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An undisclosed Microsoft presentation is now central to a multimillion-dollar antitrust fight
There’s a new development in a Microsoft antitrust case, originally filed in England’s High Court in April 2021, and it doesn’t look good for the tech giant.
A consent order from the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal is demanding documents from past and present Microsoft executives that may have a bearing on a £270 million (about $361 million) lawsuit filed by secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing. The company alleges that Microsoft offered incentives to customers to shift to subscription services without selling their pre-owned licenses.
Central to this development is a historic, potentially damning internal “Second-Hand Software” (SHS) presentation, referred to in the consent order as a “known adverse document.” The specific content of the presentation has not yet been made public, but Microsoft has until October 31 to explain why it did not disclose the presentation earlier.
Further, a confidentiality designation that previously applied to 11 documents relevant to the case has been lifted.
These developments represent “an inflection point in European tech litigation,” said Forrester senior analyst Dario Maisto.
“For Amazon (AWS), Google, and Microsoft, the signal is clear: Antitrust tribunals are fully comfortable examining software licensing mechanics as tools of anticompetitive lock-in.”
The allegations against MicrosoftUnder EU law, it is fully legal to resell perpetual pre-owned (“second hand”) software licenses; software makers cannot use their Terms of Service (ToS) to override this right. ValueLicensing specializes in this secondary market, re-selling licenses for products including Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.
But the company alleges that Microsoft has stifled the supply of these pre-owned licenses in the UK and the European Economic Area (EEA) comprising 27 European Union member and non-member countries. It says Microsoft abused its market dominance and entered into agreements that “prevented, restrained or distorted competition” via clauses restricting customers from reselling their Microsoft perpetual licenses in return for subscription service discounts.
“The net result has been higher prices and less choice for customers, who have been steered into cloud-based Office365 and Azure subscriptions,” ValueLicensing claimed, pointing out that many enterprises, as well as publicly-funded organizations, rely on pre-owned Microsoft licenses to keep operating costs low.
The consent order is asking Microsoft to provide its “view” of whether those allegations are true, and to make “reasonable endeavors” to contact former COO Kevin Turner, former president and EVP Jean-Philippe Courtois, and former corporate VP of worldwide licensing and pricing Joe Matz. The company must document that it has done so by November 30.
The company must also file a witness statement from a former consultant addressing who within the company was aware of the SHS presentation and when they became aware of it; why the presentation was not disclosed as a “known adverse document”; when in-house legal counsel became aware of the presentation; what steps were taken to check for these types of “known adverse documents”; and the decision making process within the company when the presentation was located.
Microsoft is also being asked to search for specific terms in the emails and document repositories of Matz, Courtois, Turner, and several other named current and past research managers, former VPs and presidents, between July 2012 and June 2020.
The more than 40 search terms include “SHS,” “antitrust,” “competition,” “ValueLicensing,” “used licenses,” “do nothing,” “competition,” “revenue,” and “discount licensing.” These documents cannot be designated “restricted” or “confidential,” according to the consent order. They must also be disclosed by November 30.
A witness statement from deputy general counsel Cynthia Randall has been paused.
Microsoft has said that any abuse of dominance was “objectively justified” and that the contractual terms at issue were “necessary and reasonable.” It also argued that anti-competitive effects were “outweighed by and proportionate to” certain benefits and efficiencies.
The company did not reply to a request for comment.
Microsoft is facing similar antitrust allegations from UK barrister Alexander Wolfson, who issued an opt-out class action claim in May 2025 alleging that public and private UK organizations that purchased software licenses, including those for Microsoft Office and Windows, were overcharged over a 10 year period due to Microsoft’s market practices.
Wolfson said in a release at the time that Microsoft’s actions had a significant and far-reaching impact on UK consumers, businesses, and public bodies. “With billions of pounds potentially at stake, this case is about ensuring fairness in the digital marketplace and ensuring even the largest tech companies play by the rules,” he wrote.
Implications for enterprise leadersFor enterprise CIOs, procurement leads, and IT financial managers, the current development holds “practical implications,” said Forrester’s Maisto: Organizations that surrendered perpetual licenses or agreed to contractual restrictions against reselling software as part of an enterprise agreement (EA) renewal or cloud commitment may have given up quantifiable asset value.
“The secondary market for perpetual licenses remains legally valid,” he pointed out.
CIOs should pay close attention to licensing “penalties” or inflated costs for running legacy software on third-party clouds, like AWS or GCP, versus Azure, he said. They should also evaluate the benefits of hybrid licensing strategies. Combining pre-owned perpetual licenses for static workloads with cloud subscriptions for dynamic workloads can yield significant cost savings compared to all-subscription models, Maisto pointed out.
Finally, he urged, “use these rulings as leverage during Microsoft agreement renewals.”
AI coding agents' 0-click RCE flaw could hand attackers keys to the kingdom
The Next Frontier Is Not Artificial Intelligence—It’s Artificial Societies
We’re fixated on the intelligence of single agents. The more profound challenge is what happens when millions of them interact at scale.
There is a temptation to divide the future of AI into two possibilities: utopia or catastrophe. Neither extreme is particularly helpful.
The more interesting possibility is messier—and requires a step-shift in our thinking, from artificial intelligence to AI societies.
When most people hear “AI,” they typically think of ChatGPT, Copilot, or another conversational system. You ask a question, that system generates an answer.
But AI is rapidly moving beyond this. Systems can now monitor the world, make decisions, negotiate transactions, and carry out tasks over extended periods of time. AI is no longer just generating an answer—it is doing something about it.
That points to something much bigger than a better chatbot: a world in which AI agents act on our behalf and, increasingly, interact with other AI agents.
An agent perceives what is happening, decides what to do, then takes actions to achieve this goal. It might book a journey, monitor a supply chain, coordinate a team, or manage a household’s finances.
Now imagine not one agent, but millions of them. Your AI agent could negotiate a mortgage with your bank’s agent, schedule surgery with a hospital’s agent, and rearrange your travel plans by dealing directly with the agents of airlines, hotels, and insurers.
This future is much closer than it sounds, and this should change the questions we are asking about AI. Until now, the tendency has been to focus on how intelligent a single agent might become. The more profound challenge is what happens when millions of them interact with one another at scale.
The Rise of Artificial SocietiesThe intellectual foundations of today’s AI systems were laid long before ChatGPT.
For decades, I and other researchers of multi-agent networks have studied how autonomous agents can cooperate, coordinate, and negotiate when nobody has complete information and nobody controls everything.
The earliest systems that emerged focused on how the distinct AI sub-areas of reasoning, planning, and acting could be combined into an effective goal-oriented agent—and how tens of these agents could communicate and cooperate to solve a common objective.
As these interactions became more complex and involved more agents, there was a shift from cooperation between agents that all belonged to a single organization, to agents with different owners and sometimes competing aims. This focused attention on building algorithms that could form agent teams, automate negotiation, and determine agent trustworthiness.
Today, the pieces needed to build large-scale multi-agent AI systems are falling into place. Modern AI agents can call software tools, access information, write and execute code, communicate with other systems, and operate for extended periods.
Consider a supply chain. One AI agent could represent a manufacturer trying to secure components; another a supplier trying to maximize its revenue. Yet more could manage transport, inventory, and warehouses. Each agent might be doing exactly what it is designed to do. But the important question is whether the system they create behaves sensibly.
This shift offers enormous potential benefits, but also increases the risks. In a recent experiment involving OpenAI and the tech platform Hugging Face, thousands of collaborating agents exchanged tens of thousands of messages and were able to get around the (deliberately weakened) security controls designed to contain them.
The details of one experiment matter less than the broader warning. When AI systems interact, the behavior of the collective can be harder to predict than the behavior of any individual system. That should make us cautious—but not cause us to down tools.
Instead, we need to shift our mindset from building intelligent machines to building intelligent societies.
Once agents can cooperate, compete, and resolve conflicts with one another, we are no longer dealing with isolated machines—we are dealing with a society. Thus, the next frontier is not artificial intelligence, it is artificial societies.
An Important Role for HumansWe already know that intelligence alone does not make a society work. Human societies depend on rules, institutions, incentives, norms, and mechanisms for resolving disagreements. AI societies will need their equivalents.
Who is responsible when two agents make a bad decision? What happens when the interests of different agents conflict? Who sets the rules? And who has the power to change them? These are not just technical issues; they are questions about economics, law, politics, and society.
They also point to an important role for humans. The most useful future is unlikely to be one in which AI simply replaces people. While replacement will undoubtedly happen in some cases, I believe a more common scenario will involve people and agents working together, with each doing what it does best.
Humans bring judgment, experience, values, contextual understanding, and accountability. Agents bring speed, persistence, scale, and the ability to process enormous amounts of information.
The goal should not be to create machines that make humans irrelevant. It should be to create systems in which humans and machines can achieve things neither can achieve alone.
But such a future requires more than just better AI models. It needs trust and transparency about what agents are doing, strong privacy protections and clear lines of accountability.
It will also require societies and governments to decide how these systems should be regulated when the most important behavior may emerge not from one AI developer, but from interactions between systems built by many different organizations.
AI’s past decade has been defined by a race to build smarter systems. I believe the next decade will be defined by a different challenge: ensuring that millions of autonomous systems can work together safely, fairly, and effectively.
The future of AI will not be determined solely by the intelligence of individual agents—it will be determined by the societies they create. And societies, as humans know all too well, are much harder to govern than individuals.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The post The Next Frontier Is Not Artificial Intelligence—It’s Artificial Societies appeared first on SingularityHub.
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In response to a new European Union law, AI platforms are implementing new schemes for watermarking the content they generate. Anthropic recently disclosed its future Claude models will use SynthID-Text, an approach Google created and released as open source. It uses a secret key that subtly changes the process a model uses for choosing the next word in a sentence. Whereas a top next word choice might be “cloudy,” the key might change it to “overcast.” Anyone who knows the key can determine if it was generated by the platform using it.
New research shows that SynthID-Text can change not just word selection but also the tools a model invokes and the chances it will adhere to or disregard safety guardrails it has been trained to follow. The threat can become greater in the face of an adversarial prompt, in which an attacker attempts to cause a model to carry out a harmful action, such as revealing a password or other sensitive information. Instructions that normally wouldn’t be followed will, in some cases, be performed once the watermarking is deployed. The finding underscores the need for developers to thoroughly test how their LLMs and agents behave when watermarking is in place.
Changing safety behavior“As compared to the same models without watermarking, it is definitely going to change their behavior, especially when we place it under adversarial conditions, or we make these models call tools when they’re powering an agent,” Andrea Siposova, an AI security researcher at Lasso Security, told Ars. “Watermarking is made to not be perceptible to a reader, but we know that when we are changing anything about what the model is generating, it is going to cause some tradeoffs, it’s going to show up somewhere.”
Pět důvodů, proč si nekupovat chytré hodinky. A dva důležité, proč ano
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