It seems Microsoft has previously explored the idea of building Windows entirely around AI, based on a leaked video from a few years ago.
Windows Central highlighted a video (see below) that is a few minutes long and was leaked via the BetaWiki Discord server, with our sister site’s Zac Bowden noting that sources have given assurances that the clip is genuine. It shows an AI-focused version of Windows built around Copilot and apparently codenamed Aion.
The concept shown is a lightweight web-based OS, meaning it’s built on web apps instead of native Windows apps. In other words, it won’t run standard Windows (Win32) software, with the idea being to stream those apps to the desktop if they’re required (meaning running them from the cloud, or more specifically Windows 365, Microsoft’s cloud PC offering).
It’s a bit like Microsoft’s version of ChromeOS as it leverages the cloud, except it’s built around the Edge browser and Copilot.
Copilot runs the show and is the central player in the Start menu, and the idea is for AI to provide contextual suggestions here, recalling past interactions to try to anticipate what the user might need.
In the video, Microsoft explains that Aion aims to break down the “traditional app-centric” approach to taskbar grouping, instead using ‘Spaces’ that act as groups where apps, websites or files related to the same targets are deposited.
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The thematic approach to Spaces sounds rather like the idea of sets that Microsoft toyed with in Windows 10 for the better part of a decade ago now, only to abandon the concept. Except this time, it’s grouped content organized and curated by AI.
The Aion concept has not been well received by the PC crowd, as you might guess. A commenter on the video simply says, “This company has completely lost the plot.”
Another notes that it’s “like ChromeOS for people who don’t know how to use a computer at all.”
And yet another notes: “How did they even manage to make simple web apps look slow and lame? One of the strengths of ChromeOS is that it’s very fast even on old, slow machines.”
In fact, there are a few people who aren’t impressed with how clunky and sluggish the OS appears to be in the video. In fairness to Microsoft, though, it’s only a concept illustration and early working code (although the obvious lack of smoothness isn’t a good look, it must be said). Bowden explains that the video was shot sometime in 2024 and that it’s “unclear if this was just a Hackathon project or something more.”
However, the ideas explored in Aion could be a hint at where Microsoft is going with the next generation of Windows. Which may be troubling to some, of course, but you might as well get used to these ideas.
While Microsoft has promised to reduce AI overreach in Windows 11, it’s more about streamlining submenus here and there and removing Copilot features from certain apps than it is some kind of wholesale change in philosophy regarding AI. Windows 11 is getting AI agents, and they’re actually the next big thing for the operating system, if Microsoft has anything to do with it (and oddly enough, it does).
With Project Solara, Microsoft actually plans to bring AI agents to every possible device in the world, beyond mere PCs and phones. Bowden theorizes that Aion may have evolved into Solara.
Regardless, Aion is still a thing, believe it or not: Microsoft unveiled a new family of local AI models running under the same name at Build 2026. These are a “new generation of small language models that are smaller, faster, and more efficient than our previous Windows OS SLMs,” as Microsoft explains here. Apparently, Aion lives on in some form, so even if it’s a very different idea than the idea of a fully-fledged Copilot-based operating system.
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