“People matter more than AI.”
That’s the premise of a draft code of conduct Microsoft published Monday morning for the AI models it’s developing in-house. The 37-page document would bar its models from resisting shutdown, setting their own goals, or hiding their reasoning from human auditors.
The document applies to Microsoft’s MAI models, the in-house family the company began building after forming a superintelligence team in late 2025. Microsoft has since released seven homegrown models in what it described as a push for long-term self-sufficiency in AI.
The company says the models should remain “subordinate to humanity, subject to meaningful human oversight and control.”
“AI is moving fast,” the company says in a blog post. “As it does, we believe it’s worth writing down the rules and the motivations behind it, and doing it in as open a space as possible.”
Microsoft acknowledges there’s no guarantee its models will follow the rules. “Written objectives alone can never ensure alignment,” the company says, calling the document a “north star,” not “a guarantee of present-day performance.”
The company says it also filters what its models produce, watches how they behave once released, and limits what they’re allowed to do.
Microsoft’s move comes amid a growing debate over the pace of AI development. In an essay over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing down AI advances, saying the pace of development has started to surpass the industry’s ability to keep AI systems safe.
As a first step, Anthropic committed to giving outside evaluators permanent, employee-level access to its systems.
Industry reaction to Amodei: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreed and said OpenAI would make the same commitment to independent evaluators. Elon Musk’s response: “Dario is right.”
President Donald Trump rejected the idea of guardrails outright Monday, blaming a “SICK conspiracy” for public backlash over AI data centers and writing that “the only one that is happy about it is China,” alluding to concerns about American competitiveness in AI.
David Sacks, who served as the White House AI and crypto czar until March, said the two companies should slow down on their own and questioned their motives, arguing that a slowdown is already good business for them and that new industry rules would mostly serve to lock in their lead.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella weighed in Sunday, writing on X that the company welcomes “the research, focus, and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right,” using the industry’s term for making AI systems reliably do what people intend.
Nadella added that the effort “cannot be controlled by a handful of entities, but must have broad representation across the ecosystem, countries, and fields, including academia.”
Microsoft’s draft code of conduct: Mustafa Suleyman, the Microsoft AI CEO, told CNBC the document had been in the works for about five months, and that the company decided to publish it now given the current discussions.
Microsoft and Anthropic are business partners. Microsoft agreed last November to invest $5 billion in Anthropic, as part of a deal in which Anthropic committed $30 billion to Azure. Claude models run inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork tier integrates Claude.
One place where the two companies may diverge is the question of what AI models are, exactly. Microsoft’s code of conduct says its models are “not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness.” It also rejects “the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that models might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights.”
The Verge called that portion of the document “a direct swipe at AI welfare research and model consciousness — concepts Anthropic has been pushing hard on lately.”
Anthropic runs a research program on model welfare. It has given some Claude models the ability to end abusive conversations, and committed to preserving the weights of retired models. Amodei has said he’s open to the idea that a model could be conscious.
Microsoft is taking public comment on its code of conduct for six weeks through a feedback form. It says it will publish a summary of the responses and a revised version later this year, to guide development starting in 2027. It says it isn’t training its current models on it.
The company’s AI team developed the draft with its responsible AI, legal, red teaming and safety teams, consulting outside experts in law, ethics, linguistics and philosophy, plus focus groups drawn from the public.
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