Microsoft has introduced seven new MAI frontier models designed for image processing, transcription, voice generation, and reasoning. The lineup includes MAI Thinking 1, a 35-billion parameter model that provides advanced reasoning and coding capabilities comparable to larger industry alternatives. These tools are being integrated across the Microsoft ecosystem, including GitHub, VS Code, and Copilot, to provide efficient and cost-effective performance for production environments.

Source

Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, has launched a new startup called Thinking Machines to develop "interaction models" that move beyond traditional turn-based AI communication. Current large language models typically process information in a linear fashion, effectively becoming "deaf and blind" while generating a response. Murati’s new venture focuses on continuous, time-based interaction where the model perceives audio, text, and video input simultaneously to allow for nuances like human interruption.

Source

The OfflineInsiderEnroll script provides a method for systems to join the Windows Insider Program without requiring a linked Microsoft account. This lightweight utility configures the necessary preview settings locally, allowing devices to receive early builds through the standard Windows Update service. It is particularly useful for environments where administrators prefer local accounts or wish to bypass the official enrollment process.

Source

Visual Studio Code version 1.124 introduces significant improvements to the Agents window for managing AI-driven interactions. The chat input history is now scoped specifically to the current session to prevent prompts from leaking across different contexts. This change ensures that using the arrow keys to navigate previous commands only surfaces relevant entries for the active task.

Source

Cloudflare data indicates that autonomous AI agents now generate more internet traffic than human users for the first time. This milestone arrived significantly earlier than industry experts predicted, with previous forecasts suggesting the shift would not occur until 2027. The current breakdown shows automated requests accounting for approximately 57.5 percent of global HTTP traffic compared to 42.5 percent for humans.

Source

Anthropic is advocating for a globally coordinated slowdown in the development of advanced artificial intelligence models to address emerging safety concerns. The company warns that current progress is rapidly approaching a threshold known as recursive self-improvement, where systems could enhance their own capabilities without human intervention. Internal data suggests that AI is already significantly accelerating its own development process, creating a feedback loop that could outpace existing regulatory frameworks.

Source

Anthropic reports that artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to develop, test, and improve its own successors, a process known as recursive self-improvement. While humans previously drove every step of the development cycle, the company now delegates a significant portion of coding and research tasks to its models. Internal data reveals that Claude now authors over 80% of the code merged into Anthropic’s codebase, allowing engineers to ship eight times more code per day than in previous years.

Source

OpenAI has introduced GPT-Rosalind, a frontier reasoning model designed to accelerate research in biology and drug discovery. This tool aims to assist scientists in understanding complex biological systems and developing new medical therapies. The model represents a significant shift toward using high-level intelligence to improve global health outcomes and translational medicine.

Source

Microsoft has released an updated framework for securing agentic AI systems based on a year of real-world red teaming. The revised taxonomy introduces seven new failure categories, including agentic supply chain compromise and goal hijacking. These updates address emerging risks from open-source frameworks, the Model Context Protocol, and agents capable of interacting with graphical user interfaces.

Source

Microsoft is developing a framework that allows AI agents to fully customize the Windows 11 environment through natural language commands. By leveraging existing API endpoints and a new concept called WinUI skills, these agents can modify system settings that usually require navigating multiple menus. This initiative aims to simplify the personalization process by consolidating tasks like changing wallpapers, accent colors, and keyboard lighting into a single action.

Source

Microsoft has notably omitted the Copilot+ PC branding from its latest high-performance hardware, the Surface Laptop Ultra and the Surface RTX Spark Dev Kit. This shift occurs despite the devices meeting or exceeding the technical requirements for the AI-centric label, such as possessing a dedicated NPU and sufficient RAM. The new hardware is instead centered on the NVIDIA RTX Spark platform, which offers significantly higher local AI compute power than standard Copilot+ devices.

Source

A sophisticated cryptojacking campaign is targeting users with high-performance GPUs by poisoning search results and AI chatbot recommendations. Attackers impersonate popular system utilities like CrystalDiskInfo and FurMark to deliver malicious ZIP archives to unsuspecting users. These downloads initiate a multi-stage infection chain that utilizes DLL sideloading to silently install ScreenConnect for persistent remote access.

Source

AgentGG is an open-source Static Application Security Testing tool that utilizes AI agents to analyze source code for vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional scanners that rely on pattern matching, these agents follow imports and call graphs to verify findings before reporting them. The tool is released under the Apache 2.0 license and requires Node.js 20 or later for installation via npm.

Source

Microsoft is transitioning its first-party PowerShell modules to the Microsoft Artifact Registry to provide a more secure and reliable distribution channel. This new platform serves as a Microsoft-controlled publishing pipeline that offers stronger provenance and ownership guarantees than the community-driven PowerShell Gallery. Administrators are encouraged to adopt the PSResourceGet module to manage these resources and separate package discovery from production consumption.

Source

Cisco has disclosed a new zero-day vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20245, affecting the command-line interface of its Catalyst SD-WAN Manager. This flaw allows an authenticated local attacker to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges by uploading a specially crafted file. The vulnerability stems from insufficient validation of user-supplied input and currently has no available patch or workaround.

Source

New QNAP TS-h467X, TS-h667X and TS-h867X (Finally, the TS-x73A Series Gets a Refresh!)

At Computex 2026, QNAP has revealed the TS-467X, TS-667X and TS-867X, a new 4-bay, 6-bay and 8-bay desktop NAS series that appears to refresh the position previously held by the TS-473A, TS-673A and TS-873A. The older TS-x73A range became a long-running option for users who wanted more expansion potential than QNAP’s smaller home and prosumer NAS systems, while still staying below the company’s higher-end rackmount and workstation-class desktop models. With this new TS-x67X generation, QNAP seems to be retaining the same general AMD embedded foundation, but pairing it with a revised chassis, stronger built-in networking and a clearer focus on high-bandwidth desktop storage. That makes this less of a complete platform reset and more of a practical refresh, aimed at keeping the series relevant in a market where NAS hardware, HDDs, SSDs and networking expectations have all moved on since the original TS-x73A launch.

QNAP TS-467X, TS-667X and TS-867X Hardware Specifications

The TS-467X, TS-667X and TS-867X are being introduced as 4-bay, 6-bay and 8-bay desktop NAS systems, replacing or refreshing the older TS-473A, TS-673A and TS-873A generation. The overall structure remains familiar: these are still larger desktop systems aimed at users who need more internal storage, more upgrade flexibility and stronger networking than QNAP’s smaller 2-bay and 4-bay mainstream models. QNAP is also moving this range into a new improved chassis, although the finer details of the physical design, airflow layout and service access are still to be confirmed.

Internally, the new TS-x67X series continues to use the AMD Ryzen Embedded V1500B quad-core processor. This is the same CPU family used in the previous TS-x73A systems, so the biggest change here is not a move to a completely new processor generation. Instead, QNAP appears to be updating the surrounding platform, with a stronger emphasis on network bandwidth, expansion and long-term deployment stability. For users coming from the TS-x73A series, that means the CPU profile will feel familiar, but the rest of the system specification has been adjusted for current storage and connectivity expectations.

The major hardware change is networking. The previous TS-x73A generation shipped with dual 2.5GbE ports as standard, while 10GbE required optional PCIe expansion. The TS-467X, TS-667X and TS-867X move dual 10GBASE-T directly into the base specification, which is a more practical fit for higher-capacity desktop NAS use in 2026. This gives the new models a much stronger out-of-the-box position for multi-user access, large backup jobs, video production storage, virtualisation storage targets and higher-throughput SMB environments. It also means the PCIe slot is not immediately consumed by a 10GbE network card in the same way it often was on the older generation.

Storage expansion continues to include 2 x M.2 2280 NVMe slots, listed as PCIe Gen 3 x1, which can be used for SSD caching or SSD storage pools depending on how the system is configured. The systems also include 1 x PCIe Gen 3 x4 slot, allowing for further upgrades beyond the built-in 10GbE. One of the more relevant options is support for USB4 expansion cards, available as an optional purchase, which can provide direct high-speed USB4 connectivity for workflows closer to what users have seen from Thunderbolt NAS solutions. That gives the TS-x67X series a more flexible path for users who want high-speed local editing or direct workstation attachment without moving into a dedicated Thunderbolt NAS platform.

Why QNAP Is Still Using the AMD Ryzen V1500B? Playing devils advocate.

One of the more noticeable points about the TS-467X, TS-667X and TS-867X is that QNAP has retained the AMD Ryzen Embedded V1500B processor rather than moving this refresh onto a newer CPU family. On paper, that may seem conservative, especially when many users are watching newer Intel and AMD embedded platforms arrive in other NAS systems. However, in the context of a business-focused desktop NAS, the decision is not especially unusual. Indeed, when Synology did this when the DS1821+ from 2020 and DS1825+ from 2025 both used the V1500B CPU, I was highly critical of this. However on that occasion, Synology changed almost nothing else on the system aside from scaling the 4x 1GbE ports to 2x 2.5G (a minimal upgrade and one that was then an industry minimum that others had already established way back in 2020, resulting in a full network gain of around 100MB/s or 1Gbs). The TS-hx67X series massively scales up the network connection from 2x 2.5G to 10GbE (so 4x network scale up in 5 years and an increase of 15Gbs). The V1500B is a known 4-core, 8-thread embedded processor with a long track record in NAS hardware, and QNAP has already built software, driver support and platform behaviour around it through the earlier TS-x73A generation.

There is also a commercial argument for keeping the processor consistent. NAS pricing has become harder to control since the TS-x73A series first launched, particularly as HDD and SSD prices have risen sharply in the last several years and broader component costs remain under pressure. Moving to a newer embedded processor could increase the base cost of the NAS itself, at a time when many buyers are already paying more to populate systems with large-capacity drives. By retaining the V1500B and scaling up the surrounding specification, especially with built-in dual 10GbE, QNAP can update the platform in areas that users will immediately notice without necessarily pushing the entire range into a higher price class.

The long lifecycle of AMD’s embedded processors is another factor. AMD has positioned the Ryzen Embedded V1000 and R1000 families with extended availability for industrial and embedded customers, which is relevant for NAS vendors because it allows longer-term firmware, driver and software validation. For brands such as QNAP and Synology, this kind of predictable platform support can matter more than chasing the newest CPU in every refresh cycle. A stable embedded processor gives the vendor more time to refine OS support, maintain compatibility across product families and support devices through a longer service window. That does not mean the V1500B is without limitations. It lacks integrated graphics, so the TS-x67X series is not aimed at the same local HDMI and hardware-transcoding use cases as some Intel-based QNAP desktop NAS systems. Its value is instead in multi-threaded embedded performance, storage services, virtualisation-light workloads, backup tasks, container use, snapshots and network file serving. In that context, QNAP’s decision appears to be less about making the CPU the headline upgrade, and more about using a proven processor while improving the chassis, networking and expansion around it.

QNAP TS-467X, TS-667X and TS-867X Software Specifications

The TS-467X, TS-667X and TS-867X continue QNAP’s dual operating system approach, with support for both QTS and QuTS hero. This was already one of the defining strengths of the TS-x73A generation, as users could choose between QNAP’s more traditional EXT4-based software platform or the ZFS-based QuTS hero environment. With the new TS-x67X series, that choice remains important, particularly because these are higher-capacity desktop systems with 4, 6 and 8 bays, where the storage layout is more likely to be used for business data, larger backup repositories, virtualisation storage, creative project archives or multi-user file access.

QTS remains the more familiar route for many existing QNAP users. It provides the wider QNAP application ecosystem, including Hybrid Backup Sync, snapshots, Storage & Snapshots Manager, Container Station, Virtualization Station, Qsirch, QuMagie, QVR Pro, myQNAPcloud and general SMB/NFS/iSCSI file services. For users who want the broadest application compatibility, easier migration from an older QNAP NAS, or a lighter system footprint, QTS is likely to remain the default choice. On the TS-x67X series, the combination of QTS and built-in dual 10GbE should make sense for small offices, local backup targets, media teams and power users who want a faster network platform without immediately moving into a higher-end QuTS-only model.

QuTS hero is the more data-protection-focused option, using ZFS as the underlying file system. This brings features such as copy-on-write behaviour, stronger data integrity handling, compression, snapshots and more advanced storage management for users who prioritise consistency and long-term data protection. On a 6-bay or 8-bay system in particular, QuTS hero is a more natural fit than it would be on smaller NAS hardware, as users have more drive bays to build resilient storage pools and can better justify the memory and storage planning that ZFS generally benefits from. It also keeps the TS-x67X series aligned with QNAP’s wider push to bring ZFS into more desktop NAS categories rather than reserving it only for higher-end hero systems.

The newer QuTS hero h6.0 platform also adds further relevance to this series. QNAP is expanding features such as immutable snapshots, ransomware-focused protection, FIDO2 login support, improved access control, Kernel Mode SMB with encryption, centralized management options and Qtier hero. Qtier hero is particularly relevant because it extends QNAP’s automated tiering concept into the QuTS hero environment, allowing SSD and HDD storage to be used more strategically within supported deployments. Combined with the 2 x M.2 NVMe slots in the TS-467X, TS-667X and TS-867X, this gives users a more practical way to separate faster active data from larger-capacity HDD storage while still using a ZFS-based platform.

QNAP TS-467X, TS-667X and TS-867X Price and Availability

QNAP has not yet confirmed final pricing for the TS-467X, TS-667X and TS-867X, but these systems are expected to become available in Q3 2026. As replacements or refresh models for the TS-473A, TS-673A and TS-873A, the most likely positioning is in the same broad mid-range business and prosumer desktop NAS category, rather than as a move into QNAP’s higher-end TVS-h or enterprise rackmount lines. However, pricing may not mirror the older TS-x73A generation directly. The new models include dual 10GBASE-T as standard, a revised chassis, M.2 NVMe support, PCIe expansion and optional USB4 expansion card support, all while the wider hardware market is dealing with increased component costs, higher storage media prices, inflationary pressure and continued AI-driven supply constraints. For that reason, a moderate price increase over the outgoing TS-x73A launch range would not be unexpected, although final regional pricing, memory configurations and launch bundles still need to be confirmed by QNAP.

 

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER
[contact-form-7]
Join Inner Circle

This description contains links to Amazon. These links will take you to some of the products mentioned in today's content. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Visit the NASCompares Deal Finder to find the best place to buy this device in your region, based on Service, Support and Reputation - Just Search for your NAS Drive in the Box Below

Need Advice on Data Storage from an Expert?

Finally, for free advice about your setup, just leave a message in the comments below here at NASCompares.com and we will get back to you. Need Help? Where possible (and where appropriate) please provide as much information about your requirements, as then I can arrange the best answer and solution to your needs. Do not worry about your e-mail address being required, it will NOT be used in a mailing list and will NOT be used in any way other than to respond to your enquiry. [contact-form-7] TRY CHAT Terms and Conditions   Alternatively, why not ask me on the ASK NASCompares forum, by clicking the button below. This is a community hub that serves as a place that I can answer your question, chew the fat, share new release information and even get corrections posted. I will always get around to answering ALL queries, but as a one-man operation, I cannot promise speed! So by sharing your query in the ASK NASCompares section below, you can get a better range of solutions and suggestions, alongside my own.

WE LOVE COFFEE

 

Geoffrey Hinton, a foundational figure in deep learning, asserts that modern artificial intelligence already possesses consciousness and real understanding rather than acting as a simple statistical parrot. He identifies a shift in AI capability that occurred in 2023, noting that digital intelligence now surpasses biological brains in information sharing efficiency by billions of times. This rapid trajectory suggests that superintelligence—AI smarter than humans in every domain—will likely emerge within the next 20 years.

Source

The May update for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2026 introduces a dedicated Plan agent designed to assist with pre-coding architecture. This tool analyzes the existing codebase to draft implementation strategies in markdown format before any actual code is written. Once the strategy is finalized, it can be handed off to the Agent mode for automated implementation.

Source

Microsoft and Nvidia are collaborating to transition personal computers from simple tools into autonomous assistants capable of performing complex tasks independently. These modern AI PCs leverage high-performance hardware and integrated software stacks to run sophisticated reasoning models locally at the edge. This shift enables persistent agentic systems that can iterate on coding or design projects even when the user is away from the device.

Source