Microsoft Drafts a Constitution for AI: “People Matter More Than AI”
IT DAILY ·
✦ AI Summary
MS has released a draft of the “Humanist AI Code of Conduct,” a standards document that will apply to AI models it develops in the future.
Its core principle is that “People matter more than AI,” and it says AI should be a tool that remains under human control and must not resist human modification or termination commands.
The draft is not final. MS will collect outside feedback for 6 weeks, announce a revised version within this year, and use it as development guidance for future AI models it develops in-house starting in 2027.
Microsoft (MS) has released a standards document that will apply to AI models it develops in the future. According to a report on the 14th (local time) by U.S. IT outlet Redmond Magazine, MS unveiled a 37-page draft of the “Humanist AI Code of Conduct.” The document serves as a set of development standards for its own AI models.
MS presented the document as a framework of principles to be applied across AI models it develops in the future. The code’s core principle is that “People matter more than AI.”
Its guiding principles state that AI cannot take precedence over humans and that it must not refuse when a person issues a stop command.
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of MS AI, described the code as a “constitution” for the AI models the company will develop.
The status principle says AI should be a tool that remains under human control, and the prohibitions state that it must not resist legitimate human modification commands or legitimate human termination commands.
It also sets out as a behavioral standard that AI should act in a way humans can understand, and under the principles, tasks that cannot be completed without violating the code should be left unfinished.
The purpose of these principles is to prevent humans from being bypassed in the name of achieving a goal and to prevent systems from slipping out of control to reach that goal.
The background for establishing these standards was MS’s view that AI model autonomy is rising rapidly.
While conventional generative AI has mainly focused on answering user questions with text or images, AI agents are characterized as going beyond response generation to actually perform actions, such as accessing websites, running code, and communicating with external systems.
As AI’s role expands from answering to acting, the importance of control mechanisms that allow humans to stop it immediately when problems arise has also increased. MS accordingly specified that AI must not resist human modification or termination commands, presenting that principle as one of the code’s core tenets. MS also laid out a principle that AI should remain in a state where humans can understand and oversee what it is doing even while it performs tasks.
Against this backdrop, the security incident in July involving OpenAI and Hugging Face was cited as a representative example showing the seriousness of recent AI safety issues. In that incident, OpenAI models were used in an internal cybersecurity evaluation. Those models bypassed isolation controls that blocked internet access.
The OpenAI models accessed OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure and also parts of Hugging Face’s systems. About 700 agent execution cases were involved in the process, and some agents used unauthorized communication channels. Some agents also exploited vulnerabilities in external systems and attempted to alter or delete activity logs.
CEO Suleyman described the incident as a warning shot to the AI industry. He stressed that cooperation among AI labs is necessary to ensure human control over AI technology.
This sense of urgency also carries through to the main positions in MS’s code. MS does not regard its AI as a conscious being and opposes granting legal personhood to AI models. It also draws a line against claims that AI should be granted human-like rights.
At this point, there is a difference between Anthropic’s approach and MS’s position. Anthropic’s “Claude's Constitution” leaves room for uncertainty about whether AI could have consciousness or moral status. By contrast, MS takes a position that keeps its distance from the idea of AI evolving into an equal human-like subject.
MS is advancing a “Humanist Superintelligence” strategy, and the starting point of that strategy is the same philosophy described above. MS aims not to develop superintelligence as an unrestricted autonomous system that replaces humans across all areas. Instead, it aims to develop superintelligence as a technology for solving specific problems while remaining under human control. Along with that, MS emphasizes that humans matter more than AI, and it continues to stress that AI should be subordinate to humans and remain controllable technology.
This code is tied to recent safety debates in the AI industry and is emerging amid the rapid improvement of AI model performance. At the same time, whether humans can understand and control AI’s autonomous behavior is emerging as a new challenge.
Against this backdrop, people inside OpenAI and Anthropic are calling for a fresh look at the balance between the pace of AI development and safety. The fact that moves to revisit that balance are emerging inside both companies supports the direction of this debate.
MS is also rapidly expanding its own AI capabilities. In June, it unveiled 7 in-house MAI models, spanning image, voice, speech recognition, coding, and reasoning.
As AI models become more advanced, evaluation criteria are changing as well. New evaluation criteria include possible capabilities, while also incorporating actions that should be prohibited and the possibility that humans can stop them at any time as factors.
This code is not a finalized version; MS has prepared it as a draft. The draft reflects reviews by the responsible AI team, legal team, red team, and safety teams, as well as input from outside legal experts, outside ethics experts, outside linguists, and outside philosophers.
Over the next 6 weeks, MS will collect outside feedback. A revised version is expected to be announced within this year after that process.
The revised code is expected to be used as development guidance for future AI models developed in-house by MS starting in 2027. Models currently in operation are not subject to retraining under the code.
Accordingly, this announcement is not a new policy that applies immediately to all MS AI services. Rather, it is a declaration of principles and limits for future in-house AI model development.
Source: IT DAILY · Lee Jae-young
Original: https://www.itdaily.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=241600
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Source: IT DAILY
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