Microsoft to release new coding model next week, stock jumps 3.5%

Microsoft's new coding model enters a market where GitHub Copilot already generates $2 billion in annual revenue, with the company positioning AI-assisted development as the centerpiece of its Build 2026 strategy.

Microsoft Corp. will release a new coding model next week, the company said May 28, sending shares up 3.5% as investors bet the AI tool will deepen the company's grip on the $30 billion developer tools market.

"Agent supervision is the new senior engineering skill," reads the title of one Build 2026 session, reflecting Microsoft's view that AI agents — not just human developers — are becoming the target users for the software it designs. The company's broader coding push includes OpenClaw AI agent integration for Windows and GitHub Copilot's agentic coding features, which Microsoft says will transform how developers build native Windows applications.

The new model arrives as Microsoft's Visual Studio team ships a Plan agent that creates read-only implementation plans before code changes, alongside multi-file diff review tools and MSVC Build Tools v14.51. The May Visual Studio update also added a skills management panel and context window usage indicators for Copilot Chat, according to a May 26 blog post.

Microsoft shares trade at 35x forward earnings. The coding model could expand GitHub Copilot's $2 billion annualized revenue run rate by accelerating adoption among enterprise developers, a segment where Microsoft competes with Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Amazon.com Inc.'s CodeWhisperer.

The Build 2026 Context

Microsoft's Build conference, starting June 2 in San Francisco, will feature 375 sessions with AI-assisted development as the dominant theme. The company invited OpenAI's Peter Steinberger, creator of the OpenClaw AI agent system, as a featured speaker. Sessions include "Claws on Windows" and discussions on using Windows 365 cloud PCs to run AI agents rather than running them locally.

The conference also highlights Microsoft's bet that AI-assisted coding will revive native Windows app development. One session discusses using AI agents to create native Windows apps with the WinUI 3 framework, while another encourages agentic AI to port x86 applications to Arm versions of Windows. Microsoft also recently launched Azure Linux 4.0, a Linux distribution designed for its cloud platform and the Windows Subsystem for Linux, with one Build session covering how it "supports cloud-native and AI workloads."

Competitive Stakes in AI Coding

Microsoft's coding model enters a market where Alphabet's Google offers Gemini Code Assist, Amazon's CodeWhisperer competes on price, and startups like Cursor and Replit have gained traction with developer communities. GitHub Copilot, which Microsoft acquired alongside GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion, remains the market leader with more than 1.8 million paid subscribers as of early 2026.

The new model's performance benchmarks — including scores on HumanEval and SWE-bench — have not yet been disclosed. Microsoft said it will publish technical details at the time of release next week. The company separately extended its memory-safety push to C# in a May 21 post, proposing Rust-inspired unsafe contract models for the language, signaling a broader effort to improve code quality across its developer ecosystem.

The coding model strengthens Microsoft's ability to cross-sell its Azure cloud platform alongside developer tools. Every developer using Microsoft's AI coding tools is a potential Azure customer for inference compute, training infrastructure, and cloud storage. With Azure's AI revenue growing at triple-digit percentages year-over-year, the coding model serves as both a product and a customer acquisition channel.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.