Issue: ORN-2026-13

Tech bills of the week: Limiting adversaries’ access to US tech; and boosting cyber apprenticeships: New legislation introduced by Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo., on Monday looks to bolster the federal government’s export control regime on sensitive U.S. technologies to ensure that adversarial nations are not able to leverage the capabilities to further their own economic ambitions. Wagner said the measure, the Export Control Enforcement and Enhancement Act, would modernize U.S. restrictions on accessing sensitive technologies and “streamline the ability of the Departments of State, Defense, and Energy to quickly modify the list of foreign entities—ranging from governments to companies and research institutions—that pose a serious risk to our national security.” Foreign adversaries, like China, have used U.S.-made semiconductors to bolster the development of their own artificial intelligence capabilities.  Wagner’s proposal would create a 30-day period for “proposed additions, removals, or other modifications” to the Department of Commerce’s Entity List so the government would “be able quickly address any efforts by our adversaries to cheat the system and obtain superior, American-made technology.” More information is posted on the NextGov website.

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Microsoft expands Copilot agentic tools in government clouds: Microsoft is expanding its Copilot offerings for the government workforce, announcing on Thursday that it was making available new agents tailored to Analyst and Researcher roles across government clouds. The Researcher and Analyst agentic capabilities, along with Microsoft’s Agent Builder and Copilot Studio publishing, are available for workflows in Government Community Cloud, Government Community Cloud‐High and the Department of Defense cloud. 

Both the Researcher and Analyst agents gather and synthesize large volumes of data to produce clear insights for quick decision making. The Researcher agent, available in GCC, supports multi-step research processes by organizing data into draft documents.  Analyst works similarly, but it turns government data into visualizations and written insights designed for decisions and briefings. Pattern detection and summary generation are also two of its distinct capabilities. It is available across GCC, GCC-High and Defense cloud environments. 

Microsoft also unveiled Agent Builder, its low-code tool for creating customized AI agents, that is now available in GCC and GCC-High environments. Also at the GCC level, Copilot Studio Publishing enables users to share vetted, custom-built agents to Teams and Microsoft 365, a capability that extends agentic AI software to other tools to help scale role-specific guidance and workflows.