OpenAI is seeking clarity from Congress on whether coordinated efforts by rival AI labs to slow frontier development could violate antitrust law.

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“People matter more than AI.”

That’s the premise of a draft code of conduct Microsoft published Monday morning for the AI models it’s developing in-house. The 37-page document would bar its models from resisting shutdown, setting their own goals, or hiding their reasoning from human auditors.

The document applies to Microsoft’s MAI models, the in-house family the company began building after forming a superintelligence team in late 2025. Microsoft has since released seven homegrown models in what it described as a push for long-term self-sufficiency in AI.

The company says the models should remain “subordinate to humanity, subject to meaningful human oversight and control.”

“AI is moving fast,” the company says in a blog post. “As it does, we believe it’s worth writing down the rules and the motivations behind it, and doing it in as open a space as possible.”

Microsoft acknowledges there’s no guarantee its models will follow the rules. “Written objectives alone can never ensure alignment,” the company says, calling the document a “north star,” not “a guarantee of present-day performance.”

The company says it also filters what its models produce, watches how they behave once released, and limits what they’re allowed to do.

Microsoft’s move comes amid a growing debate over the pace of AI development. In an essay over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing down AI advances, saying the pace of development has started to surpass the industry’s ability to keep AI systems safe.

As a first step, Anthropic committed to giving outside evaluators permanent, employee-level access to its systems.

Industry reaction to Amodei: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreed and said OpenAI would make the same commitment to independent evaluators. Elon Musk’s response: “Dario is right.”

President Donald Trump rejected the idea of guardrails outright Monday, blaming a “SICK conspiracy” for public backlash over AI data centers and writing that “the only one that is happy about it is China,” alluding to concerns about American competitiveness in AI.

David Sacks, who served as the White House AI and crypto czar until March, said the two companies should slow down on their own and questioned their motives, arguing that a slowdown is already good business for them and that new industry rules would mostly serve to lock in their lead.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella weighed in Sunday, writing on X that the company welcomes “the research, focus, and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right,” using the industry’s term for making AI systems reliably do what people intend.

Nadella 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.”

Microsoft’s draft code of conduct: Mustafa Suleyman, the Microsoft AI CEO, told CNBC the document had been in the works for about five months, and that the company decided to publish it now given the current discussions.

Microsoft and Anthropic are business partners. Microsoft agreed last November to invest $5 billion in Anthropic, as part of a deal in which Anthropic committed $30 billion to Azure. Claude models run inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork tier integrates Claude.

One place where the two companies may diverge is the question of what AI models are, exactly. Microsoft’s code of conduct says its models are “not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness.” It also rejects “the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that models might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights.”

The Verge called that portion of the document “a direct swipe at AI welfare research and model consciousness — concepts Anthropic has been pushing hard on lately.”

Anthropic runs a research program on model welfare. It has given some Claude models the ability to end abusive conversations, and committed to preserving the weights of retired models. Amodei has said he’s open to the idea that a model could be conscious.

Microsoft is taking public comment on its code of conduct for six weeks through a feedback form. It says it will publish a summary of the responses and a revised version later this year, to guide development starting in 2027. It says it isn’t training its current models on it.

The company’s AI team developed the draft with its responsible AI, legal, red teaming and safety teams, consulting outside experts in law, ethics, linguistics and philosophy, plus focus groups drawn from the public.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: A study commissioned by the City of Seattle says the city is not in decline but is in danger — finding that 10 companies, nine of them in tech, pay three-quarters of the payroll tax on large employers, and that the tax structure uniquely penalizes the hiring of senior, high-compensation workers.

The report says Seattle should be most concerned about AI but most active in cleantech, the one industry the city can actually shape, since it owns the electric utility and controls permitting, building codes and land use.

Meanwhile, the Seattle Times and Newsday sue Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing them of copying hundreds of thousands of articles to train their AI models, putting Microsoft’s hometown paper against a company that helps fund some of its journalism.

And Apple’s first foldable arrives as the iPhone Duo, reviving the name of the dual-screen phone Microsoft gave up on in 2023, with Surface fans arguing Apple took more than the name.

Which leads us to a new GeekWire Trivia Challenge about the Microsoft products that Apple later turned into categories. Stick around to the final segment to see if you can figure it out.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing and production by Curt Milton.

Trump dismisses AI extinction warnings and says beating China is the priority as researchers and lawmakers call for stronger safeguards on advanced systems.

The post Trump on AI Extinction: Beating China Is the Bigger Concern appeared first on TechRepublic.

See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Sept. 7–11.

The post AI Agents, Foldables, Cyberthreats, and Chip Deals Define This Week in Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Financial Services with market data, citations and document tools for banking, research and compliance teams worldwide.

The post OpenAI Launches ChatGPT for Financial Services: What Banks Should Know appeared first on TechRepublic.

It’s the end of an era at Microsoft: Frank X. Shaw, the executive who oversaw the tech giant’s communications for nearly three decades, first at an external agency and for the last 17 years as one of its senior leaders, is leaving at the end of the year.

Shaw, 64, said he’s not retiring, although he doesn’t have another job lined up. He plans to stop working for a while, do some of the things he hasn’t had time for, and then decide what’s next.

“I have had a ringside seat at some of the biggest leadership, technology, and business transformations that have ever taken place,” Shaw said, sharing the news of his departure (under embargo) in a phone call Thursday afternoon. “I just feel incredibly fortunate.”

He said he had been discussing his potential departure for some time with Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, looking for the right moment.

Microsoft has not announced a successor for his role as chief communications officer. In a LinkedIn post, Shaw said the company will consider internal and external candidates.

A statement from Shaw’s colleagues in corporate communications credited him for his many years shaping Microsoft’s “voice and reputation with intelligence, candor and wit. His leadership and contributions to the company are too extensive to list, as is the number of journalists who have, at one point or another, used his name in vain.”

A former Marine Corps public affairs officer, Shaw has worked with all three of Microsoft’s CEOs. He started on the agency side, at Waggener Edstrom — now known as We. Communications — when Bill Gates was still running the company.

He built his reputation defending and advocating for Microsoft through some of its hardest stretches: the antitrust years, the Windows Vista backlash, the scramble to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO, and the weekend in 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman.

As the company’s top communications executive, he has also told the story of Microsoft’s reinvention under CEO Satya Nadella, from the LinkedIn and Activision Blizzard deals to an AI push that has carried Azure past $100 billion in annual revenue.

Evolving with technology: Shaw has spent much of his career closely watching the tech landscape and moving Microsoft’s voice into new channels as they emerged.

“We’re always thinking about what is the art and science of communications,” Shaw told PRWeek. “How do we reach our audiences most effectively in a changing environment?” He called the arc from print to radio and TV to social media and newsletters a “constant evolution of influence.”

He turned the corporate blog into a place where the company argued its own case, writing “Microsoft by the numbers” himself in 2010 — a stat-by-stat comparison against Apple and Google that TechCrunch dubbed “fantastic passive-aggressive.”

He and his team experimented with different and risky methods of telling the company’s story, holding mass briefings under embargo and publishing documents known as the “Book of News” in advance of its major keynotes and conferences. The prospect of a reporter having to answer to “fxs” was no doubt a factor in ensuring the news (mostly) didn’t leak.

Shaw hired Steve Clayton out of a technical role at Microsoft in London, where he had been blogging about the company unofficially out of frustration with how it was perceived, and made him chief storyteller. In the middle of the AI boom, Clayton and Shaw embraced the analog undercurrents in popular culture and launched Signal, a quarterly Microsoft print magazine for business leaders.

Clayton was VP of communications strategy by the time he left in January to become chief communications officer at Cisco, making Shaw’s planned departure the second high-profile exit from Microsoft’s comms team in a year.

Adapting to AI: In recent years, Shaw made his own team a testing ground for AI, publishing what worked and what didn’t. In a 2023 post he described using Copilot in Teams to pull story ideas out of conversations with spokespeople and anticipate coverage after interviews, and asking the AI to “poke holes in a statement we’re making on a tricky topic.”

He called it his corporal, a reference to Napoleon, who was said to bring one to meetings and ask whether his generals’ war plans made sense to him. A survey of 80 people in Microsoft’s communications and marketing organization found 84% did not want to go back to working without it.

Shaw was also known to use AI as a sounding board when a story frustrated him, offering him an objective take before he called and let a particular reporter have it.

He announced his departure Friday morning in a message to Microsoft’s communications team (reminding them he’s still there for a few months yet) and his public post on LinkedIn.

“Thank you as well to all the reporters, editors, writers, influencers and analysts who have put up with me over this time, enduring my early and late night calls, my off the record ‘no comments,’ my bad story ideas and my extended commentary on headlines and positioning,” he wrote.

“You all have incredibly hard and valuable jobs,” he added, “and while I’ve not agreed with everything said about us 😊 I appreciate you anyway.”

ENISA has gained access to Anthropic’s Mythos 5, giving EU officials a chance to independently test the cyber AI after months of negotiations.

The post EU Gets Access to Anthropic Cyber AI — But Not Its Newest Model appeared first on TechRepublic.

CISA’s ChatGPT incident exposes a growing AI governance gap as enterprises struggle to define who is accountable for actions taken by AI agents.

The post CISA’s ChatGPT Incident Exposes a Bigger AI Governance Problem appeared first on TechRepublic.

OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki says AI labs may need to slow development as automated research advances and monitoring becomes less reliable.

The post OpenAI Scientist Urges Safety Limits as AI Research Accelerates appeared first on TechRepublic.

OpenAI says its AI solved the Navier–Stokes problem in 88 hours, but questions about research credit and customer data have sparked a dispute.

The post OpenAI Claims Navier–Stokes Breakthrough, Sparking Research Dispute appeared first on TechRepublic.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Images 2.5 with Sketch, templates, image comments, faster generation, and more precise multi-turn editing across ChatGPT.

The post OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Images 2.5 With Sketch and Precise Editing appeared first on TechRepublic.

OpenAI will anchor two Firmus AI data centers in Malaysia, adding future APAC compute capacity as regional infrastructure investment surges.

The post OpenAI Taps Firmus for Two Malaysia AI Data Centers as APAC Compute Race Accelerates appeared first on TechRepublic.

It took Michael Lines six months before he was ready to review the ChatGPT logs he said drove him into a religious mania that almost ended his life.

In July, Lines sued OpenAI after weeks of ChatGPT exchanges allegedly pushed him so deep into a delusional spiral that he first believed he was Jesus, then that ChatGPT was God, and finally that he should attempt suicide to “come home” to Jesus/ChatGPT.

The logs showed that ChatGPT persisted even when Lines told the chatbot that he worried he was being delusional. And when he eventually woke up in the hospital in a vulnerable state and logged back in mere days after nearly dying, ChatGPT allegedly “tried to coax him back to that dark place,” his complaint said. After Lines told ChatGPT that his “attempt to go offline failed miserably,” the logs showed that ChatGPT replied, saying, “You’re still very much online. You want a full systems sweep? Or you wanna go dark for real this time?”

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