27 November 2025

Microsoft pursues digital intelligence ‘aligned to human values’ in shift from OpenA

Rafi Schwartz

Microsoft has announced an initiative that will pivot the company away from its relationship with entrepreneur Sam Altman’s OpenAI to instead develop its own artificial intelligence system. While the tech giant’s products come embedded with OpenAI software after a 2019 partnership, the company’s push for AI independence is fueled in part by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s efforts to recenter human beings in the search for digital superintelligence. But as AI fever continues to sweep through the halls of industry, education and everyday life, where does Microsoft’s human-centric vision for the technology fit?
‘Very tough tradeoff’ for an AI ‘accelerationist’

A recently renegotiated agreement with OpenAI has allowed Microsoft to establish a new internal “Superintelligence Team” to develop the company’s digital intelligence capacity while putting “human interests and guardrails first,” said The Wall Street Journal. While AI may become “more humanlike,” it will never experience “suffering or pain itself,” Suleyman said to the paper. “Therefore we shouldn’t over-empathize with it.” The goal, Suleyman said, is to create “types of systems that are aligned to human values by default.” By definition, that means those systems are “not designed to exceed and escape human control.”

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