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404 Media is an independent website whose work is written, reported, and owned by human journalists and whose intended audience is real people, not AI scrapers, bots, or a search algorithm. Sign up to support our work and for free access to this article. Learn why we require this here<\/a>.<\/p>\n An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced \u201cScout\u201d personal assistant AI is to \u201cmake people addicted\u201d to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned. \u201cThree phases from addictive app to agentic platform,\u201d the documentation.<\/p>\n Microsoft has been piloting Scout as an internal tool for employees it was calling \u201cClawPilot,\u201d since March. ClawPilot\u2014and now Scout\u2014are part of \u201cProject Lobster,\u201d which is a Microsoft plan to bring the popular OpenClaw AI tool<\/a> to its Microsoft 365 suite of products in a way that nontechnical people can use. It is not particularly notable that Microsoft is developing new AI tools\u2014the company has reoriented almost everything it does to focus on AI, and every major AI company has tried to figure out how to bring AI agents into their products after OpenClaw went viral earlier this year. OpenClaw allows users to create AI agents that can act on behalf of the person using it; it can send emails, edit calendars, publish blog posts, and more. What is notable is that the explicit goal of the people developing the product is to addict its users. Microsoft officially announced Scout Tuesday<\/a> as an \u201calways-on personal agent\u201d that runs on OpenClaw and is integrated into Microsoft 365.\u00a0<\/p>\n The internal Microsoft document, called \u201cClawPilot: Overview and Plan with Project Lobster,\u201d seen by 404 Media has a subheading called \u201cClawPilot Overall Plan,\u201d which notes \u201cthree phases\u201d to its launch plan. The first phase is \u201cMake people addicted.\u201d<\/p>\n This post is for paid members only<\/p>\n Become a paid member for unlimited ad-free access to articles, bonus podcast content, and more.<\/p>\n