Leak Reveals Microsoft Wants Its AI To Be 'Addictive'

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John Walker

Published June 5, 2026

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A Scout AI being asked how to get users addicted. © Microsoft / Kotaku

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 it had sourced from within Microsoft, in which it is written that the corporation’s immediate intention for Scout is to "make people addicted." After 404‘s damning reveal, tech news site The Information followed this up with a denial from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in which the boss feigned disbelief, saying that he was "not sure what this document is or who is writing and leaking this nonsense." 404 has now hit back, pointing out Nadella knows exactly what the document is and exactly which senior members of his staff wrote it—and one of them is Scout’s project lead.<br>Scout (formerly ClawPilot) is Microsoft’s latest attempt to create a so-called "personal assistant AI," the current golden calf of AI bullshit, 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 "keep it grounded in your flow of work." 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’s 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’s all-consuming AI obsession via Copilot under the ridiculous name of Project Lobster.

The internal document revealed by 404 is titled "ClawPilot: Overview and Plan with Project Lobster," and it lists three phases for its launch plans. The first phase is "Make people addicted."<br>Inject it into your veins<br>This addiction, it appears Microsoft hopes, will be achieved by Scout’s sheer ubiquity across all its products, such that a user becomes so reliant on it that they "depend on it daily." This has already proven successful with the corp’s experiments on its own employees, with "Daily Usage with High Retention and intensity of usage (chats, queries, workflows, skills)" among its staff. And one of those internal lab rats is a Microsoft employee by the name of, oh wait, Satya Nadella.

The document, meanwhile, is credited to Microsoft executives Omar Shahine and Jakob Werner, alongside—inevitably—AI. And these aren’t 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’s site was written by Omar Shahine.<br>All of which makes Nadella’s response, which somehow got into the hands of the very AI-friendly The Information, a little odd. "This is absolutely a non goal!" the CEO bellowed in a message sent to staff. "If anything we are doing the exact opposite," he opined. So they’re building an AI they hope everyone will immediately hate and never want to use again? Well, no, it seems the "opposite" of an AI that makes people addicted is an AI that "empowers and adds real value to human endeavor and broad economic growth!" (Exclamation point his own.)

After expressing his complete disbelief that such a document could have been written, Nadella adds that the elusive and mysterious authors "may want to go work elsewhere."<br>Scream time<br>404 goes on to note that Microsoft gave the site no response whatsoever, but instead disparaged the site’s reporting in the internal damage control memo, along with a close to meaningless statement from a Microsoft spokesperson sent to a friendly outlet. Microsoft’s Frank Shaw told The Information that Scout is for "helping people accomplish tasks more effectively—not encouraging dependency. Our goal isn’t more screen time. It’s more time back. As we shared in our announcement, we’re taking a thoughtful approach to the rollout—learning with and from customers as the technology evolves, and ensuring people have clear choice and control in how they engage."<br>Obviously no one was suggesting the product would be "addictive" 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 "addicted" 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.

This is all a very transparent attempt at damage control, following the embarrassing leak and accompanying statements from unnamed Microsoft employees to 404 expressing...