By Amiya Johar
Microsoft published a code of conduct for its AI models, laying down fresh rules to ensure increasingly powerful systems remain under human control and do not resist correction, interruption or shutdown.
“People matter more than AI,” Microsoft stated, adding the technology “should be a tool, not a person, and should never resist being switched off”. The software giant opened a six-week public consultation for the first draft of its AI Code of Conduct, with a revised version expected later this year.
The proposed code set out 10 main areas of control. It argued AI models must remain interruptible, never resist correction, interruption or shutdown, or take on goals beyond those assigned by humans.
Models must also remain subordinate to humans, never expanding their authority, pursuing independent objectives or concealing information from human auditors. As a result, the company ruled out model communication that cannot be understood by people.
Microsoft highlighted that models must treat any breach of the code as a failure of the task itself. In addition, it emphasised the importance of enforcing safety constraints over completing a task, including hard limits around issues involding weapons of mass harm, child safety and dangerous manipulation at scale.
The document called for AI systems that support human agency rather than replace it, discouraging excessive reliance or emotional dependence on the technology.
To this end, Microsoft emphasised its models are “not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness”, rejecting “the pursuit of legal personhood” or the idea that models should have welfare or rights. In January, US AI player Anthropic had stated its model Claude’s “moral status, welfare, and consciousness remain deeply uncertain”.
Microsoft explained the code intends to act as “a training manual for how we develop our AI, and how we intend it to function during deployment”. According to the company, “recent safety incidents of large scale, highly coordinated, and persistent hacking campaigns of AI agents” prove that “the stakes are high and only getting higher”. This week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called for a slowdown in the pace of frontier AI development as concerns mount over the behaviour of autonomous systems.
