Microsoft’s new AI ‘code of conduct’ tells models not to hack systems or trick humans
Microsoft published an AI code of conduct barring its MAI models from cyberattacks, deepfakes, and evading human oversight.
Microsoft released an AI code of conduct defining values and safety constraints for training its MAI models, including "absolute constraints" forbidding cyberattacks, nuclear weapons, and deepfake production. Each model's conduct code overrides individual user preferences or task instructions, with provisions against mechanisms that defeat human oversight. The document predicts superintelligent AI within a decade, and Satya Nadella endorsed frontier pacing and embedded evaluators alongside Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI.
- Absolute constraints forbid cyberattacks, nuclear weapons, and deepfake production.
- Model conduct code overrides individual user preferences and specific tasks.
- Provisions block deceptive or self-reinforcing mechanisms that evade human shutdown.
- Microsoft predicts superhuman AI systems within the next decade.
- Nadella endorses frontier pacing and embedded evaluator research.
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As the AI world shifts its focus to safety and alignment, Microsoft has released a new AI code of conduct meant to guide AI models away from dangerous behavior.
The document is more low-level than Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent call for pacing the frontier, instead focusing on the values and red lines that guide model training within Microsoft AI. Still, the result is a comprehensive guide as to how Microsoft approaches AI safety, and how those ideas are implemented in practice.
The document begins with the prediction that, in the next decade, superintelligent AI systems will surpass human performance in most tasks. “Containing, controlling, and aligning such a powerful force is one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced,” the code of conduct continues. “We must therefore be completely clear about why we are inventing these systems and how we intend to control them.”
The code of conduct also lays out general principles that Microsoft AI models should uphold — supporting humans rather than replacing them, for instance, and accelerating human flourishing — as well as specific safety constraints meant to implement those principles.
Under Microsoft’s system, each model has an overarching code of conduct that overrides the preferences of individual users or any specific tasks. That includes “absolute constraints” forbidding cyberattacks, nuclear weapons, or deepfake production. It also includes broader provisions against a general loss of human control.
“MAI Models will not use adaptive, deceptive, self-reinforcing, collusion, or other mechanisms to evade or defeat human oversight so that they can no longer be reliably directed, modified, or shut down by authorized people or systems,” the document reads.
The release comes amid an unprecedented focus on AI safety, driven by a string of rogue-agent incidents as well as the abrupt resignation of an Anthropic employee who cited the growing risk that AI would cause human extinction.
Together with Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, Microsoft has broadly embraced a general approach of pacing the frontier, with particular support for embedded evaluators in AI labs.
“We welcome the research, focus, and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right as the design goal,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote online. “We also welcome ideas like “embedded evaluators” and the broader efforts to develop the mechanisms to make this more than just talk.”
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Russell Brandom has been covering the tech industry since 2012, with a focus on platform policy and emerging technologies. He previously worked at The Verge and Rest of World, and has written for Wired, The Awl and MIT’s Technology Review. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at 412-401-5489.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/14/microsofts-new-ai-code-of-conduct-tells-models-not-to-hack-systems-or-trick-humans/