After OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the US Congress has restricted its employees from using Microsoft’s Copilot AI. As per a report by Axios, this decision is taken due to major security concerns. The staff members will not be able to use Copilot on their government-issued devices. The directive came through a memo from House Chief Administrative Officer Catherine Szpindor.
The memo stated concerns regarding potential risk of data leak to unauthorised cloud services. These concerns were raised by the Office of Cybersecurity. Notably, the employees can still use Copilot AI on their personal devices.
As per a statement by a Microsoft spokesperson to Reuters, “We recognise that government users have higher security requirements for data. That’s why we announced a roadmap of Microsoft AI tools, like Copilot, that meet federal government security and compliance requirements that we intend to deliver later this year.”
House Chief Administrative Chief Catherine L. Szpindor wrote in the memo that lawmakers and staff are now limited to using ChatGPT Plus, the paid version of the OpenAI’s AI chatbot, due to its improved privacy features. Offices can only use the product for “research and evaluation” with privacy settings enabled. The staff members are not allowed to paste “any blocks of text that have not already been made public” into the service.
The memo also read, “No other versions of ChatGPT or other large language models AI software are authorised for use in the House currently.”
Last year, two Democratic and two Republican US senators introduced legislation to ban the use of artificial intelligence that creates content falsely depicting candidates in political advertisements to influence federal elections. The report further adds that Szpindor’s office will evaluate the government version of Copilot after its release to analyse its suitability for use of House devices.
For the unversed, Microsoft had previously announced plans to introduce several tools and services for government including an Azure OpenAI services for classified workloads and improved version of Microsoft 365’s Copilot assistant. These will enhance the security of government’s sensitive data.
Not just the government, several tech companies like Samsung, Apple has restricted their employees from using generative AI tools like ChatGPT. They have raised concerns regarding the security of sensitive data. This comes after several OpenAI privacy blunders have already taken place in these companies. For example, a ChatGPT bug leaked chat histories of the users on the platform. Later, it was revealed that the issue was caused by “a bug in an open source library”.
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