John Langford, a partner research manager at Microsoft Research in New York, has left Microsoft and declared the company's AI Frontiers research group over. He announced his departure on social media on 6 November 2026 and published a blog post titled "The End of AI Frontiers" the same day.

Langford helped create AI Frontiers inside Microsoft Research in 2023, in the months after ChatGPT was released, to run research in a more coordinated way. The group had about 50 people. In early September 2026 it was moved out of Microsoft Research and into Microsoft AI, a reporting change that Langford says left little room for fundamental research.

He wrote that the new organisation's philosophy was scaling, and aggressively not research, and that he placed his team members as best he could before leaving. He added that there will be no internships with the group in the coming year.

The group's public output included AutoGen, a framework for coordinating multiple AI agents, and Fara, an agent that operates a computer on a user's behalf. The AutoGen repository already carried a warning before Langford's post: a change made on 16 October said Microsoft was not providing bug fixes, security fixes, new features or support for the project.

One point needs care. Langford has declared AI Frontiers over, but Microsoft has not publicly confirmed a formal shutdown, and its research page still describes the September move as a transition into Microsoft AI. The departure is confirmed; the group's formal status is not.