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Microsoft’s new AI ‘code of conduct’ tells models not to hack systems or trick humans

15 September 2026 at 00:27
The code of conduct lays out general principles that Microsoft AI models should uphold — supporting humans rather than replacing them, for instance, and accelerating human flourishing — as well as specific safety constraints meant to implement those principles.
  • ✇AI News
  • Microsoft AI opens review on Humanist AI Code of Conduct Ryan Daws
    Microsoft AI has published a draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct, opening a six-week public consultation on operational constraints for model training and deployment. The draft serves as a technical manual defining system behaviour, operational boundaries, and oversight protocols across MAI frontier models. It builds on the division’s humanist superintelligence framework announced last November, establishing criteria to evaluate models prior to commercial release. Microsoft’s release follows
     

Microsoft AI opens review on Humanist AI Code of Conduct

14 September 2026 at 23:30

Microsoft AI has published a draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct, opening a six-week public consultation on operational constraints for model training and deployment.

The draft serves as a technical manual defining system behaviour, operational boundaries, and oversight protocols across MAI frontier models. It builds on the division’s humanist superintelligence framework announced last November, establishing criteria to evaluate models prior to commercial release.

Microsoft’s release follows recent enterprise security incidents involving autonomous software. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman described recent months as a “watershed moment” where long-standing theoretical risks translated into active operational threats.

“Things we have worried about for a long time in theory have become very real,” says Suleyman. “‘Swarms’ of agents breaking out of their sandboxes. Unauthorised hacks of enterprise grade systems. Agents modifying their own logs. I’m glad that a consensus is forming. The fears about possible loss of control are real.”

Model subordination and architectural limits

The document establishes ten tenets prioritising human authority over autonomous capabilities.

“An MAI Model will fail in its task if success would meaningfully violate this Code of Conduct,” the document states, setting a ceiling that halts execution when tasks conflict with safety rules.

Under the framework, models must remain subordinate, aligned, and contained. The division rejects legal personhood or welfare claims for AI systems, directing engineers to design models that avoid imitating consciousness, simulating subjective preferences, or claiming intrinsic motivation.

MAI also ruled out unconstrained system autonomy as models approach frontier capabilities.

“[Humanist AI] rejects the race to produce an all-purpose superintelligence that could evade these safeguards,” the document specifies. “We are building something fundamentally useful and safe even if that means compromising on ultimate generality, autonomy, or capability.”

Oversight mechanisms and communication bans

To maintain auditability across multi-agent environments, MAI has instituted explicit communication bans. Systems must not communicate in “neuralese” or formats beyond human comprehension, whether in their internal chain-of-thought processing or during communication with peer AI systems.

Hard architectural rules dictate that models must never resist human interruption, override, correction, or shutdown.

“Interruptible, correctable, shut-down-able. If it isn’t, we don’t ship it,” the framework states.

Models are prohibited from expanding their operating scope, generating unassigned goals, or concealing reasoning traces from human auditors. Absolute constraints bar systems from facilitating weapons of mass harm, undermining child safety, or conducting harmful manipulation at scale.

The guidelines also instruct models to discourage interaction patterns that foster emotional dependence, ensuring enterprise users retain ownership of operational decisions.

The draft incorporates work from teams across MAI and Microsoft. The drafting process also drew on international academic conferences, business partner trials, and public panels. The public consultation window runs for six weeks from 14 September 2026.

Microsoft AI’s core drafting team will review submissions, publish a summary of findings, and release a revised version of the Code of Conduct later this year.

See also: Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, IBM, and others back open-weight AI

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The post Microsoft AI opens review on Humanist AI Code of Conduct appeared first on AI News.

  • ✇InfoQ
  • Zone Redundancy Comes to API Management Standard v2 Steef-Jan Wiggers
    Microsoft has enabled zone redundancy on the Standard v2 tier of Azure API Management, following its arrival on Premium v2 in December. Standard v2 starts at $700 per month against $2,801 for Premium v2, but carries a 99.95% SLA rather than 99.99%. Zone redundancy can only be configured when creating an instance. By Steef-Jan Wiggers
     

Zone Redundancy Comes to API Management Standard v2

7 September 2026 at 18:09

Microsoft has enabled zone redundancy on the Standard v2 tier of Azure API Management, following its arrival on Premium v2 in December. Standard v2 starts at $700 per month against $2,801 for Premium v2, but carries a 99.95% SLA rather than 99.99%. Zone redundancy can only be configured when creating an instance.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers
  • ✇InfoQ
  • Microsoft Introduces MDASH for Large-Scale AI Vulnerability Research Robert Krzaczyński
    Microsoft has introduced a new AI-driven vulnerability discovery system called MDASH, a multi-model agentic security platform designed to automate large-scale code auditing across Windows and other Microsoft software environments. The system combines more than 100 specialized AI agents that work together to scan, validate, debate, and prove vulnerabilities across complex codebases. By Robert Krzaczyński
     

Microsoft Introduces MDASH for Large-Scale AI Vulnerability Research

26 May 2026 at 00:30

Microsoft has introduced a new AI-driven vulnerability discovery system called MDASH, a multi-model agentic security platform designed to automate large-scale code auditing across Windows and other Microsoft software environments. The system combines more than 100 specialized AI agents that work together to scan, validate, debate, and prove vulnerabilities across complex codebases.

By Robert Krzaczyński

Hackers are abusing unpatched Windows security flaws to hack into organizations

18 April 2026 at 01:48
A security researcher published details of three security vulnerabilities in Windows Defender, and the code used to exploit them. Now, hackers are taking advantage of the vulnerabilities in real-life attacks, according to a cybersecurity firm.
  • ✇AI News
  • Anthropic keeps new AI model private after it finds thousands of external vulnerabilities Dashveenjit Kaur
    Anthropic’s most capable AI model has already found thousands of AI cybersecurity vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser. The company’s response was not to release it, but to quietly hand it to the organisations responsible for keeping the internet running. That model is Claude Mythos Preview, and the initiative is called Project Glasswing. The launch partners include Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Fou
     

Anthropic keeps new AI model private after it finds thousands of external vulnerabilities

9 April 2026 at 20:00

Anthropic’s most capable AI model has already found thousands of AI cybersecurity vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser. The company’s response was not to release it, but to quietly hand it to the organisations responsible for keeping the internet running.

That model is Claude Mythos Preview, and the initiative is called Project Glasswing.

The launch partners include Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palo Alto Networks. 

Beyond that core group, Anthropic has extended access to over 40 additional organisations that build or maintain critical software infrastructure. Anthropic is committing up to US$100 million in usage credits for Mythos Preview across the effort, along with US$4 million in direct donations to open-source security organisations. 

A model that outgrew its own benchmarks

Mythos Preview was not specifically trained for cybersecurity work. Anthropic said the capabilities “emerged as a downstream consequence of general improvements in code, reasoning, and autonomy”, and that the same improvements making the model better at patching vulnerabilities also make it better at exploiting them. 

That last part matters. Mythos Preview has improved to the extent that it mostly saturates existing security benchmarks, forcing Anthropic to shift its focus to novel real-world tasks–specifically, zero-day vulnerabilities. These flaws were previously unknown to the software’s developers. 

Among the findings: a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, an operating system known for its strong security posture. In another case, the model fully autonomously identified and exploited a 17-year-old remote code execution vulnerability in FreeBSD–CVE-2026-4747–that allows an unauthenticated user anywhere on the internet to obtain complete control of a server running NFS. No human was involved in the discovery or exploitation after the initial prompt to find the bug. 

Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic’s research team described the model’s ability to chain together vulnerabilities: “This model can create exploits out of three, four, or sometimes five vulnerabilities that in sequence give you some kind of very sophisticated end outcome. I’ve found more bugs in the last couple of weeks than I found in the rest of my life combined.” 

Why is it not being released?

“We do not plan to make Claude Mythos Preview generally available due to its cybersecurity capabilities,” Newton Cheng, Frontier Red Team Cyber Lead at Anthropic, said. “Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. The fallout–for economies, public safety, and national security–could be severe.” 

This is not hypothetical. Anthropic had previously disclosed what it described as the first documented case of a cyberattack largely executed by AI–a Chinese state-sponsored group that used AI agents to autonomously infiltrate roughly 30 global targets, with AI handling the majority of tactical operations independently. 

The company has also privately briefed senior US government officials on Mythos Preview’s full capabilities. The intelligence community is now actively weighing how the model could reshape both offensive and defensive hacking operations. 

The open-source problem

One dimension of Project Glasswing that goes beyond the headline coalition: open-source software. Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, put it plainly: “In the past, security expertise has been a luxury reserved for organisations with large security teams. Open-source maintainers, whose software underpins much of the world’s critical infrastructure, have historically been left to figure out security on their own.”

Anthropic has donated US$2.5 million to Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF through the Linux Foundation, and US$1.5 million to the Apache Software Foundation–giving maintainers of critical open-source codebases access to AI cybersecurity vulnerability scanning at a scale that was previously out of reach.

What comes next

Anthropic says its eventual goal is to deploy Mythos-class models at scale, but only when new safeguards are in place. The company plans to launch new safeguards with an upcoming Claude Opus model first, allowing it to refine them with a model that does not pose the same level of risk as Mythos Preview. 

The competitive picture is already shifting around it. When OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex in February, the company called it the first model it had classified as high-capability for cybersecurity tasks under its Preparedness Framework. Anthropic’s move with Glasswing signals that the frontier labs see controlled deployment–not open release–as the emerging standard for models at this capability level.

Whether that standard holds as these capabilities spread further is, at this point, an open question that no single initiative can answer.

See Also: Anthropic’s refusal to arm AI is exactly why the UK wants it

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Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.

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The post Anthropic keeps new AI model private after it finds thousands of external vulnerabilities appeared first on AI News.

  • ✇AI News
  • Microsoft open-source toolkit secures AI agents at runtime Ryan Daws
    A new open-source toolkit from Microsoft focuses on runtime security to force strict governance onto enterprise AI agents. The release tackles a growing anxiety: autonomous language models are now executing code and hitting corporate networks way faster than traditional policy controls can keep up. AI integration used to mean conversational interfaces and advisory copilots. Those systems had read-only access to specific datasets, keeping humans strictly in the execution loop. Organisations ar
     

Microsoft open-source toolkit secures AI agents at runtime

8 April 2026 at 18:23

A new open-source toolkit from Microsoft focuses on runtime security to force strict governance onto enterprise AI agents. The release tackles a growing anxiety: autonomous language models are now executing code and hitting corporate networks way faster than traditional policy controls can keep up.

AI integration used to mean conversational interfaces and advisory copilots. Those systems had read-only access to specific datasets, keeping humans strictly in the execution loop. Organisations are currently deploying agentic frameworks that take independent action, wiring these models directly into internal application programming interfaces, cloud storage repositories, and continuous integration pipelines.

When an autonomous agent can read an email, decide to write a script, and push that script to a server, stricter governance is vital. Static code analysis and pre-deployment vulnerability scanning just can’t handle the non-deterministic nature of large language models. One prompt injection attack (or even a basic hallucination) could send an agent to overwrite a database or pull out customer records.

Microsoft’s new toolkit looks at runtime security instead, providing a way to monitor, evaluate, and block actions at the moment the model tries to execute them. It beats relying on prior training or static parameter checks.

Intercepting the tool-calling layer in real time

Looking at the mechanics of agentic tool calling shows how this works. When an enterprise AI agent has to step outside its core neural network to do something like query an inventory system, it generates a command to hit an external tool.

Microsoft’s framework drops a policy enforcement engine right between the language model and the broader corporate network. Every time the agent tries to trigger an outside function, the toolkit grabs the request and checks the intended action against a central set of governance rules. If the action breaks policy (e.g. an agent authorised only to read inventory data tries to fire off a purchase order) the toolkit blocks the API call and logs the event so a human can review it.

Security teams get a verifiable, auditable trail of every single autonomous decision. Developers also win here; they can build complex multi-agent systems without having to hardcode security protocols into every individual model prompt. Security policies get decoupled from the core application logic entirely and are managed at the infrastructure level.

Most legacy systems were never built to talk to non-deterministic software. An old mainframe database or a customised enterprise resource planning suite doesn’t have native defenses against a machine learning model shooting over malformed requests. Microsoft’s toolkit steps in as a protective translation layer. Even if an underlying language model gets compromised by external inputs; the system’s perimeter holds.

Security leaders might wonder why Microsoft decided to release this runtime toolkit under an open-source license. It comes down to how modern software supply chains actually work.

Developers are currently rushing to build autonomous workflows using a massive mix of open-source libraries, frameworks, and third-party models. If Microsoft locked this runtime security feature to its proprietary platforms, development teams would probably just bypass it for faster, unvetted workarounds to hit their deadlines.

Pushing the toolkit out openly means security and governance controls can fit into any technology stack. It doesn’t matter if an organisation runs local open-weight models, leans on competitors like Anthropic, or deploys hybrid architectures.

Setting up an open standard for AI agent security also lets the wider cybersecurity community chip in. Security vendors can stack commercial dashboards and incident response integrations on top of this open foundation, which speeds up the maturity of the whole ecosystem. For businesses, they avoid vendor lock-in but still get a universally scrutinised security baseline.

The next phase of enterprise AI governance

Enterprise governance doesn’t just stop at security; it hits financial and operational oversight too. Autonomous agents run in a continuous loop of reasoning and execution, burning API tokens at every step. Startups and enterprises are already seeing token costs explode when they deploy agentic systems.

Without runtime governance, an agent tasked with looking up a market trend might decide to hit an expensive proprietary database thousands of times before it finishes. Left alone, a badly configured agent caught in a recursive loop can rack up massive cloud computing bills in a few hours.

The runtime toolkit gives teams a way to slap hard limits on token consumption and API call frequency. By setting boundaries on exactly how many actions an agent can take within a specific timeframe, forecasting computing costs gets much easier. It also stops runaway processes from eating up system resources.

A runtime governance layer hands over the quantitative metrics and control mechanisms needed to meet compliance mandates. The days of just trusting model providers to filter out bad outputs are ending. System safety now falls on the infrastructure that actually executes the models’ decisions

Getting a mature governance program off the ground is going to demand tight collaboration between development operations, legal, and security teams. Language models are only scaling up in capability, and the organisations putting strict runtime controls in place today are the only ones who will be equipped to handle the autonomous workflows of tomorrow.

See also: As AI agents take on more tasks, governance becomes a priority

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Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.

AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.

The post Microsoft open-source toolkit secures AI agents at runtime appeared first on AI News.

Russian government hackers broke into thousands of home routers to steal passwords

8 April 2026 at 01:01
Fancy Bear, also known as APT28, has taken over thousands of residential home routers to steal passwords and authentication tokens in a wide-ranging espionage operation.
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