{"id":687718,"date":"2026-06-06T09:59:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T09:59:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/687718\/"},"modified":"2026-06-06T09:59:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T09:59:17","slug":"leak-reveals-microsoft-wants-its-ai-to-be-addictive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/687718\/","title":{"rendered":"Leak Reveals Microsoft Wants Its AI To Be ‘Addictive’"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday of this week Microsoft made public its latest AI endeavor, Scout. On the same day, 404 Media published a leaked internal strategy document<\/a> it had sourced from within Microsoft, in which it is written that the corporation\u2019s immediate intention for Scout is to \u201cmake people addicted.\u201d After 404\u2018s damning reveal, tech news site\u00a0The Information<\/a> followed this up with a denial from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in which the boss feigned disbelief, saying that he was \u201cnot sure what this document is or who is writing and leaking this nonsense.\u201d 404 has now hit back<\/a>, pointing out Nadella knows exactly what the document is and exactly which senior members of his staff wrote it\u2014and one of them is Scout\u2019s project lead.<\/p>\n

Scout (formerly ClawPilot) is Microsoft\u2019s latest attempt to create a so-called \u201cpersonal assistant AI,\u201d the current golden calf of AI bullshit<\/a>, designed to interfere with your attempts to use products like Word, Outlook, Teams and Edge, by reading all your email, online conversations, browsing history and private documents in order to use all your personal information to train its algorithm \u201ckeep it grounded in your flow of work.\u201d The idea is an AI will write your emails, create your spreadsheets, file your invoices, and respond to your staff, all that dreadful stuff that forces you to engage with your job and employees. It\u2019s using the techy OpenClaw AI agent tool that went wildly popular among some engineers this year, made more user-friendly to be the latest part of MS\u2019s all-consuming AI obsession via Copilot under the ridiculous name of Project Lobster.<\/p>\n

The internal document revealed by 404 is titled \u201cClawPilot: Overview and Plan with Project Lobster,\u201d and it lists three phases for its launch plans. The first phase is \u201cMake people addicted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inject it into your veins <\/p>\n

This addiction, it appears Microsoft hopes, will be achieved by Scout\u2019s sheer ubiquity across all its products, such that a user becomes so reliant on it that they \u201cdepend on it daily.\u201d This has already proven successful with the corp\u2019s experiments on its own employees, with \u201cDaily Usage with High Retention and intensity of usage (chats, queries, workflows, skills)\u201d among its staff. And one of those internal lab rats is a Microsoft employee by the name of, oh wait, Satya Nadella.<\/p>\n

The document, meanwhile, is credited to Microsoft executives Omar Shahine and Jakob Werner, alongside\u2014inevitably\u2014AI. And these aren\u2019t two backroom employees who went rogue. Omar Shahine is a Corporate Vice President and the creator, pioneer and project lead on Scout. Gosh, look here, the official announcement of Scout on Microsoft\u2019s site<\/a> was written by Omar Shahine.<\/p>\n

All of which makes Nadella\u2019s response, which somehow got into the hands of the very AI-friendly The Information, a little odd. \u201cThis is absolutely a non goal!\u201d the CEO bellowed in a message sent to staff. \u201cIf anything we are doing the exact opposite,\u201d he opined. So they\u2019re building an AI they hope everyone will immediately hate and never want to use again? Well, no, it seems the \u201copposite\u201d of an AI that makes people addicted is an AI that \u201cempowers and adds real value to human endeavor and broad economic growth!\u201d (Exclamation point his own.)<\/p>\n

After expressing his complete disbelief that such a document could have been written, Nadella adds that the elusive and mysterious authors \u201cmay want to go work elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scream time <\/p>\n

404 goes on to note that Microsoft gave the site no response whatsoever, but instead disparaged the site\u2019s reporting in the internal damage control memo, along with a close to meaningless statement from a Microsoft spokesperson sent to a friendly outlet. Microsoft\u2019s Frank Shaw told The Information that Scout is for \u201chelping people accomplish tasks more effectively\u2014not encouraging dependency. Our goal isn\u2019t more screen time. It\u2019s more time back. As we shared in our announcement, we\u2019re taking a thoughtful approach to the rollout\u2014learning with and from customers as the technology evolves, and ensuring people have clear choice and control in how they engage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obviously no one was suggesting the product would be \u201caddictive\u201d in the sense that people would be sitting at their desks using it 18 hours a day, jonesing to be back in the office and having it write just one more email. The clear intention of the leaked document is that people would become \u201caddicted\u201d as in dependent. An attempt to obfuscate in this way, were it sent as a response to a site like 404, would have been ridiculed. We have, of course, reached out to Microsoft for clarity regarding all these apparent contradictions.<\/p>\n

This is all a very transparent attempt at damage control, following the embarrassing leak and accompanying statements from unnamed Microsoft employees to 404 expressing their dismay and horror at the current internal strategies. It\u2019s perhaps very convenient that the internal memo with abject denials and veiled threats got out into public.<\/p>\n

Of course the goal is to have Scout\u2014or any other \u201cAI personal assistant\u201d\u2014be something upon which users become dependent. Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic et al are all risking impossible billions on this idiot competition to see who can win the AI race and leave all the others to look responsible for the unavoidable global recession to follow. There are only two possible business models for recouping any of these costs, and one is hooking an audience to the point of no return and then making them pay massive prices to continue using the products. (We\u2019re seeing exactly that right now as tools like Claude and Copilot have suddenly massively hiked costs<\/a> for programmers.) The other is to take all the colossal amounts of private data that have been harvested in the process and sell it to advertisers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Tuesday of this week Microsoft made public its latest AI endeavor, Scout. On the same day, 404…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":687719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,1281,25114,74],"class_list":["post-687718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-microsoft","tag-scout","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/687719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}