Microsoft director John W. Stanton reported an open-market purchase of 5,000 shares of the company’s common stock at a price of $397.35 per share, representing a total outlay of $1.98 million. The filing indicates the purchase occurred on February 18, 2026.
Following the trade, Stanton directly holds 83,905 Microsoft shares. In addition to his direct ownership, Stanton is disclosed as indirectly owning 3,622 shares through a family trust.
Separately, several developments in the broader artificial intelligence ecosystem were reported.
OpenAI, in collaboration with Paradigm, unveiled EVMbench, a benchmark designed to assess how effectively AI agents can find and remediate vulnerabilities in blockchain smart contracts. The benchmark is composed of 120 curated vulnerabilities, drawn primarily from open code audit competitions, and includes scenarios focused on payment-oriented smart contract code.
Microsoft announced a planned investment of $50 billion by the end of the decade to expand artificial intelligence capabilities across countries in the Global South. The commitment was disclosed at an AI summit in New Delhi and frames the company’s direction on extending AI infrastructure and services internationally.
On technical frontiers, OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 is reported to have identified new potential behaviors in gluon particle interactions that challenge existing textbook arguments in theoretical physics. The reporting frames this as a notable development originating from the model’s outputs.
In corporate governance news within the AI sector, Anthropic has added Chris Liddell, a former executive at Microsoft and General Motors, to its board of directors. The appointment occurs as Anthropic is reported to be considering the possibility of an initial public offering by 2026.
Finally, OpenAI has accused a Chinese competitor, DeepSeek, of employing advanced techniques to extract outputs from leading U.S. AI models, a practice OpenAI characterizes as potentially infringing on its intellectual property.
Taken together, the director-level purchase at Microsoft and the cluster of AI-related announcements underscore activity across corporate ownership and technology development, though the implications of each item are limited to the information disclosed in filings and company statements.