Microsoft Responsible AI Principles

This is Microsoft's public statement explaining how the company says it will build and use artificial intelligence responsibly, covering principles like fairness, safety, and privacy across all its AI products. The most important thing to know is that this is a voluntary commitment document — it does not give you any legally enforceable rights over how Microsoft's AI systems use your data or make decisions that affect you. If you are concerned about how Microsoft AI products handle your personal data, you should consult Microsoft's Privacy Statement at https://privacy.microsoft.com for your actual legal rights.

This document is Microsoft's Responsible AI public-facing webpage (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/responsible-ai), which articulates Microsoft's voluntary ethical framework and governance principles for AI development and deployment, rather than a legally binding terms-of-service or privacy policy. The most significant obligations described are internal to Microsoft: commitments to develop AI according to six principles (fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability) and to operate an Office of Responsible AI with an AI, Ethics and Effects in Engineering and Research (AETHER) Committee. Notable from a compliance perspective is that this document is a marketing and governance statement rather than a binding instrument — it creates no enforceable consumer rights, no contractual obligations to users, and no specific data processing commitments with legal basis citations, which is an unusual gap for a company of Microsoft's scale deploying AI systems globally. The EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) is the primary regulatory framework this document indirectly engages, as Microsoft's AI principles align with but do not specifically map to the Act's mandatory requirements for high-risk AI systems; GDPR Art. 5 transparency obligations and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) AI Risk Management Framework are also contextually implicated. Compliance teams should note that this document cannot substitute for AI-specific data protection impact assessments (DPIAs), model cards, or conformity assessments required under applicable regulation.