Microsoft spent time in 2024 building a working operating system that has nothing to do with Windows 11 as you know it. There’s no Start menu, or desktop icons, or the traditional taskbar apps, just Copilot (I know!) at the center of everything.
I have gone through the leaked video and internal documents in detail, and I hope this one stays buried. The odds are already in favor of that happening, and if you dislike how much AI has crept into Windows 11 already, the good news is that Microsoft is nowremoving Copilot from parts of Windows 11where it doesn’t deliver.
The project is called Aion, and it dates back to 2024 or earlier, based on the news articles opened inside the demo, which are all from that year. The leak includes a SharePoint site calledCopilotOS, with its own tabs forThe Pillars, AI Devices, Self Driving OS, and Key Tech. The pitch on that page is bigger than a PC shell.
It describes Copilot becoming“the primary way people express, entertain, and educate themselves, and complete tasks across all aspects of their lives,”achieved through what the document calls an “agent OS,” also referred to internally as“agent of agents” or the“outside agent.”Microsoft’s build of this is named Copilot OS, or the Outside Copilot.
That said, these might’ve been broader plans, and the immediate one might’ve been a Microsoft web OS for PCs and maybe other form factors.
Microsoft built a working Copilot OS called Project Aion
It runs on a stripped-down Windows codebase referred to internally asWin3, built to be lighter than Windows 11, with faster boot times and better battery life, at the cost of dropping legacyWin32app support. Copilot anchors the shell from top to bottom, and the whole thing runs inside a customized version ofMicrosoft Edge.
Like all versions of Windows, the Start menu, desktop, and pinned taskbar icons are hardcoded into our brains. But in Aion, there is none of that. Actually, there are no desktop icons.
Instead, clicking the Copilot button opens a dashboard greeting you by name, “Good afternoon, Nathan,” followed by three cards labeled Stay on Top, Create something new, and News of the day. A My Stuff row follows below it, with app icons for Edge, Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft 365, but also Figma and Visual Studio Code, which tells me Aion was not built as a Microsoft-only walled garden.
Aion is described as an“Agent/Copilot OS you can run on a variety of new AI-focused devices running AOSP, Win3, and even Windows 11.”