US Congress bans employees from using Microsoft’s Copilot AI

The United States House of Representatives has banned the use of Copilot artificial intelligence (AI) by site employees. The measure came into effect last Friday (29) and prevents the use of the platform by teams from the government itself or parliamentarians.

According to the Axios website, Copilot is considered “not authorized for use by the Chamber”, which houses both the country’s deputies and senators. The local team should soon carry out configurations on the networks to block access to the platform over the internet, in addition to removing it from Windows machines.

The Department of Cybersecurity was the one who guided the measure, considering the chatbot a possible threat capable of “leak sensitive data to unauthorized cloud services”. This could happen, for example, if employees or politicians feed the chatbot with texts, documents or data considered confidential.

What Microsoft says

According to a note sent to Axios, Microsoft recognizes that the Legislature “has greater security requirements for data”. The company should not appeal or complain about the decision, but it already has an ace up its sleeve.

Shortly, Copilot will gain a safer and more private version, aimed especially at use by government agencies and sectors that require restrictions on data storage. The idea is that this modification will be released until the end of 2024 and subsequently evaluated to reverse the ban.

The Copilot chatbot interface.Source: Microsoft

ChatGPT, from OpenAI, already has restricted use there: only the paid version is allowed, as it keeps the data on the devices themselves and does not use it to train the AI ​​or transfer the information to other environments.

Apple has also banned ChatGPT for internal use out of concern that private information would be accidentally disclosed by the platform.

The same Chamber recently also approved the ban or sale of social networks of Chinese origin in the country, such as TikTok. The reason is a concern about privacy and use of user data, especially for possible espionage from a country that is not an ally.