Simon Willison’s Weblog

Top companies ground Microsoft Copilot over data governance concerns (via) Microsoft’s use of the term “Copilot” is pretty confusing these days - this article appears to be about Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is effectively an internal RAG chatbot with access to your company’s private data from tools like SharePoint.

The concern here isn’t the usual fear of data leaked to the model or prompt injection security concerns. It’s something much more banal: it turns out many companies don’t have the right privacy controls in place to safely enable these tools.

Jack Berkowitz (of Securiti, who sell a product designed to help with data governance):

Particularly around bigger companies that have complex permissions around their SharePoint or their Office 365 or things like that, where the Copilots are basically aggressively summarizing information that maybe people technically have access to but shouldn't have access to.

Now, maybe if you set up a totally clean Microsoft environment from day one, that would be alleviated. But nobody has that.

If your document permissions aren’t properly locked down, anyone in the company who asks the chatbot “how much does everyone get paid here?” might get an instant answer!

This is a fun example of a problem with AI systems caused by them working exactly as advertised.

This is also not a new problem: the article mentions similar concerns introduced when companies tried adopting Google Search Appliance for internal search more than twenty years ago.