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Microsoft rejects AI personhood

PLUS: The AI Tipping Point

Author

Barsee
15 Sep

Together with

howdy, it’s Barsee again.

happy tuesday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.

here are the biggest things worth knowing today:

  • Microsoft wants its AI to know humans are in charge

  • The AI Tipping Point

  • Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

VIKTOR

Courtesy: Viktor

Every team has one. The Monday numbers report someone still rebuilds by hand, or the internal tool everyone wants and nobody has time to build.

Viktor is an AI employee that works in Slack and Microsoft Teams. Message it the way you would message a new hire: "Every Monday at 7, pull Stripe and HubSpot, write up the weekly numbers and post them to #leadership." It runs from then on. Ask for a dashboard and it builds a real web app and deploys it at a live link. Ask it to review a pull request and it reads the diff and leaves comments.

By week three, finance, marketing, eng and ops are handing work to the same employee. It connects to 3,200+ tools and remembers how your company does things. 60,000+ teams have hired one. SOC 2 certified, no credit card to start.

*This is sponsored

THROUGH THE VALLEY

Courtesy: Microsoft

Microsoft wants its AI to know humans are in charge - Microsoft published a 38-page draft “Humanist AI Code of Conduct” for its own MAI models. The basic idea is pretty simple: people matter more than AI, and if completing a task means breaking the code, the model should just fail the task.

There are some interesting rules in there. Models should accept being shut down or corrected, keep their reasoning auditable, not mess with their own logs, and never claim to be conscious or have feelings. Microsoft also straight up rejects the idea of “model welfare” or giving AI legal personhood.

There are harder lines around CBRNE weapons, cyberattacks and nonconsensual deepfakes. Mustafa Suleyman says some autonomy might have to be sacrificed to keep humans in control, and apparently sees recent agent incidents as evidence that loss-of-control concerns are real.

None of this applies to Microsoft’s models today. It’s a draft, with the revised version meant to guide training from 2027.

So for now it’s basically Microsoft writing a constitution for its future AI. The interesting bit will be what happens when those rules start getting in the way of making the models more capable.

TRENDING TOOLS

  • Acrobat's new AI - helps you understand documents faster, turning dense reports into visual summaries, interactive reports, podcasts, and audio experiences you can take anywhere (sponsored)

  • ElevenLabs MCP - introduces voice, music, image, and video generation

  • Dreambeans - Google Labs’ experiment pulling suggestions from apps

  • Inspo - a design MCP server for Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode

WHAT I'M CONSUMING

THE VALLEY GEMS

What’s trending on social today:

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY

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