Microsoft has finally answered the question nobody asked: “What if my childhood doodling app became an AI-powered coloring book factory with hardware requirements stricter than some AAA games?” Paint, the app we all used to draw misshapen houses and cursed stick figures, now lives on Copilot Plus PCs as a kind of AI preschool teacher that also demands you sign in with a Microsoft account before you get your crayons.

Here’s how it works in the most gloriously unnecessary way possible. In the latest Windows 11 Insider builds, Paint gets a new “Coloring book” option tucked inside the Copilot menu. You type in a prompt like “a cute fluffy cat on a donut,” and Paint dutifully spits out four black-and-white line-art options that look like they were generated by an AI that has seen both cats and donuts, but never in the same room. One doesn’t even bother to finish the face, which frankly is the most authentic “Microsoft Paint energy” imaginable.

The feature is rolling out first to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels, presumably because Microsoft wants feedback from the bravest people on Earth: users who install pre-release Windows builds and still open Paint on purpose. It’s version 11.2512.191.0 of Paint you’re looking for, in case you like your software version numbers long and your feature set weirdly specific. Once you pick a design, you can drop it onto the canvas, color it in digitally, or print it out so your kids can ignore it while they go back to watching YouTube.

Of course, there’s a catch — because this is modern Windows, not Windows XP. The coloring book is only available on Copilot Plus PCs, so you need a fairly new machine with a dedicated NPU and, yes, that Microsoft account login. In other words, this is less “democratizing creativity” and more “you bought the AI laptop, now please use the AI laptop.” The pitch is clear: Look at all these whimsical features you can only get if you’re on the shiny new Windows 11 hardware train.

If you zoom out a bit, this coloring-book trick is just the latest stop on Paint’s AI glow-up tour. Microsoft already has Cocreator, a DALL-E–powered image generator that lets you describe a scene and get three artsy images to choose from. Cocreator is the dramatic older sibling — “paint me a dragon at sunset in watercolor” — while Coloring book is the younger one that only does line art and is extremely into outlines. Both are part of Microsoft’s broader push to turn Paint from “that thing you use to crop screenshots” into “entry-level AI art studio, now with nostalgia tax.”​

To make all this a bit less chaotic, Microsoft is also giving the Fill tool a new tolerance slider, which sounds dry until you remember how many childhood afternoons were ruined by colors bleeding through jagged pixel gaps. With tolerance controls, you can decide how aggressively the paint bucket spills over lines, which is especially useful now that AI is generating intricate patterns that look like they hate both your mouse and your patience. It’s a small, actually sensible upgrade buried under “AI cat donut generator,” which feels very on brand.

Then there’s Notepad, which is quietly going through its own “character development arc” in the background. The same Insider wave that brought AI coloring books to Paint is giving Notepad better AI text tools, including streamed results for its Write, Rewrite, and Summarize features. Instead of that classic “please enjoy this spinning icon while we think about your paragraph,” Notepad now starts showing AI text as it’s generated, so you can watch your mediocre draft become a different kind of mediocre in real time.

Notepad’s AI features are surprisingly practical: Rewrite to tweak tone and clarity, Summarize to condense long text, and Write to spin up new content from a prompt. It even supports more Markdown syntax now, including things like strikethrough and nested lists, which is hilarious because that means Notepad is getting dangerously close to becoming a lightweight notes app instead of the place you paste error logs and feelings. Microsoft even added a new welcome screen explaining what the app can do, in case you somehow missed the memo that the humble .txt editor now wants to help with your writing career.

Put together, Paint and Notepad have basically joined an AI startup without telling anyone. One app wants to turn your idle brain dumps into more polished text; the other wants to turn your chaotic prompts into borderline cursed coloring pages. Both are very clearly designed to show off “this is what Copilot Plus PCs can do,” from local NPU-accelerated image generation to cloud-assisted writing tools. It’s a marketing story disguised as a quality-of-life upgrade — and honestly, it kind of works, if only because the features are just absurd enough to feel fun.

The bigger question is who this is actually for. Parents might appreciate infinite, on-demand coloring sheets tailored to whatever obsession their kid has this week: dinosaurs in space, unicorns with laptops, or three-page story arcs starring a waffle that wants to be a cloud. Stressed-out adults get endless adult coloring pages without paying for yet another app, as long as they’ve already paid for the privilege of owning the right AI-powered PC. And for everyone else, it’s a party trick: a way to kill 10 minutes by trying to see how badly Paint can mess up “a realistic banana riding a bicycle.”

There’s also an unspoken side effect: AI is quietly rewriting the definition of “basic” software. Paint used to be the baseline drawing tool that shipped with Windows; now it’s a testbed for generative art, Copilot integration, and whatever other AI gimmick Microsoft wants to normalize next. Notepad, once the digital equivalent of a sticky note, is now running GPT-powered helpers to rewrite your sentences and summarize your messiest documents. The message is simple: if even Notepad and Paint are doing AI now, of course, your next PC should, too.

For all the eye-rolling this invites, there is something charming about Paint getting weird again. This is the app that survived the “we’re killing it” scare, got redesigned, got layers, got transparency, then got an AI art generator, and now it’s printing off janky cat donuts like it’s running an Etsy shop from 2011. It’s chaotic, a little unnecessary, and oddly delightful — which, in 2026, might be the most honest kind of tech feature you can ship.