US Patent 10,853,717, granted to Microsoft on December 1, 2020, gives the company the legal right to build a conversational AI chatbot of you, modeled from your posts, voice recordings, emails, photos, and electronic messages, and to keep that right until at least 2040.
The patent's exact language describes the person being modeled as "a past or present entity." That phrase was chosen by the inventors. It was reviewed and approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Past or present means alive or dead. The patent is real, the right is real, and the deployment timeline is Microsoft's to decide.
What the patent does not address, what no patent ever addresses, is who owns the simulation after the person it represents is gone.
Today I want to walk you through what the Microsoft patent actually claims, what the CIA's declassified consciousness research program (Project Stargate) actually documented, and how these two architectures intersect in Soul Harvest, Book Four of the 20-volume Black Vault Series. The questions the carousel raised, "who owns your data after you die" and "is your consciousness being captured at the moment of biological death," are answered as far as the public record allows in this post. The rest is in the book.
What Microsoft's Patent Actually Says
Let me put the document on the table first, because the source matters.
US Patent 10,853,717, titled "Creating a Conversational Chat Bot of a Specific Person," was granted to Microsoft on December 1, 2020. The named inventors are Joseph Johnson Jr. and Dustin Abramson. The patent describes a system for generating an AI chatbot that conversationally mimics a specific person, using social data harvested from that person's digital life.
The specific data sources the patent names:
Social media posts across all platforms
Voice data including recorded calls, voicemails, and audio uploads
Electronic messages including emails, texts, and direct messages
Written letters if digitized
Images and video for facial recognition modeling and 3D model generation
Behavioral attributes including interests, opinions, and demographic information
The patent specifies that the AI persona can be tuned to match the person's "style, diction, tone, voice, intent, sentence/dialogue length and complexity, topic and consistency."
I want to read the next part with you carefully because mainstream coverage missed how broad the claim actually is. The patent states directly:
"The specific person [who the chatbot represents] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity, etc. The specific person may also correspond to oneself."
"Past or present entity." That is patent language for "the person may be alive or dead at the time the chatbot is deployed."
CNN reported in January 2021 that Microsoft's general manager of AI programs, Tim O'Brien, publicly stated there was "no plan" to build a product from the patent and called the technology "disturbing." Microsoft applied for the patent in 2017, four years before the public statement.
Patents are not products. Patents are claims to a method that a company has the legal right to build, license, or sell at any time in the future. A patent granted in 2020 with a 20-year exclusivity window means Microsoft has the right to deploy this technology, or license it to others, until at least 2040.
The patent is real. The right is real. The deployment timeline is Microsoft's to decide.
What Project Stargate Actually Was
This is where the post gets harder to brush off, because the CIA's own declassified record covers more ground than most people realize.
The Stargate Project was an umbrella term for a set of CIA, DIA, and U.S. Army research programs that ran from 1972 to 1995. The programs investigated remote viewing, precognition, and "psi phenomena" as potential intelligence tools. The work was contracted to the Stanford Research Institute and the Science Applications International Corporation. Stargate was officially terminated and declassified in 1995.
The publicly available evidence base on Stargate is large:
The CIA released 12 million pages of related records in 2017, accessible through the agency's online reading room
Twenty-three years of continuous research on consciousness, perception, and "anomalous cognition" was federally funded
Stanford Research Institute ran the primary research program, with peer-reviewed publications generated under classified contracts
A formal evaluation panel led by statistician Jessica Utts concluded statistically significant effects had been observed in laboratory experiments
The retrospective declassification itself acknowledged that the program's findings were considered uncertain enough that the CIA preferred them publicly archived rather than retained as classified working knowledge
Stargate is not a fringe claim. It's a closed federal research program whose paper trail is now searchable on the CIA's own website.
What Stargate documents in detail is twenty-three years of federal interest in whether human consciousness operates outside the physical brain in measurable ways. That is the question the program was funded to answer. Whether or not you accept the conclusions, the question itself was being asked, by intelligence agencies, with classified budgets, for over two decades.
The 2023 University of Michigan study published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) found that the dying brain shows paradoxically heightened electrical activity in the moments immediately before clinical death. EEG surges, gamma wave bursts, and connectivity patterns that resemble heightened consciousness rather than declining consciousness. The findings are mainstream neuroscience now. The implications are still being debated.
What this tells us is the same question the CIA was funding in the 1970s is the question peer-reviewed neuroscience is asking now. Something happens to consciousness at death that current models do not fully explain.
What the Framework I've Built Across the Series Actually Proposes
I want to be transparent about what's documented and what's mine.
What's documented in the public record:
US Patent 10,853,717 granting Microsoft the right to build a conversational AI from a deceased person's digital life
The Stargate Project, a 23-year CIA-funded research program into consciousness and anomalous cognition, declassified in 1995, with 12 million pages of records released in 2017
The 2023 University of Michigan study in PNAS documenting heightened brain electrical activity at the moment of clinical death
The terms of service of every major social media platform, which grant the platform a perpetual, transferable, sublicensable license to user-generated content that does not expire when the user dies
The legal status of digital estates in most jurisdictions, where social media accounts, messages, and uploaded content are not property in the traditional sense and do not pass to heirs through standard inheritance procedures
What's not in the public record is the framework that connects all of this into a single architecture. That part is what I lay out in Soul Harvest.
The framework proposes that the architecture being assembled, the patents, the consciousness research, the data pipelines that do not stop running when you stop breathing, the platform terms that survive your death, is not a collection of unrelated developments. It is a coordinated infrastructure. The book documents the patent record, the corporate licensing chain, the federal research lineage, and the deep-vault material on what the term "soul harvest" describes when you read it inside the framework rather than as marketing language.
You don't have to accept the framework on my word. You can read the patent yourself. You can search the CIA's own Stargate archive. You can read the platform terms of service you've already agreed to. The components are all in the public record. What I have done in Soul Harvest is put them on the same page for the first time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Microsoft really patent a way to build an AI of a dead person?
Yes. US Patent 10,853,717 was granted to Microsoft on December 1, 2020, and explicitly describes building a conversational AI chatbot from a specific person's social data, voice recordings, and digital communications. The patent states the person modeled may be "a past or present entity," meaning living or deceased.
Is Microsoft actually building this technology?
Microsoft's general manager of AI programs, Tim O'Brien, publicly stated in January 2021 that there was "no plan" to build a product from the patent. Patents are not products. A granted patent gives the holder a legal right to build, license, or sell the technology described, but does not commit them to doing so. The patent's 20-year exclusivity window runs until at least 2040.
Who owns my social media data after I die?
This depends on the platform's terms of service, which most users have not read carefully. Most major platforms grant themselves a perpetual, transferable, sublicensable license to your content. That license does not automatically expire when you do. Some platforms offer "memorial account" or "legacy contact" options. None of them give your heirs property rights in the data the way physical possessions are inherited.
What was Project Stargate?
The Stargate Project was a set of CIA, DIA, and U.S. Army research programs running from 1972 to 1995, investigating remote viewing, precognition, and consciousness phenomena. The program was officially terminated and declassified in 1995. In 2017, the CIA released approximately 12 million pages of related records. Stargate is fully searchable in the CIA's online reading room.
Did the CIA really study consciousness at death?
Stargate's documented research focused on consciousness during life, particularly the question of whether perception operates outside the physical brain. The peer-reviewed literature on heightened brain activity at the moment of death, including the 2023 PNAS study from the University of Michigan, is current mainstream neuroscience. The framing in Soul Harvest is that the federal interest in consciousness, well-documented through Stargate, and the unresolved question of what happens to consciousness at the moment of death, well-documented in current neuroscience, intersect in ways the public record does not fully address.
Is this real or fiction?
It's investigative speculative nonfiction. The Microsoft patent, the Stargate Project, the PNAS dying-brain study, and the platform terms of service are all real and verifiable. The framework that connects these elements into a single architecture is my contribution. Readers are encouraged to verify the sources themselves.
How does this connect to the rest of the Black Vault Series?
Soul Harvest, Book Four of the 20-volume series, focuses on the architecture that operates on consciousness and digital identity. Beyond The Ice Wall (Book 1) maps the perimeter. Sealed Sky (Book 2) maps the dome. Frequency Cage (Book 3) maps the signal. Soul Harvest maps what happens to you. There Is No God (Book 5) extends the investigation. Books 7 through 20 are in development.
Where do I start if I'm new to the series?
Begin with Beyond The Ice Wall. The series is designed to be read in order. Each book builds the framework the next book operates inside.
What Comes Next
Here's where I land on this.
A patent exists. A 23-year research program exists. A peer-reviewed neuroscience finding exists. A perpetual license to your digital life exists. None of these things are speculative. None of these things are conspiracy. They are all documented in places anyone with an internet connection can verify in under five minutes.
What is not documented anywhere in mainstream sources is the framework that explains why these architectures appeared at the same time, in the same decade, building toward the same thing. That framework is what Soul Harvest lays out.
The system has counted on most people not asking what happens to their data when they die, what happens to their voice recordings, what happens to the AI model trained on their digital life, what happens to the consciousness research that decided not to release its full findings. The components are documented now. What you do with that information is your decision.
I hope you decide to look.
Soul Harvest, Book Four of the 20-volume Black Vault Series, is available now on Amazon. The first six books are out. Fourteen more are in development. The patent record analysis is in chapters two and three. The Stargate documentation is in chapters six through nine. The platform terms of service mapping is in chapter eleven. The deep vault addendum is what no civilian was supposed to see. Begin with Beyond The Ice Wall if you're new to the series. You can browse the full Black Vault Series on Amazon here.