Microsoft just made the agent runtime free -- and kept everything around it

Microsoft just made the agent runtime free -- and kept everything around it

Microsoft has the engineers to build its own agent runtime. At Build 2026 last week, it chose not to, shipping Scout, its first always-on work agent, on OpenClaw, the open-source project an Austrian developer hacked together over a weekend in late 2025. Microsoft is also contributing its enterprise policy controls back upstream to that project. The decision reads as a concession only if you still think the runtime is the valuable part of an agen…