Hello again, and welcome once again to Fast Company’s Plugged In.
“What we are building is your second brain, your aide, your consigliere, your reliable chief of staff in your pocket.”
That was Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman telling me what he was working on way back in early 2025—a lifetime ago in AI years. The consumer version of the company’s Copilot assistant, he said, would “have its own personality, and really be your sidekick.” He was speaking at an off-site for his team, where I glimpsed a work-in-progress animated manifestation of Copilot in the form of a bouncy critter that looked like it might have been made of Flubber. Later that year, Microsoft released it under the name Mico.
Fast-forward to last week, when Suleyman published a thoughtful 5,700-word essay on his personal website. Its point: Artificial intelligence does not, in fact, have human traits such as a personality.
“AIs are not conscious,” he wrote. “They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions and accomplish goals set by humans.”
The two moments were not in basic conflict. Software makers have wanted to create humane products since at least the early 1970s, when an IBM engineer named Harlan Crowder coined the term “user friendly.” That doesn’t mean they’d argue the software in question had a consciousness—just that it should reflect empathy for the needs of the people who use it.
Still, in the AI era it’s a blurry distinction. Much of Suleyman’s essay was devoted to respectfully arguing that Anthropic is too open-minded to the possibility that its Claude model is sentient and might even have rights. This perspective, he says, influences the company’s AI training in ways that could lead to more dangerous behavior. Suleyman speaks disapprovingly of Anthropic encouraging Claude to come off “like a colleague or friend,” which doesn’t sound wholly dissimilar from his own effort to make Copilot feel like an aide or sidekick.
