Manage access to SharePoint agents
SharePoint agents, powered by AI, help users quickly find information and insights on SharePoint sites, pages, and document libraries. SharePoint agents access your organization's data the same way Copilot in other Microsoft 365 apps does, responding to users based on their access permissions to the data. As a SharePoint admin, you can manage users' access to an agent in multiple ways by managing:
- Who can access the agents
- What information the user can access through the agent
- Where agents are available
Manage who can access the agents
Use file permissions on the agent file
As SharePoint agents are represented as .agent files, permissions on the .agent file govern who can access or edit the agent. Only users who are able to create or access files on a SharePoint site can create or access agents.
Control user access through licensing
Currently, users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license can use the agents. You can use the Microsoft 365 Copilot setup guide in the Microsoft 365 admin center to assign the required licenses to users. For more information, see Assign licenses to users in the Microsoft 365 admin center and Microsoft 365 Copilot requirements.
Admins can choose to edit the service plans under the Copilot license to specifically allow or block users from using Copilot experiences on SharePoint. Under the license details page for Microsoft 365 Copilot on the Microsoft 365 admin center, admins can turn 'Microsoft 365 Copilot for SharePoint' on or off on a per-user basis. For example, a user could be allowed to use Microsoft 365 Copilot on Teams but not use any agents on SharePoint alone. This will also disable Copilots on OneDrive and the SharePoint page authoring Copilot for that user.
Note
From January 6, 2025, to June 30, 2025, enterprise tenants with 50 or more Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses will receive 10,000 free SharePoint agents queries for unlicensed users every month as a trial. Users with a role of SharePoint administrator or higher can check the trial promotion status and set trial promotion using PowerShell cmdlets. Please see the terms of trial usage here.
Manage what information a user can access through the agents
With built-in SharePoint features
SharePoint agents use SharePoint sites, pages, and document libraries as knowledge sources to respond to the user. You can control a user’s access to the information when they use an agent by controlling their access to the site. SharePoint provides many tools to control access to a site:
- Control access to a site that is associated with a Microsoft 365 group by setting the site as private (team sites only) and controlling group membership.
- Control access to a site that isn't associated with a group using site permissions.
- Control access with access governance policies available in the SharePoint admin center and PowerShell.
Learn more about using SharePoint's built-in features to control access here.
With SharePoint Advanced Management
Currently, to restrict access to a site by Microsoft 365 Copilot, the SharePoint Admin can set up a restricted access control policy. As a result, all access to the site is restricted to only the group of users specified in the policy. Accordingly, the content from this site is visible in Microsoft 365 Copilot only for this restricted group of users. You can restrict access to individual sites or OneDrive. Learn more about more features to prevent oversharing, control access, and enhance your content governance with SharePoint Advanced Management here.
With Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
You can prevent selected files from being used by agents by using sensitivity labels along with Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP). You do this by creating a DLP custom policy with the Content contains > Sensitivity labels condition to exclude items from being processed. Identified items are available in the citations of the response, but the content of the item isn't used in the response. We don’t yet support adding a sensitivity label directly to the .agent file. If you want to govern your .agent file with DLP, instead of using the sensitivity labels as the condition, you can use conditions based on the .agent extension. We'll support the ability of adding a sensitivity label directly to a .agent file in the future.
Manage where agents are available in SharePoint
Site owner controls
Agents created in SharePoint aren't automatically listed or published anywhere. Users can manually navigate to .agent files to use them just like how they would discover or use Word or Excel files. Site owners can choose to designate specific agents from their sites as 'approved' ones. These agents would be guaranteed to show up on the picker for that particular site, and users can differentiate them from the ones that are recommended to them. Learn more here.
Turn off agents on sites with restricted content discovery
You as a SharePoint Admin can turn off all agent-related features on individual sites with the restricted content discovery. Once a site is flagged with restricted content discovery, users can't see the Copilot icon on the upper right of the site. Therefore, they don’t have access to use the ready-made agent, create new agents, or add content from that site to any other agents. The restricted content discovery policy leaves site access unchanged but prevents the site's content from being surfaced in Microsoft 365 Copilot or organization-wide search for all users.