Microsoft leaked plans to make users "addicted" to new Scout AI
Ah, corporate honesty, the rarest element in the universe! While tech giants usually hide their desire to colonize our brains behind clean terms like "retention," Microsoft just got caught saying the quiet part out loud.
Internal planning documents titled "ClawPilot: Overview and Plan with Project Lobster" outlined a three-phase launch strategy for the tech giant's new assistant. The authors of this masterpiece of honesty, vice president Omar Shahin and lead developer Jacob Werner, explicitly defined the first phase as making people addicted to the tool.
This virtual digital drug, officially named Scout and built on the open-source OpenClaw framework, is designed to live inside Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint as a 24/7 digital shadow. The master plan was simple: force users to rely on the assistant daily so they couldn't function without it, which is basically the business model of a shady dealer, just with more spreadsheets.
Once the leaked documents hit the press, chief executive officer Satya Nadella went into full panic mode. He fired off a message to fifty of his top AI engineers, claiming that Microsoft’s actual goal is human empowerment, not digital dependency. He then suggested that whoever wrote this "nonsense" should probably start polishing their resumes and looking for a new employer.
Company spokesperson Frank Shaw rushed to the scene with a corporate fire extinguisher, assuring everyone that the tool is merely meant to help people work more efficiently. However, journalists quickly pointed out that the VP who signed off on the "addiction" strategy is the exact same guy who publicly runs the entire project.
It seems the left hand at the Redmond headquarters has absolutely no idea what the right hand is doing, or perhaps they just got caught with their fingers in the cookie jar. In the end, the only real surprise here is that someone actually wrote down the corporate playbook without running it through three layers of public relations washing first.
Source: 404 Media
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