Microsoft removes the New Copilot opt-out on Wednesday

Digital Attitudes, 13 July 2026

Term 3 opens next Monday. Two deadlines close on Wednesday. One national science curriculum brief already sits on every director's desk. That is Monday.

Microsoft removes the New Copilot opt-out on Wednesday, no fallback

Microsoft's redesigned, chat centred Microsoft 365 Copilot app started rolling to standard release on Monday 22 June, with a top right toggle that let users flip back to the previous experience. On Wednesday 15 July that toggle disappears. Every Microsoft 365 tenant on standard release lands on the new default: a redesigned chat surface, a consolidated Tasks tab that tracks scheduled chats and long running agent activity, a Work IQ toggle that combines enterprise and web data by default, and a rewritten agents section that puts pinned agents and apps in the top navigation. Deferred release tenants get the same experience from Saturday 22 August (Microsoft on the Copilot release notes and the 15 July default change).

Why this matters: Every school on the whole of government VSA6 deal, every university on Microsoft Enterprise, and every TAFE tenant on Microsoft 365 A3 or A5 lands on the new Copilot the same week Term 3 opens. Staff professional learning material written for the old chat surface goes stale on Wednesday. The Tasks tab and the pinned agents section make it visible how much agent activity a user is already running, so the tenant admin who has not yet published a written agent policy has three days to write one before staff start pinning Purview review agents and Study and Learn agents on their own. The change management note also matters for Copilot Chat under 18 access, because the redesigned agents flyout is the surface where a Year 8 student first sees the same interface as a teacher.

Anthropic AI for Science credit deadline closes Wednesday

Anthropic's AI for Science program closes applications on Tuesday 15 July at midnight Pacific time, which is Wednesday morning in Melbourne. It funds up to 50 projects at USD 30,000 in Claude credits each, with an extra USD 2,000 in Modal compute credits for selected projects. Eligibility runs to graduate researchers, postdoctoral researchers and principal investigators anywhere in the world. Award notifications go out by Friday 31 July, and funded projects run Tuesday 1 September through Tuesday 1 December. Anthropic's stated early focus is biology and biomedical research, but the call is open across scientific domains (Anthropic on the AI for Science Program).

Why this matters: For every Group of Eight faculty of science, every Australian Technology Network research office, and every CSIRO co badged lab already sitting on Claude for Education, the funding call is real and the paperwork window is measured in hours. Wednesday's deadline sits three days before InstructureCon opens in Louisville with the IgniteAI grading roadmap the ANZ Canvas customer base is tracking, and the same fortnight that Anthropic's confidential 1.4 gigawatt Australian data centre decision was flagged for. Anthropic is priming the sector's flagship researchers on Claude before it commits its Australian compute perimeter, and the Australian principal investigators who apply this week are the ones whose 2027 grant applications will name Claude on the compute line as the sovereign residency option once the tender lands.

ASERA writes AI directly into the next National Science Education Strategy

The Australasian Science Education Research Association released "Science Education: Fit for the Future" on Wednesday 1 July. Written by eight academics across Flinders, Deakin, UWA, Curtin, JCU, Monash and Auckland University of Technology, the white paper is pitched as the direction paper for a new National Science Education Strategy in Australia and New Zealand, filling the gap left by the expiry of the 2016 to 2026 National STEM School Education Strategy this year. Its recommendations name AI directly. Incorporate AI and other emerging technologies into the science curriculum. Fund dedicated science specialists in primary schools. Rebuild pedagogical content knowledge for senior secondary science teachers. Strengthen school and university partnerships. Follow up coverage on 4 July from Flinders put the paper on the desk of every state science curriculum lead the week Term 3 opens (Flinders on the ASERA white paper, 4 July).

Why this matters: For every state Department of Education science curriculum lead, every AISNSW, AISWA and ISV curriculum team, and every Catholic Education Commission science director, the paper is the working brief for what replaces the 2016 to 2026 STEM strategy after 31 December. The AI recommendation is the sharp end. The V9 Australian Curriculum already names AI in Mathematics and Technologies, and now a sector paper written by science education academics puts AI into science as well. The Term 3 curriculum committee that reads it has a citable source for the argument that a Year 9 physics teacher needs generative AI on the planning desk, and course committees for pre service science teacher education should read the pedagogical content knowledge recommendation twice, because it feeds directly into the next AITSL accreditation review of ITE course structures.

Coffee down. Term 3 opens next Monday. Anything else in the sector can wait until then. More on the operational landscape at digitalattitudes.com.au.