Microsoft sends Autopilot, its Copilot agent that works while users are away, to private preview in September

Microsoft's overview gives Autopilot one sentence ^[11]. That sentence does not say what data the agent can read, which identity it acts under, or where its actions are recorded ^[4]. For a responder, those three answers decide whether an agent built to act while its user is away can be investigated later. I'd expect the first question from preview tenants to be whether an Autopilot action shows up in the audit trail under the user's name or as a separate agent. An incident review has to be able to tell the two apart.

The containment Microsoft does describe is for Code. According to the post, Code runs in a sandboxed environment and can be hosted within the customer's tenant ^[2]. Everything built in Code is grounded in work context through Microsoft IQ, and plugins sync automatically ^[3].

The capability with the least description also has the nearest date. Home and Code reach the Frontier program "in the coming weeks" ^[1]. The post is dated September 25, 2026 ^[10]. Autopilot's private preview arrives at the end of that month, about five days later ^[12].

The rest of the release shows what unattended output looks like in Microsoft 365. If Autopilot writes through the same paths as Cowork and Office in Copilot, its edits would land in shared files while the person who owns the task is offline. Office in Copilot creates or updates real documents, workbooks and presentations, "live for your whole team, not just you," Microsoft wrote ^[7].