Microsoft AutoGen is archived: no security fixes, migrate now

Microsoft AutoGen, one of the first popular multi-agent frameworks, is now officially abandonware. The AutoGen README says Microsoft will ship no bug fixes, no security fixes, no new features and no support. And on November 6, John Langford, a founder of the Microsoft Research group that built it, wrote that the group is over. If an agent in your business runs on AutoGen, it now has no owner.

What actually happened

• The README changed on October 16. A docs commit titled "clarify AutoGen is archived and no longer maintained" added a caution banner. It says AutoGen was built "for research and experimentation" and that Microsoft continues to advise against production use. (GitHub has not yet set the repo to read-only, but the policy is clear.)
• Microsoft points users to Microsoft Agent Framework. The README calls it the "enterprise-ready successor," with stable APIs and long-term support, and links an AutoGen-to-Agent-Framework migration guide.
• The team is gone. In his post, Langford says AI Frontiers was about 50 people, and its agent work included AutoGen and the Fara computer-use agent. The group moved into Microsoft AI in early September. He says the new org's focus is "scaling, and aggressively not research," that they "did not really want us," and that he placed his people and left.

Why AutoGen's end matters for your business

You may not know you run AutoGen. A contractor picked it in 2024. A vendor's "AI assistant" wraps it. A prototype quietly became production. None of that shows up on an invoice.

An unmaintained agent framework is worse than an unmaintained library. Agents call tools, read untrusted input and hold API keys. When the next prompt-injection or code-execution bug lands in AutoGen or one of its dependencies, nobody upstream will fix it.

What we would do this week:

1. Search for it. Run pip show autogen-agentchat autogen-ext pyautogen on every server and in every requirements.txt and lockfile.
2. Ask your vendors. One email: "Does your product depend on Microsoft AutoGen? What is your migration date?"
3. Plan the move, don't panic. Agent Framework is the direct path. If you migrate anyway, consider keeping your tool definitions and prompts in your own code so the next framework change is a weekend, not a rebuild.
4. Freeze and fence until then. Pin versions, cut the agent's credentials to the minimum, and keep it off untrusted input where you can.

Sources: Microsoft AutoGen repository README, John Langford, "The End of AI Frontiers" (hunch.net), Microsoft Learn: migrate from AutoGen.