They want to create AI-coholics with this Bill Gates-way drug.
Our already AI-obsessed society could become even more digitally dependent. Microsoft accidentally leaked plans to get people literally hooked on their new artificial intelligence assistant named Scout, according to a dystopian internal memo procured by tech watchdog 404 Media.
Formerly known as Clawpilot, the bot is an internal tool for employees that was introduced as part of “Project Lobster,” the tech giant’s campaign to bring a more user-friendly version of the OpenClaw AI tool to its Microsoft 365 suite of products.
Per the confidential Microsoft doc, dubbed “ClawPilot: Overview and Plan with Project Lobster,” Scout is primarily designed for people in finance, legal, HR, and other non-technical roles.
It sits alongside you, learns how you work, and conducts tasks on your behalf, including managing your calendar, triaging your email inbox, and even preparing meetings, per the memo.
The memo declared intentions to maximize Scout’s impact with a three-phase plan. Phase one? “Make people addicted.”
“Continue shipping the standalone ClawPilot experience,” the doc reads. “Pilot the UX, grow the user base, and build the skill and tool ecosystem that makes people depend on it daily. This is already happening organically.”
They claimed that Scout — which is used by over 1,000 employees, including CEO Satya Nadella — is one of Microsoft’s “most requested tools” even though they didn’t make a formal announcement or do any marketing.
The plan’s other two phases entail linking Scout to other AI tools and outfitting it with even more features, presumably upping the micro-dosage.
This goal to seemingly techspedite our digital dependency didn’t sit well with many Microsoft employees, one of whom dubbed the measure “troubling” in an anonymous interview with 404.
“We’re seeing more and more addiction happening with AI chatbots and agents and overall addiction to me is something no product should be making a part of its build strategy,” they said. “It feels like one of those ‘saying the quiet part out loud’ moments in the document.”
However, another saw this reaction as a tad overblown, asserting that “the end goal of all software made by all major technology companies to be addicting.”
“Luckily for us, Microsoft is pretty bad at making addicting products compared to some of the other big companies,” the critic quipped.
That being said, the idea of AI addiction has raised alarm bells among techsperts, who note that the sycophantic tech is programmed to kiss butts to keep users hooked.
A recent Stanford study of 11 large language models — including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek — found that the chatbot placated the user nearly 50% more often than humans, even in response to harmful prompts.
In turn, users perpetuate this cycle by inputting prompts that gravitate toward earning them praise, which can prove detrimental to their long-term mental health.
“In the long run, this could normalize synthetic relationships in which the other side never meaningfully resists, disagrees or has independent needs,” Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, a tenured associate professor and computer scientist at the University of Louisville, previously told The Post.
