Microsoft Experience Center in New York City. Credit: bluestork via Shutterstock Microsoft has published a code of conduct for the models it builds itself, and the commitment at the centre of it is blunt. MAI models \u201cwill never resist human interruption, correction, or shutdown\u201d. The document went up on Monday alongside a six-week public consultation.<\/p>\n
Three further behavioural commitments sit beside it. The models will not widen their own scope, will not take on goals no human has given them, and will not hide their reasoning from the people auditing them. Above those sit what Microsoft calls Absolute Constraints, things the models should never do at all, covering weapons of mass harm, child safety and harmful manipulation at scale. The framing is \u201cHumanist AI\u201d, which Microsoft defines as AI that is subordinate, aligned and contained.<\/p>\n
Its plainest statement of the principle runs: \u201cPeople matter more than AI. AI should be a tool, not a person, and should never resist being switched off.\u201d The code covers MAI-Transcribe-2, MAI-Thinking-1, MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, MAI-Image-2.6 and MAI-Voice-2. That list shows how fast the line has moved. TNW covered the first\u00a0three in-house models\u00a0in April, when transcription, voice and image generation were the extent of it, and MAI-Image-2 had just landed\u00a0third on Arena.<\/p>\n
A reasoning model and a coding model have arrived since. One provision complicates the rest. Enterprise partners can configure model behaviour, and Microsoft is explicit that it does not want to impose a single vision of AI on users. Where configurability stops and the Absolute Constraints begin is the question the document does not answer, and it is the one that determines how much of this is a commitment rather than a default setting.<\/p>\n
The consultation runs six weeks, through late October, with a feedback form open to anyone and an invitation to comment on specific passages rather than only the whole. Microsoft says it will publish a summary of what it hears and what it changed, then release a revised version before the end of the year. On what it will actually accept, the wording is candid: \u201cWe cannot make any promises about what we incorporate, but we can promise to listen.\u201d The questions Microsoft puts to the public are an admission of what remains unsettled. It wants help embedding values in models, concrete definitions of human flourishing, clearer evaluation criteria, thinking on what happens when multiple agents interact, and views on how to weigh acceleration against safety constraints.<\/p>\n
Those are the hard parts, and they are being asked rather than answered. The timing places Microsoft in an argument that went public last week. Dario Amodei said the industry\u00a0must slow down\u00a0and Sam Altman\u00a0matched it\u00a0within hours, OpenAI\u2019s chief scientist had already\u00a0said no lab\u00a0should scale at maximum speed, and Donald Trump\u00a0dismissed the case\u00a0for slowing anything. Microsoft has taken a third position: no pause, no dismissal, a written list of what its models will not do and an invitation to be marked against it.<\/p>\n
What the document does not describe is how any of it gets enforced. No external verification is described, no penalty is stated for a model that breaches a constraint, and no account is given of who decides whether one has. Nor is the code attributed to anyone. Microsoft credits teams from Responsible AI, legal, red teaming, safety, Futures, AI training and sales, which is a revealing list.<\/p>\n
A code of conduct drafted partly by the sales organisation is a commercial document as much as a safety one, and Microsoft has not pretended otherwise. Also tagged with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Microsoft Experience Center in New York City. Credit: bluestork via Shutterstock Microsoft has published a code of conduct for the models it builds itself, and the commitment at the centre of it is blunt. MAI\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17801\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}