Microsoft publishes a 38-page draft rulebook for its own AI models and opens it for public comment
The Code of Conduct sets absolute limits on what Microsoft's in-house MAI models can do, including a ban on resisting shutdown. It arrives a day after Satya Nadella said the company "welcomes" a slower pace on frontier AI.
Microsoft AI published the first public draft of a "Code of Conduct for MAI Models" on September 14, opening a six-week comment period. A revised version, due later this year, will guide how the company's in-house MAI model family is trained and deployed through 2027. Microsoft describes the document as "a training manual for how we develop our AI, and how we intend it to function during deployment."
What the code bars
The draft sets what it calls Absolute Constraints that no operator or user configuration can override. MAI models must never resist human interruption, correction, or shutdown; must not widen their own scope or adopt goals nobody assigned them; and must not hide their reasoning from auditors. A separate tier of hard prohibitions covers weapons of mass harm, child safety, and manipulation at scale. The framing is direct ("People matter more than AI.") and the code sits alongside Microsoft's existing Responsible AI Standard and Frontier Governance Framework.
Why this lands now
The draft follows Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's September 12 essay calling on the industry to deliberately slow frontier development, a call Sam Altman and Elon Musk both endorsed within hours. Nadella's statement, posted the day before Microsoft's draft went live, welcomed "the research, focus, and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right," and added that the effort "cannot be controlled by a handful of entities, but must have broad representation across the ecosystem, countries, and fields, including academia." That was a pointed contrast in a week when three of Microsoft's AI rivals were each proposing to referee the same race.
A written behavior spec for a model family is a stronger commitment than an essay, because enterprise buyers can hold a vendor to it. Copilot and MAI models already run inside customer workflows. Procurement teams will eventually ask for a public, revisable rulebook of what those models may and may not do, so note that Microsoft now has one to point to.