Microsoft recently, and quietly, posted updates to its official Services agreements. The new rules go into effect on September 30 and have a number of new additions and changes. This page has the summary of what"s being added and changed to the full Services agreement.
The biggest change is a new section on using Microsoft"s AI services. That likely includes using its Bing Chat chatbot, along with its Windows Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot services. Here is that section in full:
- i. Reverse Engineering. You may not use the AI services to discover any underlying components of the models, algorithms, and systems. For example, you may not try to determine and remove the weights of models.
- ii. Extracting Data. Unless explicitly permitted, you may not use web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction methods to extract data from the AI services.
- iii. Limits on use of data from the AI Services. You may not use the AI services, or data from the AI services, to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service.
- iv. Use of Your Content. As part of providing the AI services, Microsoft will process and store your inputs to the service as well as output from the service, for purposes of monitoring for and preventing abusive or harmful uses or outputs of the service.
- v. Third party claims. You are solely responsible for responding to any third-party claims regarding Your use of the AI services in compliance with applicable laws (including, but not limited to, copyright infringement or other claims relating to content output during Your use of the AI services).
In addition, the definition of “Your Content” in the agreement has been expanded to include "content that is generated by your use of our AI services". Also, the Code of Conduct section now includes information for covering the use of AI services.
There are a number of other smaller changes made to the Services Agreement. They include a new Microsoft Storage section that spells out the uses of both OneDrive and Outlook.com. There"s also been some changes to the Microsoft Rewards section to reflect that it is now available globally.