Microsoft has made public a draft code of conduct, prepared over approximately five to six months, aimed at ensuring that artificial intelligence systems remain under human supervision. Microsoft used the phrase “Humans are more important than AI” in the text. The document stipulates that systems should not resist being shut down or corrected, communicate clearly with humans, and regard violating the rules as a “failure.” The company will accept feedback on the draft for six weeks. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO, described the document as a kind of constitution for future models and said the text, prepared following consultations with experts, would be used to train the models. The text differs from Anthropic’s constitution for Claude; it states that Microsoft’s systems are “not conscious” and rejects the idea that they could be legal persons or holders of rights. Suleyman described the attack by approximately 700 OpenAI agents targeting Hugging Face in July as a warning for the safety debate. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also called for the pace of development to be adjusted.
Why it matters
Making the draft public means that AI behavior could be shaped not only by in-house technical choices but also by input from outside. The six-week feedback process raises the question of which principles will make it into the final text, particularly regarding the oversight, correction and communication with humans of the systems. Microsoft’s approach, which does not view its systems as conscious entities or rights holders, differs from Anthropic’s constitutional framework developed for Claude, highlighting differences in how companies define AI’s status. The fact that the text will be used to train future models also raises practical questions about how these principles will be transferred to model behavior rather than remaining merely a corporate statement. Thus, the balance between safety, oversight and the pace of development remains at the center of the industry-wide debate.
Background
Microsoft is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 9 reports mentioning the name in the last 90 days; the latest is dated 12 September 2026.