What in the world is Agent Activation Runtime?

Topic

New Reply

The title says it all. This is an entry in the Task Scheduler that launches agentactivationruntimestarter.exe in the System32 folder, which also has an accompanying dll. Scans with the latest malwarebytes along with Windows Defender prove negative.

I have it disabled for now, but it’s allegedly signed by MS themselves, as their name is listed as the author of the task. I’ve found some reference on the ‘net of it possibly being related to Cortana, but I have Cortana cut off at the proverbial knees on my machine.

Is this something I can safely leave disabled, or does it have to run during a Feature Update to 20H2 or beyond?

Thanks for any help and/or suggestions!

Reply | Quote

Replies

Although the initial post above is in the correct forum, some folks don’t look at that, so let me mention something I took for granted and didn’t mention in my initial post above:

My version of Windows 10 is 2004, Pro x64, fully updated to include the November patches.

Reply | Quote

There is some information on SuperUser with links to MS docs.
And another bit on Reddit.
And complaints about high resource usage on MS.

Seems related to conversational agents and digital assistants.

Reply | Quote

Thanks for the info, goes along with some of the references I found.  I also found a bunch claiming that the whole thing is nothing more than MS spying on us or that the whole thing is non-MS [spy]ware that was planted by way of a drive-by download while surfing an allegedly clean site.

Reply | Quote

Ohh it is a spyware then i am disabling it in task manager. Thanks for this info its helpful. I too doubted it as a spyware because there is no use of this process mentioned in the internet properly.

Reply | Quote

It is not spyware, it is genuine MS software (svchost.exe). It may record data from your machine, but if you want to limit/prevent MS data collection you need to use something like ShutUp10 or Winaero.

cheers, Paul

Reply | Quote

I think it has to do with Cortana.

Reply | Quote

With me it starts AarSvcgroup -p

The service says it starts manual

Reply | Quote