up for these principles. In 2014, Microsoft successfully challenged a secrecy order connected to a National Security Letter that prevented notice to an enterprise customer. In 2016, we filed a landmark challenge to the widespread use of indefinite secrecy orders. We’ve successfully challenged individual secrecy orders time and again over the years. Our efforts contributed to updated Justice Department policies, but executive-branch practices can change. Durable protections require the development of case law and legislation. 

The U.S. House of Representatives recently took an important step in that direction. On August 31, the House passed legislation to rein in secret surveillance and strengthen notice protections when the government seeks data held by technology providers. As we explained when the bill passed, the reforms would place clearer limits on secrecy orders, require greater accountability, and help ensure that secrecy is the exception – not the rule. The Senate should act promptly to send these historic reforms to the President. 

The House –passed legislation recognizes that privacy and public safety are not opposing values. Clear standards can give investigators the confidentiality they genuinely need while providing courts, providers, and customers with predictable rules. The pending legislation and LinkedIn’s appeal are the latest, complementary chapters in this broader effort. Legislation can establish durable, system-wide rules for notice and accountability. Courts must meanwhile enforce the limits already contained in existing statutes and the Constitution. Neither task requires obstructing legitimate investigations. Rather, both mean the government must seek only relevant information, justify secrecy with specific evidence, and infringe on speech to the least extent possible. 

That is why today’s argument matters beyond a single sealed investigation. People and organizations increasingly entrust their most sensitive information to online services. If providers cannot challenge demands they know are overbroad—or if courts may silence them without a rigorous, adversarial review—the safeguards the law requires will be weakened precisely when they are most needed.

Microsoft and LinkedIn will continue to support lawful investigations while standing up for customer privacy, transparency, and the rule of law. We have appealed to the Fourth Circuit to preserve providers’ ability to challenge overbroad demands and to require the government to meet its constitutional burden before imposing secrecy. And we urge the Senate to complete the work the House began by enacting durable non-disclosure order reform.

Further reading 

• House passes historic reforms to rein in secret surveillance 

• New success in protecting customer rights unsealed today 

• Keeping secrecy the exception, not the rule 

• DOJ acts to curb the overuse of secrecy orders. Now it’s Congress’ turn. 

• DOJ’s newly released recommended practices are a win for cloud and enterprise customers 

• Ensuring secrecy orders are the exception not the rule when the government seeks data owned by our customers 

• The need for legislative reform on secrecy orders 

• Freedom is built on the protection of privacy | Episode 2 

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As Americans prepare to vote this November, artificial intelligence is changing how many people find and understand election information. 

Some voters are deliberately turning to AI tools with questions about candidates, ballot measures, election procedures, and issues that matter to their communities. Others are encountering AI-generated summaries at the top of search results. In either case, AI is increasingly becoming a front door to election information. 

This shift is happening quickly. More than 30% of the U.S. working-age population now uses AI (Microsoft AI Diffusion Index, Q1 2026; Microsoft, AI Adoption Across the United States). These tools can help people understand complicated topics, compare information, and explore unfamiliar issues. But election information can also present some challenges for AI. It is highly local, changes quickly, and can be incomplete, contested, or stripped of essential context. 

The answer is not to steer voters away from AI, it is to help people use it wisely, particularly when the information may influence aspects of their voting experience, such as how, when, and where they cast their ballot. 

That is why, on National Voter Registration Day, a day when our brands and products come together to encourage civic participation, we’re launching the next phase of our voter education initiative, Check. Recheck. Vote. This year, the campaign will equip voters with practical AI literacy skills for the 2026 election season.  

Check. Recheck. Vote.

We launched Check. Recheck. Vote. in 2024 to help voters recognize the risks posed by deceptive AI-generated content. Deepfakes and other deceptive media remain a serious concern. But in conversations with voters and election organizations, we are also hearing about a broader and more immediate challenge. Millions of people now encounter election information through AI-generated answers, and many are not sure how to determine whether those answers are current, complete, or reliable. 

The updated campaign gives voters three straightforward steps: 

• Check the sources and citations behind an AI-generated answer. Look for where the information came from, who published it, and when it was last updated. Be cautious when an answer provides no sources. 

• Recheck important details by visiting the original sources and comparing what other credible sources say. This is especially important for fast-changing or location-specific information. 

• Vote based on current information from your state or local election website, including official guidance on registration, voting options, deadlines, and polling locations. 

At the center of the campaign is a new 75-second video that shows how an AI-generated answer can appear during an ordinary election-related search, explains where these answers can fall short, and offers simple steps voters can take before relying on them. 

The campaign website pairs the video with practical guidance and links to authoritative election resources, including state-by-state voting information and tools for educators.  

We are working with the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) and the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) to scale the reach of this campaign across all fifty states and the territories and to point voters to accurate information directly from state and local election officials so they can participate with confidence. 

We believe that civics and voter education start well before a citizen is old enough to vote. That’s why we are also investing in efforts to extend AI voter literacy education in the classroom. The campaign website includes a classroom activity to help students examine how AI may shape the election information they encounter, practice verifying claims, and keep their own judgment at the center of the process. We are also amplifying our impact on this important issue by supporting the News Literacy Project. 

We’re also proud to announce today that, in partnership with iCivics, we are launching Village Square – a new Minecraft Education civic learning experience that helps students explore how communities make decisions and solve shared challenges. The game brings concepts such as dialogue, participation, and collective decision-making to life through immersive gameplay. Village Square gives educators and families an engaging, nonpartisan way to help young people practice listening to different perspectives, weighing trade-offs and working together to build stronger communities. 

Finally, we know that credible local reporting remains essential to informed civic participation, and that reporting is under strain in many communities. 

In Washington state, Microsoft is partnering with the Associated Press Fund for Journalism to expand election coverage for 10 local newsrooms operating 14 news websites. Participating newsrooms receive access to AP election results and race calls, vote tabulations, state-specific maps and graphics, and resources that help local journalists connect national and statewide developments to the communities they serve. 

The newsrooms represent communities from Seattle to Spokane and the Wenatchee Valley. Their work complements the reporting of the Associated Press, helping trusted, fact-based election coverage and results reach communities that might otherwise lack access. 

This investment reflects a broader reality. Voters need more than information. They need reliable sources that can provide context, ask hard questions, correct mistakes, and explain what national developments mean at the local level. 

Microsoft’s Support for the 2026 Midterms

Voters aren’t the only ones navigating this AI moment, so are the people running campaigns and conducting elections, all while facing an increasingly complex cybersecurity landscape. Microsoft has long supported the security and resilience of campaigns and elections. In 2018, we launched AccountGuard to help political campaigns and democracy-focused organizations defend against cyberattacks, and during the 2024 election cycle we joined dozens of other technology companies in the Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections. Here’s how that commitment continues today: 

Equipping election officials. With The Elections Group, International IDEA, Ready for Tuesday and Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Lab, we launched the free, open-source AI + Elections Skills Hub: prompts, sample AI agents, and draft policies for responsible adoption. It’s already reached 1,000+ officials across 45 states. 

Strengthening cybersecurity. We’ve deployed Microsoft Sentinel to several state and local election offices for stronger threat detection, and we’re also supporting select election and political stakeholders with MDASH to find and fix software vulnerabilities faster. 

Countering bomb hoaxes. More than 300 emailed bomb hoaxes disrupted polling places in 2024. In response, we’ve started a new Elections Bomb Threats Task Force alongside partners Social Scout, Nisos, and the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE) to bring together digital intelligence and law enforcement expertise to track & share trends and reduce disruptions. An initial report on the hoaxes encountered in 2024 will shape our approach for 2026. 

Supporting campaigns. Built with Defending Digital Campaigns, our Secure AI Toolkit for Campaigns has reached 3,000+ campaigns and political stakeholders with practical AI guardrails. Our Campaign Technology team has also trained thousands of candidates, staff, and officials from both parties on responsible AI use and cybersecurity best practices. 

The technology continues to change, but our approach remains consistent: help voters find authoritative information and make informed judgments, help campaigns and election authorities defend against evolving threats, and help the election community adopt technology that strengthens security, accountability, and civic participation. This work is bipartisan by design, and it includes: 

• Azure for Elections – prioritized support and security for elections-critical cloud workloads 

• M365 for Campaigns – secure, cost-effective collaboration and email for candidates and campaigns 

• Deceptive AI in Elections Reporting – malicious deepfakes of candidates and election officials are disallowed on Microsoft platforms, and targeted individuals can report them directly 

• Content Provenance – Microsoft image generation products affix content provenance to images, with LinkedIn displaying that provenance to users 

• Civic engagement – continuing our long-standing work to promote civic engagement through our own products and partnerships 

The 2026 election will be the first U.S. federal election in which generative AI is part of the everyday environment for millions of voters as well as those who support the political process. That creates new risks, but it also gives us an opportunity to equip people with skills that will remain valuable well beyond a single election. 

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Today, Microsoft is sharing our Safe Participation Framework, which centers on designing and enabling safe, privacy-preserving, and age-appropriate experiences for young people online. Members of our AI Youth Futures Council have delivered a clear message: they want to learn, create, and prepare for a future with AI. Protecting their privacy, ensuring their safety, and preserving their opportunity to participate must go hand in hand.   

They are right. Children and families should not have to choose between the protections they need and the opportunities technology can provide. 

Technology companies have a responsibility both to protect young people from harm and to ensure they can benefit from technology through thoughtfully designed experiences, age-appropriate protections, and demonstrable safeguards. Microsoft’s Safe Participation Framework serves as a foundation for our work today, and we expect it to continue evolving as technology, research, and societal expectations change. We do not claim to have all the answers, but we believe it is important to share our approach and our learnings to help inform emerging regulatory frameworks and advance protection and opportunity together. 

Pillar one: Safety by design

Microsoft recognizes our responsibility to help create safer experiences for all users, particularly children and those more vulnerable to harm. Our safety-by-design approach seeks to embed protection from the outset: identifying foreseeable risks, examining the impact of product features and user experiences, and implementing proportionate safeguards. As risks evolve, we continue to learn from emerging research, science, andas well as from customers, governments, and other stakeholders. 

For more than a decade, Microsoft has invested in technologies designed to protect people online, beginning with PhotoDNA  in 2009 and continuing through our work to build safeguards for AI experiences and address emerging harms such as synthetic and non-consensual intimate imagery. We have also learned that families want tools that are simpler, intuitive, and easier to use. That is why, earlier this week, we announced new protections and defaults for children, teenagers, and families using Windows Family Safety. We view these changes as an important step forward, while recognizing that earning and maintaining trust requires continued investment, learning, and iteration. 

Bing has also strengthened protections against child sexually abusive material (CSAM) across its generative AI experiences. We have also expanded SafeSearch globally to cover additional categories of harmful content, helping reduce the risk of exposure to harmful material. We will continue to make progress, listen to our users and stakeholders, and learn by working with others to strengthen safety.  

Our goal is to help children and teenagers participate confidently in appropriate digital experiences that reinforce access to the meaningful educational, social, and economic opportunities technology can provide. Achieving that goal requires real protections that are proportionate to risk and implemented in ways that respect users’ privacy. Risks are not uniform across different technologies and services, and safeguards should reflect and address those differences.   

Pillar two: Age-differentiated experiences

We recognize that young people are not a single group. Their needs, capabilities, and expectations evolve with age, development, and context. For that reason, age-appropriate design is an important element of creating safer digital experiences and complements safety-by-design. Age-appropriate design ensures protections and experiences are responsive to the needs of users at different stages of development. This approach informs experiences across Microsoft’s consumer ecosystem.  

On XBOX, we leverage family safety and privacy tools designed specifically to help manage online interactions, content access, spending, screen time, and privacy settings. These features are intended to support safer experiences while giving families flexibility to make choices. We are applying many of these same learnings to Copilot. All users must now sign in to use Copilot, and access is restricted for children under 13 (or older where required by local law). We have also implemented measures to reduce exposure to harmful content, directing users to crisis support resources when self-harm risks are detected, and encouraging healthy use through transparency, break reminders, reporting tools, and guardrails to protect against delusional outputs.   

Microsoft has now also extended protections at the platform level. Through our new Windows Age application programming interface (API), expanded age assurance capabilities, and enhanced family safety tools, Microsoft is helping establish a more consistent and privacy-conscious foundation for age-appropriate experiences across the broader ecosystem. These capabilities are intended to provide developers with trusted age signals to support age-appropriate protections, making the experience ultimately easier for families to understand and navigate downstream. 

Reliable age signals play an important role in enabling age-appropriate experiences. Innovations such as the Windows Age API help provide privacy-preserving age signals while minimizing the collection and sharing of personal data. Young people share this expectation. Participants in Microsoft’s AI Youth Futures Council have consistently emphasized the importance of understanding how their information is collected, used, and protected. 

Pillar three: Education and empowerment

Technology alone cannot deliver safe participation. Young people and their families must have an opportunity to provide direct feedback, and they must have easy access to tools and resources that support and build their knowledge as they navigate digital experiences, evaluate what they encounter, and decide when to seek help. Digital literacy is, therefore, a core component of child safety. 

Microsoft has invested in digital literacy and safety education for years through resources and partnerships that reach communities around the world. Earlier this year, we launched Behind the Chat: A Human Guide to Safe AI Conversations, designed specifically to help young people understand the opportunities and risks associated with AI companionship. This toolkit is supported by classroom resources for educators and materials for parents and trusted adults, reflecting our belief that supporting young people requires an ecosystem approach. Beginning this fall, we will expand these resources throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. We will also continue working closely with educators to ensure safety and privacy. 

Over the coming year, we will deepen partnerships with researchers, AI Safety Institutes (AISIs), governments, and civil society to advance the research, evaluations, and benchmarks needed for safer digital and AI experiences. Working together, we will learn and help build the foundation for the next generation of trusted technology. 

A framework for the future

Our work is far from finished. As technology evolves, our understanding of how to support young people safely and responsibly must continue to evolve with it. This framework reflects our current approach, informed by evidence, shaped by young people and their families, and grounded in ongoing learning. We recognize that we do not have every answer, and that building safer digital experiences will require continued experimentation, humility, and collaboration. No single organization can do this alone. Progress will depend on deep partnerships across government, industry, civil society, educators, and families worldwide. Together, we can help build a future in which every young person has the opportunity to participate, create, learn, and thrive. 

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Today, Microsoft published its 2026 Environmental Sustainability Report. This report covers our fiscal year 2025, and measures progress against our 2020 baseline. You can read the foreword below and explore the report in its entirety here. 

As we enter a new era for AI, Microsoft’s environmental sustainability work is entering a new phase—defined not only by ambition, but by how we deliver in a period of rapid technological change. In our pursuit of becoming a carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste company that protects ecosystems, the context has evolved, and so must our approach. 

The global shift toward AI is reshaping economies, accelerating innovation, and becoming foundational to how technology is built and used. It is also increasing demand for the energy, water, land, and materials required to support that growth. As a company at the forefront of this transition, Microsoft has a responsibility to help ensure that technology strengthens, rather than strains, the systems and communities on which it depends. This imperative is reshaping the context for our work. 

We are approaching this moment with clarity and conviction. We believe AI can deliver broad societal, economic, and environmental benefits, but innovation at this scale must be matched by responsibility at the same scale. For Microsoft, this means designing, building, and operating infrastructure that is more efficient, more resilient, and more grounded in the realities of the communities where we operate. 

We do not see these dynamics as a reason to step back. We see them as a mandate to lead differently. That requires greater operational rigor, stronger integration across our sustainability priorities, and a sharper focus on durable outcomes for the local communities where we work and the global value chains that make our work possible. It also requires being transparent about where progress is advancing, where it is more difficult, and where new approaches are needed. 

The path forward will not be defined by simple tradeoffs or single solutions. It will depend on how effectively we align innovation with stewardship. The systems we build to support the future must also support the long-term health of the planet and the communities we serve. Our experience makes clear that this is possible, but only with even greater discipline, partnership, and a willingness to learn and adapt as conditions evolve. 

What this moment requires 

Our aim is to build technology that gives more than it uses. Lasting progress depends on how we build it and whether that growth strengthens the places where it takes root.  

This thinking is reflected in our Community First AI Infrastructure approach, which is helping shape a more integrated model for community partnership, responsible operations, and environmental performance as we grow. In this way, sustainability is not separate from growth; it is part of how responsible growth is defined. 

While AI infrastructure is driving demand for energy, water, land, and materials, sustainability solutions are not scaling fast enough to meet demand. This tension is real, and it is also productive. 

It is forcing sharper questions: Where do we need to move faster, invest differently, or rethink our approach? Which assumptions still hold, which ones need to evolve? Five years into this work, we have more operational data, more direct experience, and a clearer view of what measurable planetary progress actually requires. That perspective helps keep us focused on outcomes rather than attached to any single pathway. 

We want to be clear about what this means—and what it does not. It means being more precise about what sustainability requires for Microsoft, and more willing to refine our strategies as conditions change, data improves, and tradeoffs become clearer. It does not mean we are lowering our ambition. 

Progress amid growth 

Our results reflect both progress and pressure. As we scale the physical infrastructure required to power the AI economy, our emissions are shaped by the impact of that growth and the actions we are taking to manage it. 

The visual that follows illustrates this dynamic by comparing our reported emissions with a modeled view of where emissions may have been in the absence of four specific interventions: carbon free electricity, sustainable fuels, XBOX console efficiency, and Surface device decarbonization. While these examples represent only a portion of our emissions reduction efforts, they highlight an important lesson from our work to date: that well-designed, targeted interventions can deliver measurable progress even as demand for infrastructure continues to rise.

In FY25, we matched 100% of our annual global electricity consumption with renewable energy^[2]. Microsoft will continue to push for an expansive focus on adding all forms of carbon-free electricity (CFE) ^[3] to the grids where we operate, complementing and building on our portfolio of renewable energy resources. We recognize that the world’s rising electricity needs require a balanced, all-of-the-above decarbonization strategy to meet global economic growth and environmental goals, and we will continue to support this approach moving forward.

Our total emissions (Scopes 1, 2, and 3) increased 25% year over year, driven primarily by the expansion of our datacenter infrastructure and pausing our use of non-additional, unbundled renewable energy certificates as we prioritize investments that bring net new power to grids. While this decision increases our reported emissions in the near term, it enables us to increase the development of new CFE rather than relying on certificates alone. We believe this change will create more long-term sustainability benefits. Growth-related emissions pressure was expected. The more important signal is where that pressure is concentrated. 

Scope 3 remains the largest share of our footprint overall, but one of the clearest changes this year was the growing contribution of Scope 2, which represents 13% of our total emissions—up from nearly 2% last year. This development highlights how important the energy systems across our supply chain are in shaping environmental outcomes. 

This year’s results also made clear that progress now depends on adapting how we work. 

Water is one of the clearest examples. In FY25, we replenished for the first time more water globally than we withdrew—more than 14 million cubic meters—marking a major milestone on our journey to become water positive. Reaching this point reflects years of work to improve water efficiency, expand replenishment efforts, and scale partnerships around the world. 

We are proud of this achievement but also know that replenishing global volumes is not enough. The next phase of our work is increasingly local. As we move forward, we are placing greater focus on helping restore more water to the watersheds where we operate than we withdraw while strengthening long-term water resilience. We prioritize projects in water-stressed regions that are locally relevant and designed in partnership with communities, delivering benefits not only for water availability, but also for ecosystems, economies, and people. Through this approach, we aim to ensure our growth supports and helps sustain the communities and environments where we operate. 

Transparency remains central to how we work and how we report. Microsoft has eliminated nearly all single-use plastics in our primary product packaging, reducing the share that remained to just 0.07% at the end of calendar year 2025.^[4] But we are not rounding down. We are staying accountable to the work required to eliminate them entirely. 

Across our cloud operations, we achieved 92% reuse and recycling of decommissioned servers and components for the second consecutive year, diverted 90.5% of construction and demolition waste from landfills and incinerators, and expanded our Circular Centers to seven facilities globally. These results also reflect a broader shift toward solutions that have co-benefits—reducing both emissions and resource demand over time. 

Throughout this journey, we have learned that progress in one area often depends on progress in another. Clean energy investments are essential to decarbonization. Water use is linked not only to our operations, but also to the energy systems that power them. And extending hardware life through circular approaches can reduce both emissions and material demand across the value chain. 

That is why our priorities extend beyond tracking progress against individual commitments on water, carbon, waste, and ecosystems as though they move independently. Our experience has made clear that progress does not happen pillar by pillar. Some of the most consequential work ahead will be measured in whether we address system challenges and help build the conditions for long-term progress: more resilient grids, stronger markets for lower-carbon materials, more effective water stewardship, and infrastructure designed and operated with local realities and community priorities in mind. 

For that reason, this year’s report takes a more integrated approach—placing progress against our commitments in the broader context of how those commitments are operationalized across our infrastructure and products. 

What’s next 

We are proud of what we have accomplished, and we remain humbled by the scale of the challenge ahead. Responsibly building the AI future requires clear accountability for what AI demands, candor about real constraints and tradeoffs, and sustained focus on outcomes that are durable and broadly shared. The chapters that follow show how we translate that intent into execution across our physical infrastructure, products, and value chain—where our sustainability commitments become operational reality.

Read the full report: https://aka.ms/SustainabilityReport2026 

[1] The solid line represents Microsoft’s reported greenhouse gas emissions (Scopes 1, 2, and 3) for FY20–FY25, prepared in accordance with GHG Protocol and management’s criteria, and uses a market-based emissions approach. The dotted line represents an illustrative counterfactual scenario of estimated emissions had select, discrete carbon reduction initiatives not been undertaken. These initiatives include energy efficiency improvements for XBOX consoles, renewable energy purchases, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and sustainable marine fuel (SMF) certificates, and supply chain decarbonization of Surface devices. The difference
between the two lines is an estimate of emissions avoided through these specific initiatives relative to a scenario without those initiatives occurring. This estimate is directional in nature, does not represent the full scope of Microsoft’s decarbonization efforts, and is not part of our reported greenhouse gas inventory. It should not be interpreted as a comprehensive measure of total emissions reductions or as additive to other carbon reduction or removal claims.

[2] Microsoft defines renewable energy as electricity that comes from sources that are replenished at a rate greater than or equal to their rate of depletion, such as geothermal, wind, solar, hydro, and biomass. To date, Microsoft’s renewable energy target includes two primary categories: renewable energy from contracted projects and grid mix. The first is renewable energy delivered under PPAs or similar long-term contracting mechanisms, generally for new projects where our financial involvement in the project’s development is critical for its success. This category represents more than 90% of the renewable energy applied to achieve our 2025 target. The second category is “grid mix” – renewable energy supported via our standard utility relationships and rates, inclusive of policy programs such as renewable portfolio standards and state and utility decarbonization goals. Our 2025 100% renewable target does not include purchases from short-term, so-called “spot market” renewable energy credits (RECs) sourced from operational clean energy projects.

[3] Microsoft defines carbon-free electricity (CFE) technologies as technologies with zero direct emissions and biogenic technologies with lifecycle emissions equivalent to renewables. CFE technologies include wind; solar; geothermal; sustainable biomass; hydropower; nuclear; fossil fuels with complete carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration; and storage charged with CFE generation.

[4] By weight, as designed, portfolio average. More details can be found in our Environmental Data Fact Sheet.

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Today we’re publishing our first “Public Country-by-Country Report” for our fiscal year 2025, disclosing our taxes in the period from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025. It covers the countries and regions included under European Union rules and shows, for each one, our revenue, profit, number of employees, and income tax accrued and paid during the year.  
 
We have provided this kind of information directly to tax authorities for several years under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) framework. It is now published to support transparency commitments, and we believe it is important to proactively address any questions these disclosures may raise, recognizing that numbers on a spreadsheet rarely tell the full story.
 
Microsoft pays the taxes we owe in every country where we operate. We know there are strong views about whether companies are paying enough, and we believe providing this context leads to a more informed conversation.

Understanding country-by-country reporting

Country-by-country reporting is not widely understood outside tax and accounting circles. Some figures may look surprising at first, but a number that appears low or high in one country does not, on its own, tell the full story. Tax law differs from country to country, and there are two important things to keep in mind when reading the report.  

First, the numbers are prepared using rules that differ from United States or country-specific financial accounting and tax rules, so they may not match other Microsoft information people have seen. For example, this report combines all Microsoft legal entities in a country and follows the reporting rules required by EU regulations. By contrast, local statutory accounts usually cover just one legal entity, follow local accounting rules, and may use a different fiscal year from Microsoft’s.  

Second, accrued tax is what you owe for the year. Tax paid is the amount actually paid during the year. The two can differ because the timing of owing tax and paying tax doesn’t match exactly. 

France is a good example of why a single line can look unusual without context. In FY25, cash tax paid in France reflects a one-time refund of tax overpaid in an earlier year. That makes this year an outlier. In this specific case, accrued tax may be a better reflection of the taxes borne for the fiscal year. Microsoft paid $374 million in tax in France over the prior three years. 

Variations like these are a normal part of how large companies, both domestic and multinational, are taxed across borders, and they reflect an evolving tax landscape as well as a business that continues to change. We comply with every local rule that applies to us, and as those rules change, our reporting will change with them. Microsoft is committed to a tax structure that reflects where our people work, where we invest, and where functions, assets, and risks occur, and this has been a guiding principle. 

How our investments support local economies

We understand that this discussion is not only about what the law requires or what a single tax line shows in a given year. For many people, it is also about a broader question of contribution: how companies support the countries where they do business. That contribution includes the taxes we pay, the capital we invest, the local jobs and infrastructure we support, and the economic activity created through customers and partners. In the S&P, Microsoft ranks second globally in corporate income taxes paid in the last year, with a total of $28.7 billion. In fiscal year 2025, we paid $6.3 billion in income tax in the EU. Importantly, this does not include payroll, VAT, property, and other taxes paid in addition. 

Taken together, our tax payments, capital investments, and partner ecosystem reflect a long-term commitment to the countries where we operate. We opened our first European office in the UK in 1982, followed by France and Germany in 1983, and then expanded into Denmark, Ireland (our largest hub in the region), Italy, Norway, Spain, and Sweden in 1985. Microsoft is now present in all 27 EU Member States and across the broader region. We have worked in these and many other communities for decades, and thousands of our employees call them home.  

From research and development to digital infrastructure and partnerships with local organizations, we are investing in ways that support these economies beyond our direct commercial activity. At our core, we are building tools that help large enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses, institutions, and individuals become more productive and competitive, which strengthens their business and benefits the people they serve. We only do well when our customers do well. In practice, that means helping customers design and manufacture cars better, helping patients get their next appointment sooner, or making it simpler for someone to find that dream job. 

Our investments in digital infrastructure are not only supporting the local digital economy, they are also contributing meaningfully through both taxation and capital expenditure. Across markets, we continue to invest at scale in datacenters and supporting infrastructure, creating value that extends well beyond the technology sector. In the three years to June 30, 2025, our total capital expenditure amounted to $176 billion, and we spent $89.2 billion on research and  development in the markets where we operate. 

Our customers require local industry- and country-specific expertise, and this is where our partner ecosystem plays an important role. Many of these partners are local businesses themselves. A 2024 IDC study on partner profitability showed that for every $1 of Microsoft revenue, partners that provide services generate $8.45, and partners that develop software generate $10.93. While this varies by country and partner segment, it offers another useful lens on how Microsoft’s business contributes to local economic activity. 

Investments in digital infrastructure are not only investments in technology ecosystems, but in national and local economies as well. They support jobs, strengthen supply chains, create opportunities for companies across many sectors, and help build the foundation for growth and economic competitiveness beyond the digital economy. 

That is the broader context for this report. Tax is one important measure of contribution, but it is not the only one. Our investments, partnerships, infrastructure, and long-term presence in countries around the world also reflect a commitment to helping strengthen the economies and communities where we operate, today and for the future.

 

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Europe is moving fast to capture the benefits of artificial intelligence, recognizing its potential to raise productivity, strengthen competitiveness, and help modernize public services. At the same time, organizations across Europe are focused on digital sovereignty and resilience: retaining control over their data and critical operations in a period of geopolitical volatility.

These priorities go together. That is why one year ago, we announced a set of European digital commitments to respond to these expectations. They focused on five areas:

1. Help build a broad AI and cloud ecosystem across Europe
2. Uphold Europe’s digital resilience even when there is geopolitical volatility
3. Continue to protect the privacy of European data
4. Help protect and defend Europe’s cybersecurity
5. Help strengthen Europe’s economic competitiveness, including for open source

Together, they reflect a simple principle: Europe should be able to use global technology at scale, under European rules, with confidence that it will remain available, secure, and under customer control.

One year on, we take stock of how we’ve put those commitments into practice.

1. Building a broad AI and cloud ecosystem across Europe

A year ago, we detailed plans to increase our European datacenter capacity by 40%, expand cloud operations across 16 European countries, and reach more than 200 datacenters on the continent by 2027. Since then, we have announced new multi-billion euro investments in Portugal, Norway, and the UK, adding to the increased investments announced in Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Poland, and Switzerland. We also launched new cloud regions in Austria, Denmark, and Belgium. Together, this growing capacity is helping European organizations access cloud and AI capabilities closer to home while supporting sustainable growth through investments such as matching 100% of our annual global electricity consumption with renewable energy.

We emphasize now, as we did when first announcing our digital commitments, that European laws apply to our business practices in Europe, just as local laws govern local practices elsewhere in the world. We remain committed not only to building digital infrastructure for Europe, but also to respecting the role that laws across Europe play in regulating our products and services.

2. Upholding Europe’s digital resilience in a volatile geopolitical environment

For many customers, digital sovereignty is now about more than where data is stored. Institutions and businesses across Europe also want to know whether they can rely on critical digital services when geopolitical pressures rise, and whether they can adopt advanced AI capabilities without losing control.

We have made our Digital Resilience Commitment legally binding in contracts with European national governments and the European Commission, including a commitment to promptly and vigorously contest in court any order by any government to suspend or cease cloud operations in Europe.

We also committed to continuity measures, including expanded partnerships with European cloud partners that can support our customers’ operational continuity in extreme scenarios. Reinforcing this approach, we launched a European resiliency partnership with Delos Cloud to safeguard business continuity in Europe in times of crisis. This work also supports closer cooperation among Europe’s sovereign cloud providers, including crisis response coordination and continuity options designed to help customers maintain operations even in the event of geopolitical disruptions.

We also expanded our strategic partnership with Capgemini to offer fully integrated, managed sovereign cloud services. In addition, we are deepening our collaboration with Accenture to help organizations design and implement sovereign cloud and AI solutions, supporting customers in highly regulated sectors as they balance innovation with control, compliance, and resilience.

To further strengthen governance and operational oversight in Europe, Microsoft’s European activities are now overseen by a board of directors composed exclusively of European nationals, reinforcing regional accountability and our commitments to cybersecurity, resilience, and compliance under European law.

3. Protecting the privacy of European data

Privacy, transparency, and customer control remain central to Europe’s expectations for cloud and AI. That’s why over the past year we have built a portfolio of sovereign cloud options, spanning public cloud, private cloud, and national partner solutions, so that customers can choose the level of control and oversight that best fits their legal, operational, and risk requirements. This portfolio spans infrastructure, productivity, and AI workloads across cloud, hybrid, or fully local deployments.

We have continued to implement our Defending Your Data Initiative, including our commitment to challenge government data requests for EU public‑sector or commercial customers where we have a lawful basis to do so.

We also completed the EU Data Boundary, enabling European customer data to be stored and processed within the EU. We have since expanded these commitments to cover AI-powered productivity services, so that the processing of customer data for tools like Copilot can also take place within Europe.

In order to further reinforce transparency and oversight, we announced Data Guardian, which ensures that all remote access by Microsoft engineers to systems that store and process customer data in Europe is approved and monitored by personnel residing in Europe and logged in a tamper-evident ledger.

Over the past year, we have strengthened our sovereign solutions through new contractual assurances, closer partnerships with European providers, and expanded customer support.

The Microsoft Sovereign Cloud has been enhanced to help customers meet Europe’s growing expectations for control, resilience, and compliance without slowing down innovation. Recent updates add new governance and operational controls, expand productivity options for regulated environments, and strengthen encryption, while making it easier to use advanced AI capabilities that are fully customer-controlled. This includes solutions where AI models can run on customer-owned infrastructure with limited connectivity or even in fully disconnected environments. Earlier this week, we added new capabilities to our private cloud offering allowing organizations to run much larger workloads locally.

Sovereign Landing Zone provides a cloud architecture that embeds governance, compliance, and sovereign controls, helping European organizations deploy cloud environments that align with European regulatory requirements, with less complexity.

External validation of this approach continues to grow. Microsoft was named a leader in Forrester’s latest assessment of sovereign cloud platforms, recognizing the strength of our public cloud, private cloud, and partner-operated approach.

To help customers put this into practice, we opened our first three European Sovereignty and Resilience Studios in Munich, Brussels, and Amsterdam, where governments and enterprises work side by side with Microsoft’s engineers, policy experts, and security teams to capture the full promise of cloud and AI. Additional studios are planned to open in Microsoft’s nine other Innovation Hubs across Europe.

4. Helping protect and defend Europe’s cybersecurity

Cyber threats don’t stop at national borders, and Europe’s security depends on strong public‑private cooperation. During the last year, we have rolled out our European Security Program (ESP), an offering available at no cost to governments across the UK, EU, EFTA, and EU accession countries. It expands threat intelligence sharing and prioritizes new partnerships and investments to help protect critical infrastructure, disrupt cybercrime, and strengthen Europe’s collective ability to respond to attacks.

This program is live across 27 countries across Europe, providing support at no cost within a clear scope through structured briefings, early warnings, and tailored information sharing relevant to each country’s environment.

We have provided cybersecurity support to NATO, Ukraine, and other European governments, including threat intelligence, election protection, and disrupting attacks targeting European governments, companies, and citizens.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when we helped move critical data and services to secure datacenters across Europe and defend against sustained cyberattacks and eventual kinetic attacks, Microsoft has continued to support the country without interruption, providing more than $600 million in free technology, security, and financial assistance.

We have also expanded collaboration by embedding investigators with Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3). Together, we are translating technical threat intelligence into coordinated operational action, linking visibility into cybercriminal infrastructure with law enforcement’s ability to investigate, coordinate, and disrupt. This model underpinned recent cybercrime takedowns, including Tycoon 2FA, Lumma Stealer, and RedVDS. And, through our partnership with CyberPeace Institute, more than 300 European nonprofits are receiving cybersecurity support.

All of this work was reinforced in July with the appointment of Freddy Dezeure as Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, a European national based in Europe, who is coordinating Microsoft’s compliance with European cybersecurity regulations. Our European executive cybersecurity presence and oversight  are closely aligned with Microsoft’s broader cybersecurity governance, combining European guidelines with globally consistent security practices.

5. Strengthening Europe’s economic competitiveness, including for open source

We continue to support open ecosystems, including open source, to keep our AI and cloud platforms accessible and interoperable, and to give customers deployment options that fit their needs. There are almost 25 million European software developers active on GitHub, making more than 155 million contributions to public projects in the last year alone. Through Microsoft Foundry, customers can choose from more than 11,000 AI models, both open source and commercial, and run them in sovereign public or private clouds from cloud to the edge. This enables customers to deploy the same Microsoft Foundry model catalog within sovereignty‑aligned infrastructure.

But it is also vital that we support AI solutions that are more multilingual and attuned to cultural context. As part of our commitment to advance European commerce and culture, we launched LINGUA in September 2025 to support projects that collect high‑quality speech and text datasets for Europe’s underrepresented languages. Following an open call, we selected 12 projects spanning 16 languages and dialects across 10 countries, bringing together universities, nonprofits, a government language center, and a public broadcaster to create and digitize open datasets, preserve heritage languages, and develop new evaluation resources for multilingual AI.

We have new AI for Culture projects to digitally preserve iconic European sites and artifacts, including a digital replica of Notre Dame with the French Institut du Patrimoine and Iconem, and we are working with leading institutions to digitize historic cinematic model opera sets and enable access to metadata associated with millions of artifacts. We are also working with the Vatican Library on digitization and AI analysis of historic documents. All of this builds on preservation efforts underway since 2019 for landmarks such as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Mont Saint Michel in France, and Ancient Olympia in Greece.

Relatedly, Céline Geissmann was chosen to lead our Microsoft Open Innovation Center in Strasbourg to work at the intersection of AI, languages, culture, open data, and innovation.

Staying accountable as Europe’s digital landscape evolves

These commitments are our North Star for how we engage in Europe, grounded in European law and values, shaped by European priorities, and designed to progress over time.

As Europe’s digital and geopolitical context continues to evolve, we will keep engaging with policymakers, regulators, customers, and partners to test whether what we are delivering matches what Europe needs. Where it does not, we will adapt.

Trust cannot be claimed. It needs to be earned through our actions, day by day. We are committed to earning that trust by listening, acting, and delivering for Europe.

The post One year on: Progress on our European digital commitments  appeared first on Microsoft On the Issues.

On Tuesday, February 23rd, Microsoft Senior Director of Education and Workforce Policy Allyson Knox testified before the House Education & Workforce Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education. To view the proceedings, visit the committee’s website.

STATEMENT OF ALLYSON KNOX

SENIOR DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION AND WORKFORCE POLICY

MICROSOFT CORPORATION

BEFORE THE

EDUCATION AND WORKFORCE COMMITTEE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON EARLY CHILDHOOD, ELEMENTARY, AND SECONDARY EDUCATION

UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

“BUILDING AN AI-READY AMERICA: TEACHING IN THE AI AGE”

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2026

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Good afternoon and thank you, Chairman Kiley, Ranking Member Bonamici, Members of the Subcommittee for inviting me to testify today. My name is Allyson Knox. I am Senior Director of Education and Workforce Policy at Microsoft, and I am pleased to have this opportunity to discuss issues related to artificial intelligence and its impact on teachers.

Today, I will share insights we have gathered from teachers about their experiences, challenges, and needs as they integrate AI in education; outline the steps Microsoft and other organizations are taking to facilitate this transition; and recommend legislative approaches to help policymakers strengthen these efforts. These legislative approaches include supporting professional development for teachers; encouraging public-private partnerships; promoting AI literacy; providing guidance on responsible AI use; and supporting innovation.

I would like to begin by quoting from Microsoft’s vice-chair and president, Brad Smith, in his recent foreword to Degrees of Change: What AI Means for Education and the Next Generation[i]:

“Generative AI has become the fastest-spreading technology in human history, adopted at a pace that even the most seasoned technologists could scarcely imagine. This speed is breathtaking, but it also compels us to pause and ask, “Are we ready for what comes next?” AI’s promise is extraordinary. It can help solve problems that have challenged humanity for decades—improving health outcomes, advancing education, and unlocking new opportunities for economic growth. But, like every transformative technology before it, AI brings new questions and new responsibilities.”

This thought-provoking quote is apt for today’s conversation on how AI is impacting teachers. The speed of AI adoption in our nation’s schools and classrooms is indeed breathtaking. Just three years ago, AI had barely made a mark in education. However, our 2025 Study on AI in Education found that 80% of U.S. K-12 teachers have used AI in their roles or for school-related purposes at least once or twice and one-fifth report daily use of AI. Additionally, 58% of K-12 teachers think AI usage at their school/district will increase in the next year.[ii]

What we are hearing from teachers on the impact of AI:

The breadth of adoption has been profound. We have heard directly from teachers who are using AI to streamline lesson planning, curriculum development, and personalize student learning in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago.[iii] AI is also reducing the time it takes to carry out administrative tasks, allowing more time for teachers to focus on their students.

Despite these benefits, we know teachers face challenges when it comes to AI in the classroom. We found roughly one in three teachers lack confidence in using AI effectively and responsibly. Many teachers also express concerns about how AI can exacerbate cheating and are worried about issues such as data privacy and student safety.

Teachers know AI is here to stay, and based upon countless surveys, forums, and focus groups, teachers are ready to tackle these challenges and ask for support in three main areas:

1. AI literacy – Teachers want the skills, knowledge, and support to build AI literacy and critical thinking in their students;
2. AI guardrails – Teachers want students to use AI responsibly and safely; and
3. AI tools – Teachers want classroom-ready AI tools and opportunities to provide feedback that improve them.

I’m excited to share a few ways Microsoft, along with many of our partners, are committed to providing teachers with the support they are requesting.

1.AI literacy – Teachers want the skills, knowledge, and support to build AI literacy and critical thinking in their students

At the core of this support is listening to and learning from teachers and understanding what they want and need to become AI literate themselves and teach AI literacy to their students. These conversations have resulted in exciting initiatives, including the recent launch of the Microsoft Elevate for teachers program, part of the company’s broader commitment[iii] to help schools and educators build skills, expand opportunities, and ensure everyone benefits from AI.

Microsoft Elevate for Educators

The Microsoft Elevate for Educators program equips educators and school leaders with access to one of the world’s largest and most connected peer educator networks and offers free professional development resources. It will provide free access to a new industry-recognized credential for educators, developed in partnership with one of the leading national nonprofit focused on technology and innovation (ISTE+ASCD).[vi] This partnership is aligned to the AI Literacy Framework, which is intended to help educators gain confidence and expertise in integrating AI into their teaching and learning. As part of this work, we also support ISTE+ASCD in advancing AI in teacher preparation programs.

National Academy for AI Instruction

Along with OpenAI and Anthropic, we are supporting the National Academy for AI Instruction, through a partnership with the American Federation of Teachers and the United Federation of Teachers. The Academy describes itself as a national training hub designed by educators – shaping the future of AI in public education, grounded in safety and people-first technology, and improving student learning. From everything we have heard from teachers, this is exactly the type of support they need to promote AI literacy. The Academy also focuses on building critical thinking skills for students and educators.

Rob Weil, who heads up the Academy, recently shared an update on their work with me. He noted through direct engagement with teachers, they listen to what the primary concerns teachers have around using AI in the classroom are, and then work with them to design trainings that are directly responsive to their concerns and meet them where they are – including using whatever technology they are already using in their classroom.

Their goal is to train 400,000 teachers over the next 5 years. The Academy is centered around a “train the trainer” model, building capacity to provide AI literacy to teachers at scale – providing the potential of millions of teachers to benefit from this initiative. Weil noted that interest and participation in the Academy has been taking off, largely due to word of mouth. This month, 1,000 teachers showed up for a virtual session, and another in-person session was overprescribed had to turn away a hundred interested teachers.

Why the interest? Teachers want to learn from their peers and trusted partners; they also want to ensure they are using AI effectively and safely. Weil explained that one of the most popular aspects of the training is centered around the Academy’s Commonsense Guardrails for Using Advanced Technology in Schools,[v] which helps empower teachers to address the challenges they are facing in implementing AI. Some teachers describe AI as the wild-wild west, and this guide has helped provide a roadmap for understanding how to navigate bringing this technology into the classroom.

The trainings also provide real-world, hands-on experiences with using technology which teachers themselves are bringing to the table. At the trainings, teachers are asked what they could use the most help with and then have time to experiment with different tools to do things like start a draft of a lesson plan or an outline for a rubric – allowing them more time and flexibility to incorporate their expertise. In addition, the Academy creates opportunities for educators to influence the development of AI for schools.

Support for Special Education Teachers

We also recognize the potential that AI holds to support students with disabilities – and the need to ensure special education teachers have the support and resources to fully unlock this technology.

Recently, we launched a course to support educators in exploring how Microsoft AI tools can be thoughtfully used in special education environments to reduce administrative demands, strengthen accessibility, and support clear communication with families. Throughout the learning path, responsible use of AI, privacy, and transparency are emphasized so educators can determine when and how AI fits into their practice in ways that align with student needs and professional values.

After our engagements, we tailored our trainings to special education teachers by incorporating their direct feedback. Key topics included privacy with sensitive medical information and using AI to assist parents and caregivers in IEP meetings. We emphasized clear communication, parental inclusion, and ensuring parents understand the meeting’s goals and how best to support their children.

Finally, special education involves a collaborative team beyond just teachers, and we’ve revised our approach to address the needs of occupational therapists, physical therapists, and all other members involved in special education.

Support for Teachers in Rural America

We have found there’s a significant gap in daily AI usage by urban teachers versus their rural and suburban counterparts (39% vs. 24%).[iv] This gap underscores why ensuring AI tools, resources, and professional development are attuned to the needs of rural teachers is critical.

For the last five years, we’ve been working with the National Future Farmers of America (FFA) and agricultural science teachers to develop FarmBeats for Students and ensure it is responsive to agricultural science teachers’ needs. We engaged in an iterative process with them – collaboratively designing and building curriculum and training with agricultural science teachers from the very beginning of development.

FarmBeats for Students brings AI to agricultural education through a hands-on educational program that brings precision agriculture directly into the classroom. The program consists of an affordable hardware kit and a free curriculum aligned with rigorous educational standards. Activities give students direct experience with topics like digital sensors, data analysis, and AI.

We brought FarmBeats for Students to the National FFA convention and held a series of workshops with teachers across the country. They experimented with the kits and provided input to ensure this technology was directly responsive to what they wanted to see in the classroom.

In addition to our partnership with the National FFA, Microsoft helps meet the needs of rural teachers by deploying the online content referenced above through Elevate, as well as supporting community-based organizations that help facilitate activities and events which promote AI literacy in rural communities.

AI Literacy Frameworks, Standards, and Guidance

Teachers want frameworks that help them integrate AI into their classrooms. We are pleased there is bipartisan interest in establishing strong frameworks around AI and education, especially highlighting the need for widespread AI literacy. Microsoft has provided support, guidance, and input to organizations and initiatives such as Code.org and TeachAI who work to develop and promote frameworks, guidance, and standards.

Microsoft encourages state and local policymakers to review and leverage these resources as they incorporate AI in education:

• The TeachAI Foundational Policies[vii]: This resource, endorsed by dozens of policy organizations and associations, provides practical guidance for national, state, and local leaders to harness AI’s benefits in teaching and learning while mitigating risks. The policies focus on five priorities—fostering leadership, promoting AI literacy, providing clear guidance, building educator capacity, and supporting responsible innovation—to ensure AI strengthens education systems and prepares learners for an AI‑enabled workforce.
• The TeachAI AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit[viii]: The Toolkit helps education authorities, school leaders, and educators develop clear, responsible guidance for using AI in K–12 education, balancing potential benefits with risks such as privacy, bias, and academic integrity. It provides a practical framework, principles, sample policies, and communication templates to support safe and human‑centered AI adoption across school systems. The Toolkit has been used by the majority of states in constructing guidance for schools.
• The AI Literacy Framework[ix]: The AI Literacy Framework defines the knowledge, skills, and attitudes students and educators need to understand, use, and critically evaluate AI in education. It is organized around four core domains—Engaging with AI, Creating with AI, Managing AI, and Designing AI—and emphasizes critical thinking, ethics, and human judgment alongside technical understanding. It also emphasizes the foundational computer science concepts that prepare students to not just use AI but understand how AI works and its societal impacts. The framework is designed to be interdisciplinary, practical, and durable, helping schools integrate AI literacy into curriculum, professional learning, and policy in age‑appropriate ways.

2.AI guardrails – Teachers want students to use AI responsibly and safely

We have heard from teachers that one of the greatest hesitations they have with AI is around safety for students. This includes ensuring AI tools used in the classroom protect student privacy, don’t collect their information, and are safe from a mental health perspective.

Some of the strategies teachers use to promote safety are a significant focus in the professional development referenced earlier. In addition, the frameworks include key components to help teachers understand responsible AI use.

Microsoft takes our responsibility as a developer and deployer of AI technology very seriously. Paramount to deploying this technology in classrooms is ensuring it is responsible. Microsoft has identified six principles that we believe should guide AI development and use.

• Fairness: AI systems should treat all people fairly.
• Reliability and Safety: AI systems should perform reliably and safely.
• Privacy and Security: AI systems should be secure and respect privacy.
• Inclusiveness: AI systems should empower everyone and engage all people.
• Transparency: AI systems should be understandable.
• Accountability: People should be accountable for AI systems.

These principles are the foundation for other tools and resources we share with teachers to provide guidelines for them to deploy AI in the classroom.

As another example of our commitment to safety, earlier this month, on Safer Internet Day, we launched our new Microsoft Education Security Toolkit,[x] which provides educators and IT teams with practical guidance tailored to the realities of modern education.

3. AI tools – Teachers want classroom-ready AI tools and opportunities to provide feedback that improve them

Teachers often lack the right AI tools tailored to their needs for boosting student achievement. It’s essential to develop AI solutions based on teacher input rather than just delivering generic options. Microsoft strives to meet this responsibility by designing tools and partnerships that address educators’ needs. We believe this approach creates a critical feedback loop that will allow us to constantly evolve our tools to maximize their benefit in the classroom over time.

In fact, at Microsoft, our engineering teams collaborate closely with educators and students to advance the development of AI tools for classroom use. We partner with teacher organizations and directly engage with the disability community to better understand instructional requirements and design technology that enhance student learning outcomes.  Some examples include:

Reading Progress

One of the tools we offer to teachers is called Reading Progress, which helps teachers analyze students’ fluency and generates reading passages and comprehension questions.

From the beginning of development, we worked with individual teachers through our Educator Insiders program and with entire schools or districts through our Technology Adoption Preview, where educators test prototypes of our products and provide feedback.

For example, teachers asked for a tool that could generate tailored passages to meet the needs of their students. We incorporated that feedback and now, teachers can get as specific as saying they want a passage generated about sports that is for a third-grade reading level and includes specific words their class is learning.

Teachers also told us they wanted reading comprehension questions generated faster and better. With AI, it’s easy to do this in a high-quality way.

Teachers report increased comprehension, higher reading fluency, and higher scores, especially for struggling or reluctant readers.

Teach for America (TFA)

Microsoft has been a proud supporter of TFA’s efforts to improve the education system and expand opportunities for children across the U.S. It has been great to see all of the ways in which TFA has worked to equip their teachers with AI fluency in order to help them integrate this technology into the classroom.

TFA recently completed a cloud migration to Microsoft Azure, unlocking countless avenues to improve program design and delivery, direct the most possible funds toward its mission to ensure all kids have access to an excellent education, and evolve to offer the best learning options inside and outside the classroom.

Where do we go from here

What is both exciting and daunting about AI is that while we can take lessons learned from previous technological transformations in the classroom, much of the book has not been written on AI adoption. Meaning tech companies, teachers, government, and other stakeholders have the opportunity to shape where AI goes in education and beyond.

I want to conclude my remarks today with policy recommendations for the Committee to consider:

• Support professional development for teachers to effectively teach about AI and responsibly integrate AI tools in the classroom.
  • At the Federal level, this means providing priorities for competitive grant programs, such as those recently proposed by the U.S. Department of Education.
• Encourage public-private partnerships.
  • Incentivize and prioritize Federal funds and grants that support partnerships between technology companies and educational programs, including apprenticeship and credentialed organizations, to develop up to-date AI curriculum.
• Promote AI literacy across the U.S.
  • Integrate AI skills and concepts, including their foundational principles, social impacts, and ethical concerns, into existing curriculum and instruction.
• Provide guidance.
  • Equip schools with guidance on the safe, effective, and responsible use of AI, including considerations related to student privacy, data security, accessibility, transparency, and appropriate human oversight.
• Invest in innovation.
  • Support research and evaluation to better understand the impacts of AI in education, including its effects on teaching and learning and student outcomes, and to identify effective, scalable practices that mitigate the digital divide.

 

[i] Smith, Brad. “Foreword.” Degrees of Change: What AI Means for Education and the Next Generation, by Juan M. Lavista Ferres, John Wiley & Sons, 2026.
[ii] See Microsoft 2025 AI in Education Survey Details, August 2025
[iii] See Microsoft 2025 AI in Education Survey Details, August 2025
[iv] See Microsoft Elevate: Putting people first, July 2025
[v] See Commonsense Guardrails for Using Advanced Technology in Schools, March 2025
[vi] See Microsoft 2025 AI in Education Survey Details, August 2025
[vii] See TeachAI Foundational Policies
[viii] See TeachAI AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit
[ix] See AI Literacy Framework
[x] See Microsoft Education Security Toolkit, February 2026

[1] ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) + ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development)

 

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Microsoft announces at the India AI Impact Summit it is on pace to invest USD $50 billion by the end of the decade to help bring AI to countries across the Global South  

Artificial intelligence is diffusing at an impressive speed, but its adoption around the world remains profoundly uneven. As Microsoft’s latest AI Diffusion Report shows, AI usage in the Global North is roughly twice that of the Global South. And this divide continues to widen. This disparity impacts not only national and regional economic growth, but whether AI can deliver on its broader promise of expanding opportunity and prosperity around the world.

The India AI Impact Summit rightly has placed this challenge at the center of its agenda. For more than a century, unequal access to electricity exacerbated a growing economic gap between the Global North and South. Unless we act with urgency, a growing AI divide will perpetuate this disparity in the century ahead.

Solutions will not come easily. The needs are multifaceted, and will require substantial investments and hard work by governments, the private sector, and nonprofit organizations. But the opportunity is clear. If AI is deployed broadly and used well by a young and growing population, it offers a real prospect for catch-up economic growth for the Global South. It might even provide the biggest such opportunity of the 21^st century.

As a company, we are committed to playing an ambitious and constructive role in supporting this opportunity. This week in Delhi, we’re sharing that Microsoft is on pace to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to help bring AI to countries across the Global South. This is based on a five-part program to drive AI impact, consisting of the following:

• Building the infrastructure needed for AI diffusion
• Empowering people through technology and skills for schools and nonprofits
• Strengthening multilingual and multicultural AI capabilities
• Enabling local AI innovations that address community needs
• Measuring AI diffusion to guide future AI policies and investments

One thing that is clear this week at the summit in India is that success will require many deep partnerships. These must span borders and bring people and organizations together across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

1. Building the infrastructure needed for AI diffusion

Infrastructure is a prerequisite for AI diffusion, requiring reliable electricity, connectivity, and compute capacity. To help address infrastructure gaps and support the growing needs of the Global South, Microsoft has steadily increased its investments in AI-enabling infrastructure across these regions. In our last fiscal year alone, Microsoft invested more than  $8 billion in datacenter infrastructure serving the Global South. This includes new infrastructure in India, Mexico, and countries in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

We’re coupling our investments in datacenters with an ambitious effort to help close the Global South’s connectivity divide. We’ve been pursuing aggressively a global goal to extend internet access to 250 million people in unserved and underserved communities in the Global South, including 100 million people in Africa.

As we announced in November, we’ve already reached 117 million people across Africa through partnerships with organizations such as Cassava Technologies, Mawingu, and others that are building last‑mile networks across rural and urban communities alike. We’re closing in on our global goal of reaching 250 million people and will share an update on that progress soon.

We’re investing in AI infrastructure with sensitivity to digital sovereignty needs. We recognize that in a fragmented world, we must offer customers attractive choices for the use of our offerings. This includes sovereign controls in the public cloud, private sovereign offerings, and close collaboration with national partners.

We pursue all this with commitments to protect cybersecurity, privacy, and resilience. In the age of AI, we ensure that our customers’ AI-based innovations and intellectual property remain in their hands and under their control, rather than being transferred to AI providers.

Critically, we balance our focus on national sovereignty with our efforts to support digital trust and stability across borders. The Global South requires enormous investments to fund infrastructure for datacenters, connectivity, and electricity. It is difficult to imagine meeting all these needs without foreign direct investment, including from international technology firms.

This need is part of what informed our announcement last week at the Munich Security Conference of the new Trusted Tech Alliance. This new partnership brings together 16 leading technology companies from 11 countries and four continents. We’ve agreed together that we will adhere to five core principles designed to ensure trust in technology. Ultimately, we believe the Global South—as well as the rest of the world—needs both to protect its digital sovereignty and benefit from new investments and the best digital innovations the world has to offer.

2. Empowering people through technology and skills for schools and nonprofits

Ultimately, datacenters, connectivity, and electricity provide only part of the digital infrastructure a nation needs. History shows that the ability to provide access to technology and technology skills are equally important for economic development.

As a company, we’re focused on this in multiple ways. One critical aspect of our work is based on programs to provide cloud, AI, and other digital technologies to schools and nonprofits across the Global South. Another is our work to advance broad access to AI skills. In our last fiscal year, Microsoft invested more than $2 billion in these programs in the Global South. This includes direct financial grants, technology donations, skilling programs, and below-market product discounts.

AI skills are foundational to ensuring that AI expands opportunity and enables people to pursue more impactful real-world applications. With the launch of Microsoft Elevate in July, we committed to helping 20 million people in and beyond the Global South earn in-demand AI skilling credentials by 2028. After training 5.6 million people across India in 2025, we advanced this work by setting a goal last December to equip 20 million people in India with essential AI skills by 2030.

As part of that commitment, today we are announcing the launch of Elevate for Educators in India to strengthen the capacity of two million teachers across more than 200,000 schools, vocational institutes, and higher education settings. Our goal is to help the country’s teaching workforce lead confidently in an AI‑driven future. The program will be delivered in partnership with India’s national education and workforce training authorities, expanding equitable AI opportunities for eight million students.

Through Microsoft Elevate, we’re also working to introduce new educator credentials and a global professional learning community that enables teachers to share best practices with peers worldwide. This effort will involve large-scale capacity building initiatives, including AI Ambassadors, Educator Academies, AI Productivity Labs, and Centers of Excellence. It will equip 25,000 institutions with inclusive AI infrastructure while integrating AI learning pathways into major government platforms.

3. Strengthening multilingual and multicultural AI capabilities

Language is another major barrier to AI diffusion across the Global South, particularly in regions where digitally underrepresented languages prevail and access to essential services depends on local-language communication. For billions of people worldwide, AI systems perform less consistently in the languages they rely on most than in English.

That’s why we’re announcing this week new steps to increase our investments across the AI lifecycle, from data and models to evaluation and deployment, to strengthen multilingual and multicultural capabilities and support more inclusive AI systems that will better serve the Global South.

First, we’re investing upstream in language data and model capability. This includes support for LINGUA Africa, which builds on what we learned through LINGUA Europe: that investing in language data and model capability in partnership with local communities can materially improve AI performance for underrepresented languages.

Through LINGUA Africa—a $5.5 million open call led by the Masakhane African Languages Hub, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, and the Gates Foundation, with additional support from the UK government—we are prioritizing open, responsibly sourced data across text, speech, and vision as well as use-case-driven AI model development. By enabling African languages in high-impact sectors like education, food security, health, and government services, LINGUA Africa aims to ensure AI advances translate into tangible improvements in people’s daily lives.

Second, we’re advancing multilingual and multicultural evaluation tools. We’re helping expand the MLCommons AILuminate benchmark to include major Indic and Asian languages, enabling more reliable measurement of AI safety and security beyond English.

Today, even when automated evaluation tools expand language coverage, they too often rely on machine translation or English-first model behavior, with predictable failures when local expressions shift meaning. Partnering with academic and government institutions in India, Japan, Korea, and Singapore, and with industry, Microsoft is co-leading AILuminate’s multilingual, multicultural, and multimodal expansion that builds from the ground up. With a pilot dataset of 7,000 high-quality text-and-image prompts for Hindi, Tamil, Malay, Japanese, and Korean, we’re developing tools that reflect how risks manifest in local linguistic and cultural contexts, not just how they appear after translation.

Microsoft Research is also advancing Samiksha, a community-centered method for evaluating AI behavior in real-world contexts, in collaboration with Karya and The Collective Intelligence Project in India. Samiksha encodes local language use, culturally specific communication norms, and locally relevant use cases directly into core testing artifacts by surfacing failure modes that English-first evaluations routinely miss.

Finally, we’re working to scale content provenance for linguistic diversity. For trusted AI deployment, the ecosystem benefits from tools to identify the provenance of digital content like images, audio, or video, distinguishing whether it’s AI-generated. With partners in the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), Microsoft is helping extend content provenance standards beyond an English-ready baseline. This includes forthcoming support for multiple Indic languages across metadata, specifications, and UX guidance, alongside efforts to support mobile-first deployment. With these investments, hundreds of millions more people in India will be better equipped to identify synthetic media in their primary language.

4. Enabling local AI innovations that address community needs

As India’s guiding sutras for the AI Impact Summit recognize, AI must be applied to address pressing challenges in collaboration with people and organizations in the Global South. Microsoft’s increasing investments prioritize locally defined problems, locally grounded expertise, and real-world impact. Our goal is straightforward: to ensure that AI solutions are not only technically sound, but socially relevant and sustainable.

Today, Microsoft is announcing a new AI initiative to strengthen food security across Sub-Saharan Africa, starting in Kenya and designed to scale across the region. Across Global South communities, food security and sustainable agriculture are critical to resilience and progress. In collaboration with NASA Harvest, the government of Kenya, the East Africa Grain Council, UNDP AI Hub for Sustainable Development, and FAO, our AI for Good Lab will use AI on top of satellite data to provide critical, timely food security insights. This builds on what we’ve learned in helping to address rice farming challenges in India, where severe groundwater depletion prompted 150,000 farmers in Punjab to adopt water-saving methods. In collaboration with The Nature Conservancy, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab developed a classification system with satellite imagery to empower policymakers to track adoption of sustainable rice farming practices, target interventions, and measure water management impacts at scale.

Through Project Gecko, Microsoft Research is also co-designing AI technologies with local communities in East Africa and South Asia to support agriculture. This work includes the Paza family of automatic speech recognition models that can operate on mobile devices across six Kenyan languages, multilingual Copilots, and a Multimodal Critical Thinking (MMCT) Agent that can reason over community-generated video, voice, and text. Microsoft also launched PazaBench—the first automatic speech recognition leaderboard, with initial coverage of 39 African languages—and developed two playbooks for multilingual and multicultural capabilities, Paza and Vibhasha. Likewise, our AI for Good Lab developed a reproducible pipeline for adapting open-weight large language models to low-resource languages, demonstrating measurable gains for languages such as Chichewa, Inuktitut, and Māori.

5. Measuring AI diffusion to guide future AI policies and investments

Finally, accelerating diffusion requires a firm understanding of where AI is being used, how it is being adopted, and where gaps persist. Building on our AI Diffusion Reports and Microsoft GitHub’s long track record of contributing to the OECD AI Policy Observatory, the WIPO Global Innovation Index, and other cross‑country analyses, we’re increasing our investments in research and data sharing to track AI diffusion.

We’re advancing new methods for sharing AI adoption metrics. For example, based on models used in public code repositories hosted on Microsoft GitHub and privacy-preserving aggregated usage signals from Azure Foundry, we’re scaling this work through contributions to the forthcoming Global AI Adoption Index developed by the World Bank.

Signals from the global developer community that builds, adapts, and deploys AI-enabled software round out adoption research. At 24 million, the Indian developer community is the second largest national community on GitHub, where developers learn about and collaborate with the world on AI. The Indian community is also the fastest growing among the top 30 largest economies, with growth at more than 26 percent each year since 2020 and a recent surge of over 36 percent in annual growth as of Q4 2025. Indian developers rank second globally in open-source contributions, second in GitHub Education users, and second in contributions to public generative AI projects, with readiness to use tools like GitHub Copilot across academic, enterprise, and public interest settings enabling AI diffusion.

Insights from this evidence base help inform investments in infrastructure, language capabilities, skilling, or beyond, supporting more targeted and effective interventions to expand AI’s benefits. They also create a common empirical baseline to track progress over time—so AI diffusion becomes something we can measure and shape, not just observe.

Sustaining impact at scale through coordinated global action

For AI to diffuse broadly and deliver meaningful impact across regions, several conditions matter. As a company, we are focused on the need for accessible AI infrastructure, systems that work reliably in real-world contexts, and technologies that can be applied toward local challenges and opportunities. Microsoft is committed to working with partners to advance this work, including sharing data to track progress.

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Read the full Global AI Adoption Report.

Global adoption of artificial intelligence continued to rise in the second half of 2025, increasing by 1.2 percentage points compared to the first half of the year, with roughly one in six people worldwide now using generative AI tools, remarkable progress for a technology that only recently entered mainstream use. 

To track this trend, we measure AI diffusion as the share of people worldwide who have used a generative AI product during the reported period. This measure is derived from aggregated and anonymized Microsoft telemetry and then adjusted to reflect differences in OS and device-market share, internet penetration, and country population. Additional details on the methodology are available in our AI Diffusion technical paper.^[1]

No single metric is perfect, and this one is no exception. Through the Microsoft AI Economy Institute, we continue to refine how we measure AI diffusion globally, including how adoption varies across countries in ways that best advance priorities such as scientific discovery and productivity gains. For this report, we rely on the strongest cross-country measure available today, and we expect to complement it over time with additional indicators as they emerge and mature. 

Despite progress in AI adoption, the data shows a widening divide: adoption in the Global North grew nearly twice as fast as in the Global South. As a result, 24.7 percent of the working age population in the Global North is now using these tools, compared to only 14.1 percent in the Global South.  

Countries that have invested early in digital infrastructure, AI skilling, and government adoption, such as the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Norway, Ireland, France, and Spain, continue to lead. The UAE extended its lead as the #1 ranked country, with 64.0 percent of the working age population using AI at the end of 2025, compared to 59.4 percent earlier in the year. The UAE has opened a lead of more than three percentage points over Singapore, which continues in second place with 60.9 percent adoption.

 

The second half of the year in the United States shows that leadership in innovation and infrastructure, while critical, does not by themselves lead to broad AI adoption. The U.S. leads in both AI infrastructure and frontier model development, but it fell from 23rd to 24th place in AI usage among the working age population, with a 28.3 percent usage rate. It lags far behind smaller, more highly digitized and AI-focused economies. 

South Korea stands out as the clearest end-of-year success story. It surged seven spots in the global rankings, climbing from 25th to 18th, driven by government policies, improved frontier model capabilities in the Korean language, and consumer-facing features that resonated with the population. Generative AI is now used in schools, workplaces, and public services, and South Korea has become one of ChatGPT’s fastest-growing markets, leading OpenAI to open an office in Seoul.[2] 

 

A parallel development reshaping the global landscape in 2025 was the rapid rise of DeepSeek, an open-source AI platform that has gained significant traction in markets long underserved by traditional providers. By releasing its model under an open-source MIT license and offering a completely free chatbot, DeepSeek removed both financial and technical barriers that limit access to advanced AI. Its strongest adoption, not surprisingly has emerged across China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Belarus. But perhaps even more notable is DeepSeek’s surging popularity across Africa, where it is aided by strategic promotion and partnerships with firms such as Huawei.^[3]

This rapid evolution underscores an increasingly important dimension of AI competition between the United States and China, involving a race to promote adoption of their respective national models. DeepSeek’s success reflects growing Chinese momentum across Africa, a trend that may continue to accelerate in 2026. DeepSeek’s ascent also underscores a broader truth: the global diffusion of AI is influenced by accessibility factors, and the next wave of users may come from communities that have historically had limited access to technological progress. The challenge ahead is ensuring that innovation spreads in ways that help narrow divides rather than deepen them.

[1]A. Misra, J. Wang, S. McCullers, K. White, and J. L. Ferres, “Measuring AI Diffusion: A Population-Normalized Metric for Tracking Global AI Usage,” Nov. 04, 2025, arXiv: arXiv:2511.02781. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2511.02781..

[2] OpenAI Korea set to launch next month – The Korea Times.” https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/business/companies/20250828/openai-korea-set-to-launch-next-month

[3] S. Rai, L. Prinsloo, and H. Nyambura, “China’s DeepSeek Is Beating Out OpenAI and Google in Africa (1).” Bloomberg News..

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Around the world, the dangers of extreme weather are a daily reality. In 2024, extreme weather displaced or disrupted the lives of more than 800,000 people worldwide —a reminder that accurate, timely forecasts aren’t just about data; they’re about people. From farmers deciding when to plant to coastal communities preparing for hurricanes, better forecasting can save lives, protect infrastructure, and support economies. 

That is why Microsoft remains deeply committed to Aurora, an AI model designed to help scientists understand Earth systems in new ways. Trained on vast amounts of data, it’s tuned to model the Earth’s systems. Aurora has already shown promise across multiple scenarios, including predicting the weather, tracking hurricanes and air quality, and modeling ocean waves and energy flows. 

Today, we are reaffirming our commitment: keep Aurora open, collaborative, and impactful so researchers can innovate faster and deliver solutions that help communities prepare, adapt, and thrive. Scientific progress depends on openness and a strong global community, which is why Aurora will progress as an open-source platform, enabling scientists everywhere to contribute and apply it to new climate and weather challenges. 

The next phase: Fueling innovation through research partnerships

We’re collaborating with Professor Rich Turner, a leader in machine learning research, and his lab at the University of Cambridge through a Microsoft AI for Good grant and research scientists to continue development of Aurora. Originally developed by Microsoft Research AI for Science, with collaboration from Professor Turner, we believe Aurora has the potential to change the way scientists around the world can use AI for weather and climate science. 

Building on our SPARROW initiative, we’re also investing in research of open-source weather stations that can expand access to high-quality environmental data. These affordable, community-deployable systems are designed to help fill critical observation gaps and strengthen the dependability of weather predictions where they matter most. 

Making Aurora available to scientists everywhere

Aurora’s source code and model weights are already open—but we’re going further. Together with Turner and Cambridge, our AI for Good team will open-source future releases of Aurora and new models that are built upon it, including training pipelines. By making Aurora open and free to build upon, we’re enabling researchers and developers everywhere to collaborate, contribute, and drive innovation together. 

Empowering national meteorological services

As with any technology, the measure of success for tools like Aurora is to have a positive impact on the lives of people. Empowering national meteorological services across the Global South, along with the Global North, is a priority.  We’re particularly focused on the application of Aurora to help meteorological services develop and strengthen their own forecasting systems that are tailored to their own local environments. This will allow them to adapt, extend, and innovate on top of Aurora, improving the accuracy, reliability, and reach of their forecasts. 

Enabling a cross-industry ecosystem

Aurora is trained on one of the largest collections of atmospheric data ever assembled to develop an AI forecasting model. It’s then fine-tuned to perform a variety of specific tasks, like predicting wave height or air quality, using modest amounts of additional data.  

The application of such a model could unlock innovation across all kinds of other industries. For example, energy companies and commodity traders have expressed interest, particularly in seeing how Aurora can be adapted to better predict renewable power generation, anticipate extreme weather events, and help protect energy grids. 

We are excited to see our work on Aurora graduate from a research project into a truly collaborative, open-source effort. By opening Aurora to the global community, we’re enabling breakthroughs in scientific understanding that we hope will transform humanitarian aid, optimize energy systems, advance sustainability, and even reshape financial services. 

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Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we work, learn, and innovate—and it’s doing so at a pace that surpasses every major technology before it. Microsoft’s inaugural AI Diffusion Report offers a comprehensive look at how AI adoption is accelerating worldwide, drawing on data from more than 100 countries. In less than three years, more than 1.2 billion people have used AI tools, a rate of adoption faster than the internet, the personal computer, or even the smartphone. This rapid diffusion underscores AI’s potential as a general-purpose technology but also highlights the urgent need to ensure equitable access.

The report introduces three indices—the AI Frontier Index, the AI Infrastructure Index, and the AI Diffusion Index—to help policymakers, researchers, and industry leaders understand where breakthroughs are happening, where capacity exists to scale, and where AI is being used to improve lives. These insights show that adoption is fastest where connectivity and digital infrastructure are strongest, while nearly four billion people still lack the basics needed to participate in the AI economy. Bridging this gap is essential to avoid deepening global divides.

Beyond the numbers, the report illustrates the need for collaborative action to expand access to digital infrastructure, strengthen skills development, and promote responsible AI policies. By investing in these foundational elements, governments and organizations can unlock AI’s potential for growth and innovation. The data makes clear that speed alone does not guarantee shared prosperity—broad accessibility does.

To explore the full findings and recommendations, read the AI Diffusion Report.

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