Microsoft Risks the Ire of the Anti-Woke, Won’t Build a Jerk-Off Machine

A line in the sand has been drawn in the AI race: the porn-brained and the porn-banned. Microsoft has sorted itself into the latter category. According to a report from CNBC, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told an audience at the Paley International Council Summit that the company would not allows its LLM-powered tools to generate “simulated erotica,†marking a stark contrast from its partner/rival OpenAI.

“That’s just not a service we’re going to provide,†Suleyman reportedly said. “Other companies will build that.â€

And build it they will. Earlier this month, OpenAI announced that, as part of its principle to “treat adult users like adults,†it would be introducing “erotica for verified adultsâ€â€”basically giving over-18 users the green light to goon. CEO Sam Altman later tried to explain erotica “was meant to be just one example of [OpenAI] allowing more user freedom for adults,†but he also didn’t choose it by accident.

The ability to create porn with generative AI tools has become something of a signal for those who are vigilantly monitoring whether AI is “woke†or not. Elon Musk made a point of using that as a wedge to draw a distinction between his company xAI and OpenAI, introducing an “AI girlfriend†called Ani, represented by a pretty sexed-up anime avatar. OpenAI initially decided to mock this, with Altman saying “Anime is cool I guess but I am personally more excited about AI discovering lots of new science†and “we haven’t put a sex-bot avatar on ChatGPT yet.†But a few months later, erotica is on the menu.

Not everyone wants porn to be the marker of anti-woke, though. At the same time, the Trump administration announced its AI Action Plan earlier this year, the President also signed an executive order to ban “woke†AI from landing federal contracts. Its definition of woke focused more on the embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion principles. It didn’t say that AI had to generate anime titties on demand. Vice President JD Vance went so far as to say that using AI to “come up with increasingly weird porn†is bad and floated the idea that it should be regulated.

That created a new strain between the AI industry and the administration, which previously seemed like it was on the same side when it came to doing everything possible to prevent any guardrails from going up. According to a report from NBC, an AI super PAC called Leading the Future has drawn the ire of the White House because it is offering its backing to any candidate who promises an AI-friendly agenda, including Democrats. With the House of Representatives up for grabs in 2026, the Trump administration views the potential support of Democrats as a threat to its hold on the House.

But, even within Trumpworld, there is support for unfettered AI. David Sacks, Trump’s “Crypto and AI Czar,†explicitly called out AI startup Anthropic for throwing its support behind state-level AI safety regulations, claiming that doing so was “a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.†For Sacks and the folks he’s aligned with in Silicon Valley, any sort of AI guardrails equates to stifling innovation. If that means AI erotica, so be it. Who cares if it makes the Vance wing of the party queasy? Porn is progress, apparently.

There’s something fitting about the possibility of AI porn being the first crack in the breaking apart of the Trump-Big Tech alliance. We’ll just have to deal with the fallout of everyone getting hopelessly addicted to sexting their chatbot later.