In an interview with eWeek, Microsoft’s head of artificial intelligence delivered a stark reminder as industry momentum accelerates: treating advanced AI systems as conscious entities is dangerous and distracts from the real work of governance, safety and accountability. The executive said that anthropomorphizing these systems “creates confusion about who is responsible” for harms and can lead to misplaced legal and moral claims that obstruct clear regulation.

The comments arrive at a pivotal moment. Microsoft is rolling out a Publisher Content Marketplace designed to allow newspapers, magazines and other content owners to license material to companies building AI systems. Initially available to a select group of publishers, the marketplace is intended to give outlets more control over how their work is used and to carve out revenue streams as models consume enormous troves of text and images for training.

Those commercial moves highlight the tension the Microsoft executive emphasized: while commercial platforms and governments debate compensation and copyright, the public narrative often slides toward metaphors of minds and intent. “If we start talking about these systems as if they possess consciousness, we risk obscuring who made the system, who chose the data, and who set the objectives,” the executive told eWeek. That, he argued, would make it harder to pin responsibility when misinformation, bias or legal violations occur.

Industry developments reinforce the urgency. Alibaba last month unveiled Qwen3-Max, a model reported to contain roughly one trillion parameters and trained on some 36 trillion tokens, with the capacity to handle inputs of up to one million tokens; the company said the system will be made available through Alibaba Cloud. The scale and capability of these large models amplify the need for robust licensing, provenance tracking and auditing tools—precisely the kinds of mechanisms Microsoft says deserve attention over metaphysical debates.

The practical risks are already materializing in courts. A California appeals court last week fined attorney Amir Mostafavi $10,000 after an appellate brief cited 21 fabricated case quotations that judges said were generated with ChatGPT. That ruling illustrates the downstream consequences when systems are granted undue credibility by users or when outputs are not properly verified.

Policy experts say the Microsoft interview captures a necessary recalibration: rather than debating whether models are “conscious,” policymakers should focus on transparency requirements, provenance for training data, liability frameworks and enforceable standards for safety testing. For publishers, the new marketplace offers a partial remedy—a way to opt into commercial use with clarity and compensation—but it does not resolve broader questions about fair use, public-interest exceptions and cross-border enforcement.

The Microsoft executive urged a cultural shift: see AI as engineered tools with human designers, objectives and failure modes, and align law and regulation accordingly. Until that alignment is achieved, the executive warned, public confusion will only make it harder to hold companies accountable when powerful systems err.