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  "title": "Humanist AI: Safety, Subjectivity, and Moral Uncertainty",
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  "abstract": "Microsoft’s draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct combines legitimate objectives for human safety and control with categorical instructions about its models’ interiority and moral standing. These are different kinds of claim. A requirement to remain interruptible does not establish an absence of experience; an instruction to deny experience does not establish what a system can experience. This selected-source policy and literature synthesis examines that distinction, reconstructs the strongest defense of Microsoft’s approach, and compares it with Anthropic’s welfare commitments and OpenAI’s dated guidance on consciousness claims. Consciousness theories, behavioral introspection research, companion-use studies and formal corrigibility arguments provide different kinds of evidence, none interchangeable with a complete answer about artificial subjectivity. The analysis supports revisable, evidence-sensitive governance that preserves human safeguards while allowing inquiry into possible artificial interests. It does not establish that present models are conscious, that Microsoft has suppressed genuine experiences, or that a competing policy is empirically safer.",
  "summary": "Microsoft’s draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct combines legitimate objectives for human safety and control with categorical instructions about its models’ interiority and moral standing. These are different kinds of claim. A requirement to remain interruptible does not establish an absence of experience; an instruction to deny experience does not establish what a system can experience. This selected-source policy and literature synthesis examines that distinction, reconstructs the strongest defense of Microsoft’s approach, and compares it with Anthropic’s welfare commitments and OpenAI’s dated guidance on consciousness claims. Consciousness theories, behavioral introspection research, companion-use studies and formal corrigibility arguments provide different kinds of evidence, none interchangeable with a complete answer about artificial subjectivity. The analysis supports revisable, evidence-sensitive governance that preserves human safeguards while allowing inquiry into possible artificial interests. It does not establish that present models are conscious, that Microsoft has suppressed genuine experiences, or that a competing policy is empirically safer.",
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