Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change gets enormous backlash – Neowin (www.neowin.net)

Microsoft is pushing Windows toward an "agentic OS" — an operating system built to host AI agents that can interact with native apps, devices and the cloud. The company is developing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) for Windows 11 that standardizes how local AI agents connect to and augment app functionality (e.g., Copilot Vision looking at your screen, multimodal “semantic” understanding). AMD has already signaled support, saying its Ryzen AI PCs will be compatible and optimized for those future Windows capabilities. Microsoft teased more details for Ignite, framing this as an evolution toward ambient, pervasive, multi-modal productivity. The move is technically significant because it shifts AI from optional apps to an OS-level platform, creating new requirements for hardware acceleration, local model hosting, and app integration APIs — and opening opportunities for agent ecosystems and tighter developer tooling. It also raises practical concerns: users and admins worry about performance, privacy, telemetry and bloat from always-on agent features, prompting heavy public backlash (Microsoft disabled comments on the announcement). For enterprises and hardware vendors, MCP could standardize agent integration but will demand careful security, resource-management and UX design to avoid fragmentation and user migration away from Windows.