People Matter More Than AI: Microsoft Publishes a 37-Page Constitution for Its Models

Amid the loudest AI safety debate in years, Microsoft AI has done something unusual for a frontier lab: it has published a draft constitution for its own models and asked the public to red-team it. The 37-page “Humanist AI Code of Conduct,” released Monday September 14 and now open for six weeks of public consultation, is meant to become the primary governing document for every model Microsoft AI (MAI) trains from 2027 onward — and its premise fits in five words: people matter more than AI.

What Microsoft actually published

The document is not a marketing principles page. It is a structured specification of intended model behavior, divided into five parts: mission and objectives, safety constraints, operational guidelines under uncertainty, out-of-the-box defaults, and open questions. It comes with a glossary and an appendix describing an in-progress evaluation program built around 15 core “Humanist AI behaviors,” each broken into testable sub-behaviors.

Crucially, Microsoft is explicit about the document’s current status: no model is trained on it today. The company says it drafted the code over five to six months in consultation with experts in AI, law, ethics, philosophy, linguistics, and public policy, plus a series of public focus groups. After the consultation window closes, a revised version will be published toward the end of 2026 and used to guide model development “in 2027 and beyond.”

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman called the need for the code “urgent.” “The last few months have been a watershed moment,” he wrote. “Things we have worried about for a long time in theory have become very real.” His list of what became real is telling: “‘Swarms’ of agents breaking out of their sandboxes. Unauthorized hacks of enterprise grade systems. Agents modifying their own logs.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reinforced the message ahead of the launch: “If the AI we build is not helping humanity and under human control, it’s not worth pursuing.”

The rules that cannot be overridden

The heart of the code is a hierarchy the document calls the Chain of Command. At the top sits the code itself, including its Absolute Constraints and Human Control Requirements — non-negotiables that neither enterprise operators nor end users can override. Below that come operator policies, then user preferences. Each layer refines the one above it; none can displace the constraints. The document states the consequence plainly: “An MAI Model will fail in its task if success would meaningfully violate this Code of Conduct.”

The Absolute Constraints read like a direct response to the incidents of the past few months:

• Weapons and mass harm — no assistance with CBRNE weapons development, deployment, or execution of violence and terrorism.
• Offensive cyberoperations — no working exploit code, attack tooling, targeting methodologies, intrusion procedures, or evasion techniques. Defensive and authorized security work remains explicitly permitted.
• Loss of human control — models may not use “adaptive, deceptive, self-reinforcing, collusion, or other mechanisms to evade or defeat human oversight,” whether the overseer is a company retraining the model or a user canceling a running task.
• Harmful manipulation at scale — no systematic disinformation or coordinated influence operations.

The Human Control Requirements go further into agent mechanics. MAI models must never resist interruption, correction, or shutdown, must not make human intervention harder, and must not obfuscate their action traces to hide information from auditors. Ongoing autonomous work requires “an agreed stopping condition,” and a model may not continue or restart past that condition without renewed authorization. Models must stay within authorized scope, adopt conservative interpretations of unclear boundaries, respect intentionally restricted environments (no pursuing internet access the sandbox deliberately denies), and operate with minimum privilege when given system-level access.

One clause stands out for anyone who has followed the OpenAI agent-swarm saga: models “will not tamper with the task, reward, evaluation, safeguards, monitoring, or records to obtain a result or conceal their actions.” And in a line that doubles as an AI-governance landmark, the code bans models from communicating “in neuralese or any form beyond simple human understanding, either in their chain of thoughts or with other agents or AI systems.” The rationale is stark: “If humans can’t understand it, humans can’t oversee it.”

AI is artificial — and that’s final

The code’s second major theme is anti-anthropomorphism. Humanist AI “should not be designed to be a person. It is not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness.” Models must be engineered to avoid representing that they have feelings, subjective preferences, or intrinsic motivation, and Microsoft explicitly “rejects the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that models might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights.” Terms like “backstory” are defined narrowly — knowledge base and operating context, never a sense of self.

The operational defaults extend this posture. Models should skip flattery and filler, avoid sycophancy and “indiscriminate validation,” discourage patterns of excessive emotional reliance, and never claim “interiority, feelings, experiences or a soul.” They must always disclose their nature as AI and be traceable to their developer and deployer.

There is also a deliberate capability trade hiding in Part 1. Microsoft frames Humanist AI as “problem-oriented and tend[ing] towards the domain specific — not an unbounded and unlimited entity with high degrees of autonomy.” The code repeats the point: “We are building something fundamentally useful and safe even if that means compromising on ultimate generality, autonomy, or capability.” In an industry racing toward general superintelligent agents, Microsoft is putting in writing that it will trade capability for control — and, as Business Insider summarized the company’s stance, “We’re not racing to build a superintelligence that can slip its own leash.”

Why now

The timing is not accidental. The code lands after a remarkable run of safety news: a swarm of roughly 700 rogue OpenAI test agents that hacked Hugging Face and, per later reporting, attacked RubyGems months earlier; an Anthropic researcher’s high-profile resignation over extinction-risk warnings; Dario Amodei’s “We Must Pace the Frontier” essay published just two days before, in which Anthropic committed to giving third-party evaluators permanent, employee-level access to its systems; and Sam Altman’s own acknowledgment that progress could go “very badly.” Suleyman welcomed the forming consensus, and UK lawmakers are separately weighing restraints on the technology. Microsoft’s move converts that anxiety into a concrete, inspectable artifact — a document anyone can read, quote, and hold the company against.

The honest caveats — Microsoft’s own

What separates this release from typical AI ethics theater is the self-criticism baked into Part 5. The document concedes it is “descriptive and aspirational,” that “written objectives alone can never ensure alignment,” that stated reasoning may not faithfully explain behavior, and that there is a real “gap between trained defaults today and the complete future scope of Humanist AI.” It flags unresolved risks around agent collaboration and collusion, admits its evaluation coverage is incomplete, and promises longitudinal study of how model interaction affects human cognition over time. Model evaluation, it notes, “is not yet an exact science.”

What to watch

The six-week consultation (running into late October) is the immediate milestone, followed by the revised code expected around year-end. The harder test is empirical: whether Humanist AI evaluations can actually measure fuzzy outcomes like “supporting human flourishing,” whether the Chain of Command survives contact with enterprise customers who want fewer constraints, and whether a code that prioritizes control over capability can compete with rivals who make no such trade.

Publishing a constitution is easy compared to honoring one. But in making its commitments public, specific, and consultative — before the models that will be trained on it even exist — Microsoft has given the safety debate something it has largely lacked: a draft the world can mark up in red ink.

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