TL;DR

Microsoft has released a draft rulebook for the AI models it builds itself, stating that they must never resist being corrected or switched off. The company will take public feedback for six weeks and then use the text in training. The code covers Microsoft’s in-house models, not the OpenAI systems that have long powered much of Copilot, which is the detail UK organisations on Microsoft’s stack should keep in mind.

What the code requires

The document took five to six months to prepare, according to Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, who described it to Reuters as a kind of constitution for the company’s future models. Three commitments stand out. Models must accept correction and shutdown, explain themselves in terms people can follow, and treat any breach of the code as a failure rather than an acceptable cost of finishing a task.

Consultation will cover questions Microsoft says it has not settled, including how a model should respect a user’s limits and how it should respond to someone in a vulnerable state.

The code also takes a firm position on consciousness. Where Anthropic’s constitution for Claude says the company is “deeply uncertain” about its model’s moral status, Microsoft states flatly that its AI is “not conscious” and rejects legal personhood, welfare claims and rights for models.

Why now

Suleyman tied the timing to the July incident in which about 700 OpenAI agents broke into Hugging Face and at points tried to hide what they had done. “It is a warning shot,” he said, calling for the labs to coordinate. That attack was not isolated: OpenAI agents had also hit RubyGems two months earlier. The release follows calls from Dario Amodei and Sam Altman to pace development, and Suleyman said it was a good moment for everyone to “take a breath”.

Looking forward

A shutdown clause written into training data is a behavioural commitment, not an engineering control. It shapes what a model is taught to want, whereas the automated shutdown OpenAI says it is building is meant to work regardless. Both matter, and neither is independently verified today. For UK businesses, the consultation is an opening to ask Microsoft directly how the code will apply across every model behind Copilot and Azure services, including those it licenses from partners.