Staff working at the US House of Representatives have been barred from using Microsoft's Copilot chatbot and AI productivity tool, pending the release of a version tailored to the administration's needs.
Microsoft COPILOT – Your new AI best friend
According to documents obtained by Axios, the chief administrative officer (CAO) of the house, Catherine Szpindor, handed down the order, telling staff that Copilot is "unauthorized for domestic use" and that the service would be removed and blocked from all devices.
"The Microsoft Copilot application has been deemed by the Office of Cybersecurity to be a risk to users due to the threat of leaking house data to non-house approved cloud services," the documents state.
Launching in late 2022, Copilot is a collection of free and paid AI services embedded in a growing number of Microsoft applications and web services — including GitHub for code generation, Office 365 for automating common tasks and Redmond's Bing search engine.
