PCMag: Microsoft Copilot Has Been Banned on All Congress-Owned Devices

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The U.S Congress has reportedly named the use of Microsoft Copilot on any Government-owned devices used by US congressional staff members.

According to Axios, House Chief Administrative Officer Catherine Szpindor sent a memo to all Congress personnel telling them that the AI chatbot is prohibited from use of government-owned devices “due to the threat of leaking House data to non-House approved cloud services.” Consequently, Copilot “will be removed from and blocked on all House Windows devices.”

House users were prohibited from using the free version of ChatGPT on government-owned devices last year; however, they are still able to use the paid version of ChatGPT for research purposes.

Copilot is an AI chatbot developed by Microsoft that launched earlier this year. Similar to Open AI’s ChatGPT, the chatbot can be used to conduct research or even to create content for users.

In response to the ban, Microsoft told Axios that it understands the government’s need for higher security requirements in the software that it uses. In the future, the company has plans to launch a number of tools with higher security measures intended for government use including an Azure OpenAI service for classified workloads as well as a new version of Microsoft 365’s Copilot assistant.

Earlier this month one of the designers for Copilot Designer sent letters to the US Federal Trade Commission and Microsoft’s board over concerns that the program, which is powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, is creating offensive images containing “political bias, underage drinking and drug use, misuse of corporate trademarks and copyrights, conspiracy theories, and religion.”

Via: PC Magazine