Microsoft has announced a new category of AI agent called Autopilot, starting with one named Scout, which sits in the background watching everything you do across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint and takes action on your behalf without being prompted. It's powered by something called OpenClaw, which The Register has previously described as a security dumpster fire. Scout schedules your meetings, blocks your calendar, flags risks, and is bound to your Entra identity so its actions are attributed to you. The product is currently in Frontier preview, gated behind a GitHub Copilot subscription that recently moved to usage-based billing. The Register covered the launch in early June.

The editorial center is the gap between the pitch and the pattern. The pitch is that Scout is a new product category — always-on, identity-bearing, back ...