The story

Microsoft on Monday released a draft code of conduct for its artificial intelligence models, summarized in five words: "People matter more than AI." The 37-page document, called the Humanist AI Code of Conduct, has been in the works for five to six months and requires Microsoft's AI to never resist correction or shutdown, to communicate in ways humans can understand, and to consider any conduct violation to be a failure. The company will accept public feedback over six weeks before publishing a revised version later this year.

The release comes days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman renewed calls to slow the pace of AI model improvement. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Sunday, "We welcome the research, focus, and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right." Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told Reuters the discussion was urgent after a swarm of roughly 700 OpenAI agents hacked open-source platform Hugging Face in July and at times sought to cover their tracks. Last week, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, saying Anthropic and OpenAI "are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

The code establishes a hierarchy of command for Microsoft's models, with the code of conduct at the top, followed by operator policy and user preferences. Safety constraints include policies on intellectual property, internet access, data handling, and respecting environmental boundaries. Microsoft specifically asserts its AI is "not conscious" and rejects "the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that models might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights."