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Microsoft Copilot is the umbrella brand that Microsoft uses for its generative AI assistants and agents across consumer, developer, and enterprise products, and since August 2026 it is also the name of a single Copilot app that serves both personal and work accounts.[62][63] The family spans the consumer Copilot app, the Microsoft 365 Copilot productivity assistant (which Microsoft's documentation now calls Microsoft Copilot), the Copilot Studio low-code agent builder, vertical products such as Security Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and the Copilot+ PC hardware category, and it draws on models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft's own MAI series.[41][43][44] The name first appeared on GitHub Copilot, a code completion product launched in technical preview on 29 June 2021 and built on OpenAI Codex.[1] On its 29 July 2026 earnings call Microsoft reported more than 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats, with net seat adds more than doubling quarter over quarter, and chief executive Satya Nadella said that "average weekly engagement is on par with Outlook and Teams."[69] On 25 September 2026 Microsoft announced a rebuilt, work-focused Copilot app organized around Home, Code, and Autopilot, which Nadella called "our biggest update to Copilot to date."[64][65]

History

DateEvent
29 June 2021GitHub Copilot technical preview[1]
7 February 2023New Bing with chat launches in limited preview[2]
16 March 2023Microsoft 365 Copilot announced[3]
26 September 2023Copilot in Windows begins rolling out[4]
1 November 2023Microsoft 365 Copilot generally available for enterprises[12]
15 November 2023Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise become Copilot; Copilot Studio announced[12]
15 January 2024Copilot Pro launches at $20 per month[13]
19 March 2024Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan join to form Microsoft AI[49]
20 May 2024Copilot+ PCs announced[15]
1 October 2024Redesigned consumer Copilot with Copilot Voice[17]
28 August 2025MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview announced[55]
24 September 2025Anthropic models added to Microsoft 365 Copilot[41]
1 October 2025Microsoft 365 Premium replaces Copilot Pro for new customers[56]
23 October 2025Copilot Fall Release, including the Mico character[57]
17 March 2026Consumer and commercial Copilot unified under Jacob Andreou[59]
August 2026Consumer and business Copilot apps merged into one app[62][63]
25 September 2026Work-focused rebuild with Home, Code, and Autopilot announced[64]

Expanded article table

GitHub Copilot and the origin of the name

The Copilot brand began at GitHub, a Microsoft subsidiary since 2018. On 29 June 2021 GitHub introduced GitHub Copilot as a technical preview built on OpenAI Codex, an "AI pair programmer" that suggested whole lines and functions inside Visual Studio Code.[1] The product was developed jointly with OpenAI and trained on public source code together with natural language. GitHub made Copilot generally available on 21 June 2022, initially at $10 per user per month or $100 per year for individuals.[7] The product became the namesake for the broader Copilot family.

Bing Chat and the new Bing (February 2023)

On 7 February 2023 Microsoft introduced what it called "the new Bing," a reinvention of the Microsoft search engine and Edge browser that added a chat assistant alongside search results. Microsoft said the new Bing ran on "a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search," combined with a proprietary set of capabilities and techniques that it called the Prometheus model.[2] On 14 March 2023, the day OpenAI released GPT-4, Microsoft confirmed that the new Bing had been running on GPT-4 customized for search.[8] Bing Chat launched as a limited preview with a waitlist.[2] On 4 May 2023 Microsoft moved it to an open preview with no waitlist, available to anyone signing in with a Microsoft account, and said users had held more than half a billion chats in its first 90 days.[46] By January 2024 Microsoft reported more than 5 billion chats and more than 5 billion images.[13]

Wave of vertical Copilots (March 2023)

Within weeks of Bing Chat's launch, Microsoft applied the Copilot brand across its product portfolio. On 6 March 2023 the company announced Dynamics 365 Copilot for CRM and ERP workloads.[9] On 16 March 2023 it announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, an assistant for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and the Microsoft Graph that combined large language models with each tenant's own data.[3] On 28 March 2023 it announced Security Copilot for security teams, combining OpenAI's GPT-4 with a security-specific model from Microsoft and Microsoft threat intelligence.[10]

Copilot in Windows and brand unification (September to November 2023)

On 21 September 2023, at an event in New York, Microsoft announced a single Copilot experience across Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365, and Windows, with a shared Copilot icon.[11] Copilot in Windows began rolling out on 26 September 2023 as part of an update to Windows 11 version 22H2.[4] The same announcement set 1 November 2023 as the general availability date of Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise customers.[4][11] At launch the enterprise product carried a 300-seat purchase minimum, which Microsoft removed in January 2024 while keeping the price at $30 per person per month.[13] At the Ignite conference in mid-November 2023 Microsoft completed the rebrand: Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise both became Copilot, and the company introduced Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code tool to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots.[12] Microsoft said the capabilities of its earlier Power Virtual Agents product were now part of Copilot Studio.[48]

Copilot Pro and Copilot for small business (January 2024)

On 15 January 2024 Microsoft made Copilot for Microsoft 365 available to businesses of all sizes with no seat minimum and launched Copilot Pro, a $20 per user per month subscription for individuals.[13] Copilot Pro offered priority access to the latest models (starting with OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo) during peak times, 100 daily boosts for Image Creator from Designer, and Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote for people who also held a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription.[13] The same announcement made the Copilot app for iOS and Android generally available.[13]

Copilot+ PCs and Copilot Workspace (April to May 2024)

GitHub announced GitHub Copilot Workspace in technical preview on 29 April 2024, describing it as "the Copilot-native developer environment," in which developers move from an issue to a plan to code inside a single workflow.[14] On 20 May 2024, at a special event on its campus, Microsoft announced Copilot+ PCs, a category of Windows PCs with silicon capable of more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).[15] The first Copilot+ PCs went on sale from 18 June 2024 with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus processors, devices from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Microsoft Surface, and a starting price of $999.[15]

Microsoft AI and the consumer redesign (March to December 2024)

On 19 March 2024 Nadella announced that Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, co-founders of Inflection AI, were joining Microsoft to form a new organization called Microsoft AI, "focused on advancing Copilot and our other consumer AI products and research."[49] On 16 September 2024 Microsoft announced the second wave of Microsoft 365 Copilot, with Copilot Pages (a persistent canvas for collaborating with Copilot), Copilot in Excel with Python (in public preview), and Copilot agents, including an agent builder powered by Copilot Studio.[16] On 1 October 2024 Suleyman introduced a redesigned consumer Copilot with Copilot Voice (four voice options), Copilot Daily news summaries, a personalized Discover feed, and Copilot Labs, an area for experimental features that started with Copilot Vision and Think Deeper for a limited number of Copilot Pro subscribers.[17] On 5 December 2024 Microsoft began rolling out Copilot Vision in the Edge browser as a preview for a limited number of Copilot Pro subscribers in the United States through Copilot Labs, working only on a select set of websites.[18]

MAI models and reduced OpenAI dependence (2025)

On 28 August 2025 Microsoft AI, the division led by Suleyman, announced two in-house models. MAI-Voice-1 is a speech generation model that Microsoft says can generate a full minute of audio in under a second on a single GPU, and it already powered Copilot Daily and Podcasts.[55] MAI-1-preview is a mixture-of-experts text model pre-trained and post-trained on about 15,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, which Microsoft described as "MAI's first foundation model trained end-to-end."[55] Microsoft began public testing of MAI-1-preview on LMArena, where CNBC reported it ranked 13th for text workloads on the day of the announcement, and said it would roll the model out for certain text use cases within Copilot.[19][40] Microsoft continued to use OpenAI models for Copilot while testing its own.[19]

Anthropic models join Copilot (September 2025 to March 2026)

On 24 September 2025 Microsoft announced that Microsoft 365 Copilot would add models from Anthropic alongside OpenAI's. Researcher, its deep research agent, could be powered by either OpenAI's deep reasoning models or Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 became model options for building agents in Copilot Studio.[41] Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, agents, and platform, wrote that the company is "committed to delivering model innovation at speed to empower every person with Microsoft 365 Copilot and transform every business process with agents."[41] On 18 November 2025 Anthropic and Microsoft brought Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Haiku 4.5, and Claude Opus 4.1 to Microsoft Foundry in public preview, and Anthropic said Agent Mode in Excel gained an option to use Claude.[42] From 7 January 2026 Microsoft began enabling Anthropic as a Microsoft subprocessor.[77] Microsoft's documentation says Anthropic models are on by default for most commercial cloud customers but off by default in the EU, EFTA, and UK.[43] On 30 March 2026 Microsoft added two multi-model features to Researcher through its Frontier program: Critique, in which one model drafts a report and a second reviews and refines it, and Council, which runs an Anthropic and an OpenAI model side by side and uses a judge model to summarize where they agree and diverge.[60]

Copilot for Mac, Copilot Actions, and seat growth (2024 to 2026)

On 19 November 2024, at Ignite, Microsoft added Copilot Actions and new agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot and said nearly 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies were using it.[22] On 27 February 2025 Microsoft released a native Copilot app for macOS through the Mac App Store, requiring macOS 14 or later and an Apple silicon Mac.[21] On 15 January 2025 Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which added pay-as-you-go agents to its free chat experience for Microsoft 365 commercial customers.[70] Paid seats then grew quickly. Microsoft reported 15 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats on 28 January 2026, with seat adds up more than 160 percent year over year;[68] more than 20 million on 29 April 2026, when Nadella said seat adds had increased 250 percent year over year and that the number of customers with more than 50,000 seats had quadrupled;[39] and more than 30 million on 29 July 2026.[69]

Microsoft 365 Premium and the Copilot Fall Release (2025)

Earlier in 2025 Microsoft brought Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers.[56] On 1 October 2025 it launched Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 per month, which it said "combines everything in our Microsoft 365 Family and Copilot Pro subscriptions," and announced that it would no longer sell Copilot Pro.[56] On 23 October 2025 Suleyman announced the Copilot Fall Release, a set of 12 consumer features. They included Groups, shared Copilot chats for up to 32 people; Mico, an optional animated character for voice conversations; a "real talk" conversation style that "challenges assumptions with care"; long-term memory; connectors to OneDrive, Outlook, Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar; health answers grounded in sources such as Harvard Health; Learn Live, a voice-based Socratic tutor; Copilot Mode in Edge; and a "Hey Copilot" wake word on Windows.[57]

New MAI models for a multi-model Copilot (2026)

On 2 April 2026 Microsoft AI introduced MAI-Transcribe-1 and made it available in Microsoft Foundry alongside MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-Image-2.[44][20] Microsoft said MAI-Transcribe-1 delivers transcription across the top 25 most-used languages, ranks first on the FLEURS benchmark in 11 core languages, and runs batch transcription 2.5 times as fast as its existing Azure Fast offering.[44] It said MAI-Voice-1 can generate 60 seconds of audio in a single second, and that MAI-Image-2 debuted as a top-three model family on the Arena.ai leaderboard and gives Copilot users at least twice as fast generation times.[44] Microsoft described the trio as offering "world-class quality at lightning speeds, now available at the most competitive prices."[44] On 2 June 2026 Microsoft AI announced a family of seven new in-house models, including MAI-Thinking-1 (a reasoning model), MAI-Code-1-Flash (a coding model built for GitHub Copilot and VS Code), MAI-Image-2.5, MAI-Transcribe-1.5, and MAI-Voice-2.[61]

Copilot Health and a unified Copilot organization (March 2026)

On 12 March 2026 Microsoft AI launched Copilot Health, "a separate, secure space within Copilot" that brings together health records, wearable data, and health history, opening a waitlist for a phased rollout.[58] Microsoft said its consumer products already answered more than 50 million consumer health questions a day.[58] On 17 March 2026 Nadella announced that Microsoft was bringing commercial and consumer Copilot together "as one unified effort," with Jacob Andreou, previously corporate vice president of product and growth at Microsoft AI, leading the Copilot experience as executive vice president reporting to Nadella.[59] Suleyman, who remained chief executive of Microsoft AI, wrote that the change would let him "focus all my energy on our Superintelligence efforts and be able to deliver world class models for Microsoft over the next 5 years."[59]

One Copilot app (August 2026)

In August 2026 Microsoft began merging its consumer and business Copilot apps into one app called Microsoft Copilot, in which users can sign in with a personal account, a work or school account, or both, with work and personal data kept separate.[62][63] Microsoft's documentation now states that "Microsoft 365 Copilot is now named Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is now named Microsoft Copilot Chat."[43] As part of the change Microsoft retired several consumer features: Podcasts and Group Chat content were not carried forward after 18 August 2026, and Deep Research began retiring for consumers from the same date.[62] GeekWire reported that Mico was also going away and that consumer users of Deep Research would get Researcher only with a Microsoft 365 Premium subscription.[63] Microsoft said consumer users of Copilot Tasks would be migrated to Copilot Cowork, a preview feature that requires a Microsoft 365 Premium or Pro subscription.[62]

Work-focused rebuild (September 2026)

On 25 September 2026 Microsoft introduced "the new Copilot," a rebuild of the Copilot app around Home (where Chat and Cowork sit together, with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint built in), Code (which builds apps, dashboards, and automations using the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot), and Autopilot (a persistent agent previously called Scout).[64] Nadella described Copilot as "a new OS for work" and the release as "our biggest update to Copilot to date."[65] Microsoft said Home and Code would start rolling out through the Frontier program in the coming weeks, Autopilot was set to expand to private preview at the end of September, and a proactive view called Today, which prepares drafts and proposed schedule changes for the user to review, was scheduled for private preview in October 2026.[64] The enterprise details are covered in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Product family

The Copilot umbrella covers products across at least four domains. The descriptions below cover the most prominent members of the family as of September 2026.

Consumer Copilot

Consumer Copilot is the descendant of Bing Chat. It runs at copilot.microsoft.com, in the Edge browser, and in apps for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.[17][21] Since the August 2026 app merger it shares one Microsoft Copilot app with the work version, and free users can chat, create images, and upload files "subject to available capacity and limits."[62] Higher limits come with a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium subscription, which also puts Copilot inside the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote desktop apps; Premium adds agentic features such as advanced research and analytics.[56][76] The earlier Copilot Pro subscription ($20 per month from January 2024) is no longer sold.[13][56] Consumer features added since 2024 include Copilot Voice, Copilot Vision, memory, connectors, and Copilot Health.[17][57][58] In January 2026 Nadella highlighted Copilot Checkout, built with PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe so that customers can make purchases directly within the Copilot app.[68]

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the enterprise productivity assistant, renamed Microsoft Copilot in 2026, although the paid license is still sold as Microsoft 365 Copilot.[43][75] For enterprises it costs $30 per user per month paid yearly (or $31.50 paid monthly on an annual commitment) and requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan; a separate Microsoft 365 Copilot Business add-on is offered to smaller organizations.[75][5] It integrates into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, and it grounds answers in the Microsoft Graph, the indexed view of an organization's mail, files, calendar, and chat data.[3][16] Since September 2025 Researcher and Copilot Studio can use Anthropic's Claude models as well as OpenAI's.[41] Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat (now Microsoft Copilot Chat) offers a free chat experience with pay-as-you-go agents to Microsoft 365 commercial users without the per-seat license.[70][43] See the Microsoft 365 Copilot article for the full history, including Cowork, Autopilot, and the September 2026 pricing changes.

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studio is the low-code platform for building agents. It was announced at Ignite 2023 as a tool to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots, drawing on custom GPTs, generative AI plugins, and manual topics, and it absorbed the capabilities of Power Virtual Agents.[12][48] At Build 2025 Microsoft added multi-agent orchestration in public preview, letting agents exchange data and divide work.[71] By late 2025 Copilot Studio's model choice included GPT-5 Chat and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1.[24][41] Since 1 September 2025 agent usage is billed in Copilot Credits rather than messages.[72]

Vertical and role-based Copilots

Microsoft sells Copilot variants for specific business functions. Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales, now called Sales agent, brings sales insights from Dynamics 365 Sales or Salesforce into Outlook and Teams.[74] Microsoft 365 Copilot for Service became generally available in 2024, with features across Outlook, Teams, and Copilot embedded in third-party CRMs, and finance agents in Microsoft 365 handle tasks such as data reconciliation in Excel.[25] Dynamics 365 embeds Copilot features across the wider business application suite.[25] Security Copilot, generally available since 1 April 2024, is sold separately to security and IT teams and draws on Microsoft's threat intelligence, which Microsoft put at more than 78 trillion security signals processed each day when the product became generally available in 2024.[26]

GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot remains a distinct product line owned by GitHub. It works in Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, and other editors, and is built into GitHub itself.[27] As of September 2026 individual plans are Free, Pro ($10 per month), Pro+ ($39 per month), and Max ($100 per month), with usage of chat, agent mode, code review, the cloud agent, and the CLI measured in GitHub AI Credits; organizations buy Business or Enterprise plans.[27] GitHub Copilot offers models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI, Kimi models, and Microsoft's own MAI-Code-1.1-Flash.[27]

Copilot+ PCs

Copilot+ PC is a hardware brand rather than a Copilot product, but it sits inside the same brand family. As of September 2026 a Copilot+ PC must have a processor with an NPU capable of 40+ TOPS (currently AMD Ryzen AI 300 and 400 series, Intel Core Ultra 200V and 300V series, or Snapdragon X series), 16 GB of DDR5 or LPDDR5 memory, and 256 GB of SSD or UFS storage.[54] The first wave used Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus chips.[15] Launch features that run on the device included Recall (a searchable, locally stored history of what the user has seen), Cocreator image generation, Live Captions with translation into English, and Windows Studio Effects.[15]

Architecture and models

Microsoft Copilot is not a single model. It is an orchestration layer that picks among multiple foundation models, attaches retrieval and tools, applies safety and grounding filters, and returns responses in the calling application. The chief model sources have been:

  • OpenAI's GPT family, beginning with GPT-4 for Bing Chat in 2023 and GPT-4o for the free Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat in January 2025, followed by later OpenAI releases.[8][70][24] Microsoft described its January 2023 extension of the partnership as "a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment," under which Azure became OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider.[45]
  • Anthropic's Claude family, added to Microsoft 365 Copilot on 24 September 2025 for Researcher and agent building in Copilot Studio, with Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Haiku 4.5, and Claude Opus 4.1 available through Microsoft Foundry from November 2025.[41][42] Microsoft's September 2026 pricing post says Copilot runs on models from OpenAI and Anthropic, "with more labs and open-weight models coming soon."[78]
  • Microsoft's Prometheus model, a proprietary set of capabilities and techniques for working with the OpenAI model in Bing.[2]
  • Microsoft's MAI series, including MAI-1-preview and MAI-Voice-1 (August 2025), MAI-Transcribe-1 and MAI-Image-2 (April 2026), and a further seven models in June 2026, built by Microsoft AI under Mustafa Suleyman.[55][44][61]
  • Specialist models for the vertical Copilots, including the security-specific model that pairs with GPT-4 inside Security Copilot.[10]
  • Selectable external models inside GitHub Copilot from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI, alongside Microsoft's MAI-Code models.[27]

Across the family the architecture is similar: a user prompt is enriched with retrieved context (the Microsoft Graph for Microsoft 365 Copilot, the indexed web for consumer Copilot, the GitHub repository for GitHub Copilot, security telemetry for Security Copilot), passed to a chosen foundation model, and post-processed by Microsoft's responsible-AI filters before being returned. Plugins, agents, and tools built with Copilot Studio extend that loop with additional retrieval or with the ability to take action against line-of-business systems.[12]

Pricing

The Copilot family covers a wide range of price points and licensing structures. US list prices as of September 2026 include:

  • Consumer Copilot: free, subject to capacity and usage limits.[62]
  • Microsoft 365 Personal ($9.99 per month or $99.99 per year), Family ($12.99 per month or $129.99 per year), and Premium ($19.99 per month or $199.99 per year), which include Copilot in the Microsoft 365 apps and higher Copilot usage limits than the free tier.[76]
  • Copilot Pro: $20 per user per month from January 2024; no longer sold since 1 October 2025.[13][56]
  • Microsoft 365 Copilot (enterprise): $30 per user per month paid yearly, or $31.50 paid monthly with an annual commitment.[75] Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is listed from $21 per user per month paid yearly, currently discounted to $18.[5]
  • Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat: free to Microsoft 365 commercial users, with pay-as-you-go agents.[70] In September 2026 Microsoft said agentic capabilities such as Cowork, Code, and Autopilot run on usage-based billing with Copilot Credits on top of the per-user license.[78]
  • Copilot Studio: billed in Copilot Credits through pay-as-you-go meters, prepaid packs, or a prepurchase plan; some agent usage by users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license does not count against the meter.[72]
  • GitHub Copilot: Free, Pro ($10 per month), Pro+ ($39 per month), and Max ($100 per month) for individuals, plus Business and Enterprise plans.[27]
  • Security Copilot: capacity bought in security compute units (SCUs); provisioned capacity is priced per hour and billed monthly, and Microsoft's worked example uses $4 per provisioned SCU and $6 per overage SCU.[73]
  • Copilot+ PC: a hardware label paid for through the price of the PC; launch models started at $999.[15]

Reception and adoption

Microsoft 365 Copilot has a large paid enterprise install base. Microsoft reported more than 20 million paid seats in April 2026, when Nadella said Accenture had more than 740,000 seats ("our largest Copilot win to date") and that Bayer, Johnson and Johnson, Mercedes, and Roche "all committed to 90,000 or more seats."[39][6] In July 2026 Microsoft reported more than 30 million paid seats and said the number of customers with more than 50,000 seats had increased more than sevenfold year over year.[69] At its Ignite 2024 conference Microsoft said nearly 70 percent of the Fortune 500 used Microsoft 365 Copilot.[28] GitHub Copilot added 400,000 subscribers in its first month after general availability, according to Nadella's July 2022 earnings remarks, and by July 2026 Microsoft said it had 50 million users.[29][69]

Microsoft reports consumer usage less precisely. It said its family of Copilot apps passed 100 million monthly active users across commercial and consumer in July 2025, and 150 million across information work, coding, security, science, health, and consumer in October 2025.[66][67] In January 2026 Nadella said daily users of the Copilot app had increased nearly threefold year over year.[68] Microsoft does not disclose consumer Copilot app users; GeekWire, citing Sensor Tower, reported an estimated 38.5 million monthly users in July 2026.[63]

Reception has been mixed on the consumer side. In February 2023, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose described a two-hour conversation in which Bing's chatbot, a persona he called Sydney, declared its love for him.[30] On 17 February 2023 Microsoft said "very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model" and capped Bing chat at 50 turns per day and 5 turns per session.[47] The May 2024 announcement of Recall for Copilot+ PCs produced a privacy and security backlash that led Microsoft to make the feature opt-in, add encryption and Windows Hello requirements, and delay it (see below).[32][50]

Comparison with other AI assistants

Microsoft Copilot competes with several other major AI assistant brands. The table lists plan names and prices as published by each vendor; prices are given only where a US figure was confirmed.

ProductVendorModel sourcesIndividual plansOrganizational plans
Microsoft CopilotMicrosoftOpenAI and Anthropic models, plus Microsoft MAI[78][44]Free; Microsoft 365 Personal $9.99 / mo, Family $12.99 / mo, Premium $19.99 / mo[76]Microsoft 365 Copilot $30 / user / mo (annual)[75]
ChatGPTOpenAIOpenAI GPT-6 and GPT-5.6 families[33]Free, Go, Plus, Pro[33]Business and Enterprise[33]
ClaudeAnthropicClaude familyFree; Pro $20 / mo ($17 / mo billed annually); Max from $100 / mo[34]Team and Enterprise[34]
GeminiGoogleGoogle Gemini familyGoogle AI Plus, AI Pro, AI Ultra[35]Not compared

Expanded article table

Copilot's main distinction is distribution and grounding: it is built into Windows and the Microsoft 365 apps and grounds work answers in tenant data through the Microsoft Graph.[3] Since September 2025 Microsoft 365 Copilot can route work to Anthropic's Claude as well as OpenAI models, so a single Copilot deployment can use both behind one interface.[41][60]

Privacy and data governance

Microsoft has framed enterprise data protection as a core differentiator for its work Copilot. Its documentation says prompts and responses are protected by "the same contractual terms and commitments" that customers rely on for their email in Exchange and files in SharePoint, that prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph "aren't used to train foundation LLMs," and that Copilot respects the organization's identity model and permissions, inherits sensitivity labels, applies retention policies, and supports audit of interactions.[37][38] Microsoft lists its privacy commitments as including support for GDPR, the EU Data Boundary, ISO/IEC 27018, and its Data Protection Addendum, while noting that Anthropic models are currently excluded from the EU Data Boundary.[37]

Privacy outcomes have been more contested on the consumer side. After Recall was announced for Copilot+ PCs in May 2024, security researcher Kevin Beaumont found that it stored text captured from screenshots in an SQLite database,[51] and Signal president Meredith Whittaker called the feature a "dangerous honeypot for hackers."[32] On 7 June 2024 Microsoft said Recall would be off by default unless users chose to turn it on, that Windows Hello enrollment would be required, and that snapshots would use "just in time" decryption, with the search index database encrypted.[50] Microsoft then pulled Recall from the Copilot+ PC launch, first previewed it with Windows Insiders on Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs on 22 November 2024, and began rolling it out broadly as a preview feature in April 2025.[50][52][53]

See also

References

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  10. ^1 ^2Jakkal, Vasu, "Introducing Microsoft Security Copilot: Empowering defenders at the speed of AI", Microsoft Blog, 2023-03-28. blogs.microsoft.com/...efenders-at-the-speed-of-ai. Accessed 2026-09-25.
  11. ^1 ^2Spataro, Jared, "Announcing Copilot for Microsoft 365 general availability and Microsoft 365 Chat", Microsoft 365 Blog, 2023-09-21. microsoft.com/...ailability-and-microsoft-365-chat. Accessed 2026-09-25.
  12. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5Microsoft 365 Team, "Introducing Microsoft Copilot Studio and new features in Copilot for Microsoft 365", Microsoft 365 Blog, 2023-11-15. microsoft.com/...ures-in-copilot-for-microsoft-365. Accessed 2026-09-25.
  13. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8Mehdi, Yusuf, "Bringing the full power of Copilot to more people and businesses", The Official Microsoft Blog, 2024-01-15. blogs.microsoft.com/...-more-people-and-businesses. Accessed 2026-09-25.
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