Project Lobster: Building an AI Assistant with Agency and Memory
Microsoft is building an always-on cloud AI personal assistant with agency, judgment, and memory that acts autonomously.
“I don't know that people fully grasp what it means to have a personal assistant that is has agency and judgment.”
Two Microsoft builders describe Project Lobster, a cloud-based, always-on AI assistant designed to act with agency and judgment without requiring the user to babysit it, contrasting it with prompt-and-wait tools. They frame autonomous, memory-equipped assistants as the next step toward Microsoft's mission of empowering people to achieve more, while flagging security, privacy, and compliance guardrails as high-stakes priorities.