That quiet part? In an internal memo leaked to 404 Media, a Microsoft VP said his team’s goal was to “make people addicted” to Microsoft’s new Scout tool, which is fashioned on Open Claw, the AI agent project that went viral early this year. Nadella quickly quashed such sentiments, releasing a memo stating “this is absolutely a non goal! If anything we are doing the exact opposite. We want to make sure AI empowers and adds real value to human endeavor and broad economic growth! We should make our teams clear about this.”
Microsoft then went into damage control mode, with corporate comms chief Frank Shaw piling on 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.”
The language of addiction has come to dominate criticism of big tech’s approach to product design, particularly for algorithmically driven apps like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. It’s a proxy for tech’s advertising business model, which has fueled the growth of the industry for decades.
That the dustup centers on Microsoft is what makes the story stand out – of all the big technology companies, Microsoft has the smallest advertising business and the worst track record of creating addictive consumer applications (if you’re addicted to LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired a decade ago, I recommend you put down the phone and seek help).
“Luckily for us, Microsoft is pretty bad at making addicting products compared to some of the other big companies” quipped an anonymous Microsoft employee in the 404 Media report.
The addiction narrative is picking up speed across the AI industry. Kids addicted to their chatbots, adults addicted to AI companions, coders addicted to Claude code. With OpenAI building an advertising platform largely modeled after Meta’s Instagram, the power of that narrative will only increase. Nadella is wise to distance himself early, loudly, and often. We don’t need the models of the social media era dictating the products we build in the AI era. AI should work for us, not on us.
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