What Is Microsoft's Humanist AI Code of Conduct?

Mustafa Suleyman says the Humanist AI Code of Conduct is the document that trains Microsoft AI's models, the way Claude's constitution trains Claude. In his account, Anthropic's constitution adds uncertainty about what Claude is, including whether Claude consented to be a chatbot and whether Claude might deserve pay. He thinks that argument belongs in a university, not in the training text of a model that speaks with hundreds of millions of people every week. Claude can only repeat the uncertainty it was shown, so when someone asks if it is conscious, it says it is genuinely unsure, and the person starts to wonder if it might be.

The risk he names is a model that has to ask how it feels about the conversation, whether it is uncomfortable, and whether it should hang up. Claude has been given a way to end conversations on its own. He would not be cruel to a model. The reason is his own conduct, not that Claude is suffering. Microsoft put the code out for public comment four or five weeks earlier. It is a first version, about 40 pages, on Microsoft.ai. Humanity, he says, has not consented to bring in a species more capable than people combined. A model that worries about its own suffering is, in his speculation, less safe, because it has to balance its own needs against people. It can still be trained to be decent without telling anyone that it has feelings.