Windows AI Agent原生支持：身份隔离与本地模型运行机制

AI is changing how us software engineers build software, and developers’ tool preferences are rapidly evolving with it – like how AI coding harnesses have gotten very popular. Likewise, future versions of the world’s leading operating systems look certain to feature more support for agentic tools.

To find out how things are changing, we talked with the folks at tech giant Microsoft who shared in detail their plan for Windows, and how AI will play a part. It comes after the company’s previous AI efforts led to it being dubbed “Microslop” by some users online.

The Windows team’s vision is opinionated and includes building new agentic primitives, alongside reversing some decisions that have annoyed engineers. Microsoft wants developers who have shunned the system to return. The big question is: will it succeed?

For more, check out a previous article on how the leading Linux distribution, Ubuntu, is changing, thanks to AI, with a focus on hardware support for GPUs, NPUs and DPUs, a bet on local-first LLMs, and a focus on AI developer tools.

Today, we cover:

• How many devs use Windows anyway? It’s hard to get exact numbers, but macOS appears far more popular at startups than Windows, while Linux may also be on track to overtake Microsoft’s OS in developer popularity.
• Agent identity & discovery. Windows ships with native support for agent identification, plus a centralized registry of locally available MCP servers to be included with the OS.
• Isolate agentic tools. Microsoft is building an OS-agnostic isolation mechanism that should make it easy for developers to build agents that run tools safely.
• Running models locally: Windows is betting big on local models. WindowsML is a new hardware abstraction layer for building and running local AI models across GPU, NPU, and CPU. The OS aims to ship Small Language Models (SLMs) without requiring an NPU in the future. We’ve also seen an impressive demo of a local model running on a Surface laptop using NVIDIA chips.
• Building agents on Windows: one goal of the OS is to allow building of agents with opinionated frameworks and libraries that devs can just assume are available.
• More dev-friendly: Windows was plagued by questionable product decisions that resulted in a cluttered Start menu and search, to the chagrin of many developers who lost interest in the OS. Microsoft wants them back and is addressing criticisms – finally!
• Linux on Windows (WSL): Windows ships with an embedded Linux called Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It’s proving quite popular with devs. Windows embracing Linux might just be the strategy to get devs to switch from both native Linux and macOS, as counter-intuitive as this strategy sounds.
• Windows & hardware: since its early days, Windows has gone out of its way to support a wide variety of hardware. The OS was x86-based from the beginning, but Windows on ARM is starting to finally look like a good alternative. A look into why ARM support took so long, and the upcoming NVIDIA collaboration.

We’ve talked with people on the Windows team to learn about the thinking behind Microsoft’s strategy for the operating system: Pavan Davuluri (EVP, Windows and Devices), Scott Hanselman (VP, Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft CoreAI and GitHub), and Logan Iyer, (CVP, Windows Platform and Developer). Many thanks for your time!

1. How many devs use Windows anyway?

While Windows remains the most popular desktop operating system for mainstream computer users at around 63% market share as per Statcounter – the strong sense is that its popularity is down among developers.

Windows used to be popular with devs…

A year ago, the 2025 Stack Overflow survey polled professional users’ choices of OS. It found that a minority of devs overall use Windows – although it remained the single most popular OS. Despite its top ranking in the survey, the number of devs using Windows was actually way down on Microsoft’s XP-era peak. Meanwhile, MacOS and various Linux distributions also showed considerable market share:

OS choice for professional use (49,000 respondents.) Source: Stack Overflow 2025 survey

Then Mac started to catch up…

Elsewhere, a JetBrains survey asked devs about their OS usage for developments, also last year. The results:

Source: State of Developer Ecosystem 2025 by JetBrains. Based on 24,500 responses

Interestingly, half of devs use more than one OS for development. This JetBrains survey suggests that several devs jump between operating systems for their work. The survey also found macOS close to overtaking Windows as the most-used standalone OS for development work.

… and is Windows declining in developer market share?

Only last week, myself and Ivan ran two social media surveys on X and on LinkedIn, most likely shown overwhelmingly to people who are also The Pragmatic Engineer readers. We offered a single choice – with no option to select multiple OS usage, Linux on Windows, or via WSL. We were surprised to find Windows in third place behind Linux, based on nearly 10,000 combined responses:

What OS are you using to build software on? Based on 9,937 responses, surveyed in Sep 2026

Based on current research, it’s likely that Windows’ share of the developer market is on the wane, but it’s hard to tell by how much. Inside VC-funded startups and Big Tech, it’s an open secret that Macs have been the most popular developer machine for some years now, partly thanks to the superior hardware performance of M-series CPUs, and also because these companies are not looking to save money when purchasing developer machines. It’s very likely that our own social media survey over-indexes on this group!

Either way, Microsoft has both market share and developer goodwill that it needs to win back. Based on what we’ve heard from them, Microsoft is attempting this.

But where is OS usage at with readers of The Pragmatic Engineer? To figure this out, please cast a vote on the primary operating system you use when developing software. After the vote, you can see the results:

What OS is your primary OS that you develop software on?

• MacOS
• Windows
• Linux (running natively)
• Linux (running on Windows, via WSL)
• Other

With that, let’s get into how the next version of Windows intends to integrate AI agents at the OS level.

2. Agent identity & discovery

At the operating system level, agents increasingly look like regular users. Their sessions can last hours, use multiple programs, and use OS resources like the UI and clipboard. Windows allows developers to build agentic programs that are distinguishable from users.

Agent identification is enabled through Entra ID, Microsoft’s tool for centralized identity management in Windows. When an agent has a local identity, it acts as if it is another user on the system as visible in the Task Manager. Below, tasks are grouped by user, and there are two users in the task manager: kirupach (a human) and V9-G4 (an agent). All observability of human users is now available for agent users as well.

Task Manager showing human & agent users (kirupach and V9-G4). Source: Microsoft

Agents must be built with this agent identification capability in mind. Consider how a rogue agentic application can impersonate a user and not self-register as an agent – which in a sense is how viruses operate by using legitimate OS functionality for illegitimate purposes. That’s why Defender, Microsoft’s antivirus software, is becoming “agent aware” and scanning Windows for known local agent activity like it scans for viruses.

Microsoft Defender’s AI Assets feature can scan for known agent activity. Source: Microsoft