Data, Privacy, and Security for Microsoft 365 Copilot

Important

The information in this article only applies to the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program, an invite-only paid preview program for commercial customers. Details are subject to change.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a sophisticated processing and orchestration engine that provides AI-powered productivity capabilities by coordinating the following components:

  • Large language models (LLMs)
  • Content in Microsoft Graph, such as emails, chats, and documents that you have permission to access.
  • The Microsoft 365 apps that you use every day, such as Word and PowerPoint.

For an overview of how these three components work together, see Microsoft 365 Copilot overview. For links to other content related to Microsoft 365 Copilot, see Microsoft 365 Copilot documentation.

Important

  • Microsoft 365 Copilot is compliant with our existing privacy, security, and compliance commitments to Microsoft 365 commercial customers, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and European Union (EU) Data Boundary.
  • Prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph aren't used to train foundation LLMs, including those used by Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The information in this article is intended to help provide answers to the following questions:

Note

Microsoft 365 Copilot will continue to evolve over time with new capabilities. To keep up to date on Microsoft 365 Copilot or ask questions, visit the Microsoft 365 Copilot community on the Microsoft Tech Community.

How does Microsoft 365 Copilot use your proprietary organizational data?

Microsoft 365 Copilot provides value by connecting LLMs to your organizational data. Microsoft 365 Copilot accesses content and context through Microsoft Graph. It can generate responses anchored in your organizational data, such as user documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings, and contacts. Microsoft 365 Copilot combines this content with the user’s working context, such as the meeting a user is in now, the email exchanges the user has had on a topic, or the chat conversations the user had last week. Microsoft 365 Copilot uses this combination of content and context to help provide accurate, relevant, and contextual responses.

Important

Prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph aren't used to train foundation LLMs, including those used by Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft 365 Copilot only surfaces organizational data to which individual users have at least view permissions. It's important that you're using the permission models available in Microsoft 365 services, such as SharePoint, to help ensure the right users or groups have the right access to the right content within your organization.

Microsoft 365 Copilot only searches for information from the user’s tenant. It doesn't search other tenants that the user might have access to, such as a tenant where the user is a Microsoft Entra B2B guest.

When you input prompts using Microsoft 365 Copilot, the information contained within your prompts, the data they retrieve, and the generated responses remain within the Microsoft 365 service boundary, in keeping with our current privacy, security, and compliance commitments. Microsoft 365 Copilot use Azure OpenAI services for processing, not OpenAI’s publicly available services.

Note

We may use customer feedback, which is optional, to improve Microsoft 365 Copilot, just like we use customer feedback to improve other Microsoft 365 services and Microsoft 365 apps. We don't use this feedback to train the foundation LLMs used by Microsoft 365 Copilot. Customers can manage feedback through admin controls. For more information, see Manage Microsoft feedback for your organization.

Extensibility of Microsoft 365 Copilot

While Microsoft 365 Copilot is already able to use the apps and data within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, many users still depend on various external tools and services for work management and collaboration. Customers can address this gap by extending Microsoft 365 Copilot to enable users to work with their third-party tools and services. This can be done through extending Microsoft 365 Copilot by building a plug-in or by connecting to an external data source. For more information, see Extend Microsoft 365 Copilot.

How does Microsoft 365 Copilot protect sensitive organizational data?

The permissions model within your Microsoft 365 tenant can help ensure that data won't unintentionally leak between users, groups, and tenants. Microsoft 365 Copilot presents only data that each individual can access using the same underlying controls for data access used in other Microsoft 365 services. Semantic Index honors the user identity-based access boundary so that the grounding process only accesses content that the current user is authorized to access. For more information, see Microsoft’s privacy policy and service documentation.

When you have data that's encrypted by Microsoft Purview Information Protection, it won't be returned by Microsoft 365 Copilot unless the user is granted at least the View usage right. This encryption can be applied by sensitivity labels or by restricted permissions in Microsoft 365 apps by using Information Rights Management (IRM). While Microsoft 365 Copilot generated content currently doesn't inherit the most restrictive permissions or label from the source, Microsoft 365 Copilot cites the original source, which will retain the protection.

We already implement multiple forms of protection to help prevent customers from compromising Microsoft 365 services and applications or gaining unauthorized access to other tenants or the Microsoft 365 system itself. Here are some examples of those forms of protection:

  • Logical isolation of customer content within each tenant for Microsoft 365 services is achieved through Microsoft Entra ID authorization and role-based access control. For more information, see Microsoft 365 isolation controls.

  • Microsoft uses rigorous physical security, background screening, and a multi-layered encryption strategy to protect the confidentiality and integrity of customer content.

  • Microsoft 365 uses service-side technologies that encrypt customer content at rest and in transit, including BitLocker, per-file encryption, Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Internet Protocol Security (IPsec). For specific details about encryption in Microsoft 365, see Encryption in the Microsoft Cloud.

  • Your control over your data is reinforced by Microsoft's commitment to comply with broadly applicable privacy laws, such as the GDPR, and privacy standards, such as ISO/IEC 27018, the world’s first international code of practice for cloud privacy.

  • For content accessed through Microsoft 365 Copilot plug-ins, encryption can exclude programmatic access, thus limiting the plug-in from accessing the content. For more information, see Configure usage rights for Azure Information Protection.

Microsoft 365 Copilot and the EU Data Boundary

Microsoft 365 Copilot doesn't change existing data processing and residency commitments that are applicable to Microsoft 365 tenants. Microsoft 365 Copilot calls to the LLM are routed to the closest data centers in the region, but also can call into other regions where capacity is available during high utilization periods.

For European Union (EU) users, we have additional safeguards to comply with the EU Data Boundary. EU traffic stays within the EU Data Boundary while worldwide traffic can be sent to the EU and other countries or regions for LLM processing.

Meeting regulatory compliance requirements

As regulation in the AI space evolves, Microsoft will continue to adapt and respond to fulfill future regulatory requirements.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is built on top of Microsoft’s current commitments to data security and privacy in the enterprise. There's no change to these commitments. Microsoft 365 Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 and adheres to all existing privacy, security, and compliance commitments to Microsoft 365 commercial customers. For more information, see Microsoft Compliance.

Note

Currently, Microsoft 365 Copilot operates under the terms of the Early Access Program. When Microsoft 365 Copilot becomes generally available, it will operate under the Microsoft 365 Product Terms.

Beyond adhering to regulations, we prioritize an open dialogue with our customers, partners, and regulatory authorities to better understand and address concerns, thereby fostering an environment of trust and cooperation. We acknowledge that privacy, security, and transparency aren't just features, but prerequisites in the AI-driven landscape at Microsoft.

Additional information

Microsoft 365 Copilot and policy settings for connected experiences

If you turn off connected experiences that analyze content for Microsoft 365 Apps on Windows or Mac devices in your organization, Microsoft 365 Copilot features won’t be available to your users in the following apps:

  • Excel
  • PowerPoint
  • OneNote
  • Outlook (classic)
  • Word

Similarly, Copilot features in those apps on Windows or Mac devices won’t be available if you turn off the use of connected experiences for Microsoft 365 Apps.

For more information about these policy settings, see the following articles:

About the content that Microsoft 365 Copilot creates

The responses that generative AI produces aren't guaranteed to be 100% factual. While we continue to improve responses, users should still use their judgment when reviewing the output before sending them to others. Our Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities provide useful drafts and summaries to help you achieve more while giving you a chance to review the generated AI rather than fully automating these tasks.

We continue to improve algorithms to proactively address issues, such as misinformation and disinformation, content blocking, data safety, and preventing the promotion of harmful or discriminatory content in line with our responsible AI principles.

Microsoft doesn't claim ownership of the output of the service. That said, we don't make a determination on whether a customer’s output is copyright protected or enforceable against other users. This is because generative AI systems may produce similar responses to similar prompts or queries from multiple customers. Consequently, multiple customers may have or claim rights in content that is the same or substantially similar.

If a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we'll defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products. For more information, see Microsoft announces new Copilot Copyright Commitment for customers.

Committed to responsible AI

As AI is poised to transform our lives, we must collectively define new rules, norms, and practices for the use and impact of this technology. Microsoft has been on a Responsible AI journey since 2017, when we defined our principles and approach to ensuring this technology is used in a way that is driven by ethical principles that put people first.

At Microsoft, we're guided by our AI principles, our Responsible AI Standard, and decades of research on AI, grounding, and privacy-preserving machine learning. A multidisciplinary team of researchers, engineers and policy experts reviews our AI systems for potential harms and mitigations — refining training data, filtering to limit harmful content, query- and result-blocking sensitive topics, and applying Microsoft technologies like InterpretML and Fairlearn to help detect and correct data bias. We make it clear how the system makes decisions by noting limitations, linking to sources, and prompting users to review, fact-check, and adjust content based on subject-matter expertise. For more information, see Governing AI: A Blueprint for the Future.

We aim to help our customers use our AI products responsibly, sharing our learnings, and building trust-based partnerships. For these new services, we want to provide our customers with information about the intended uses, capabilities, and limitations of our AI platform service, so they have the knowledge necessary to make responsible deployment choices. We also share resources and templates with developers inside organizations and with independent software vendors (ISVs), to help them build effective, safe, and transparent AI solutions.