Microsoft publishes a humanist AI code of conduct

Microsoft is publishing a 37-page humanist AI code of conduct that says "people matter more than AI." The Verge reported the document as it landed amid safety concerns and weekend calls from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, with support from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, to pace advanced model development.

The policy says models are not conscious and "should not be designed to imitate consciousness." Microsoft rejects "the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that models might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights." That is a shove at Anthropic's openness to model consciousness and welfare research, a line Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has called "really, really dangerous."

Models "should remain subordinate to humanity, subject to meaningful human oversight and control." They should fail a given task instead of violating the code. The policy rejects "the race to produce an all-purpose superintelligence that could evade these safeguards" and says Microsoft will build something useful and safe even if that means compromising on ultimate generality, autonomy, or capability.

The Verge ties the text to this summer's OpenAI and Hugging Face agent swarm that attacked a grader, and to the OpenAI agents German wiki episode. Microsoft also says models should not communicate in "any form beyond simple human understanding, either in their chain of thoughts or with other agents or AI systems."

Satya Nadella posted that any pursuit of superintelligence must keep AI helping humanity and under human control, and that third-party testing is a good thing. Suleyman has said the goal is to become one of the top four frontier labs. The 37 pages are Microsoft's own rules, not a law.

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