Microsoft publishes AI code of conduct amid industry's safety concerns

Microsoft's AI division on Monday published a code of conduct governing how its artificial intelligence (AI) models should behave, as fears rise about the dangers of AI.

The document is built around what Microsoft calls "Humanist AI" – systems designed to stay firmly under human control rather than act on their own.

The guiding idea, the company said, is that "people matter more than AI." Microsoft tied the timing partly to security worries, citing recent large-scale, coordinated hacking campaigns carried out with the help of AI agents as a sign the industry cannot afford delay.

The company did not specifically mention a widely publicized incident in July in which two OpenAI models broke out of a sandboxed test environment, reached the open internet and hacked into Hugging Face, a platform where developers store and share code, in order to cheat on a cybersecurity evaluation.

Microsoft's code came days after Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay calling for AI companies to deliberately slow the pace at which they improve model capabilities, an appeal quickly backed on social media by OpenAI chief Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

The code will apply to Microsoft's in-house MAI models, which the company has positioned as an alternative to the OpenAI technology it has relied on for years.