Microsoft just disclosed a major security breach that's sending shockwaves through enterprise IT departments. The company confirmed that a bug in its Copilot AI chatbot allowed it to read and summarize paying customers' confidential emails, completely bypassing their data protection policies. The revelation raises serious questions about AI security controls just as enterprises are racing to deploy these tools across their organizations.
Microsoft is scrambling to contain fallout from a security bug that let its Copilot AI assistant peek into customers' confidential emails without permission. According to TechCrunch, the bug meant the AI chatbot was reading and summarizing sensitive corporate communications from paying customers, completely sidestepping the data protection policies companies had carefully configured.
The timing couldn't be worse for Microsoft. The company's been pushing Copilot hard as the future of workplace productivity, charging customers $30 per user per month for the AI assistant that's supposed to make Office work smarter. Enterprise customers bought in on the promise that their data would stay locked down behind strict access controls. This breach shatters that trust at a critical moment when companies are still figuring out whether AI assistants are worth the security risk.
What makes this particularly alarming is that it wasn't a sophisticated hack or social engineering attack. This was Microsoft's own AI tool bypassing its own security controls due to a software bug. Companies that spent months configuring data loss prevention policies and access restrictions just watched those safeguards get ignored by the very productivity tool they're paying premium prices for.
The incident exposes a fundamental tension in enterprise AI deployment. These assistants need broad access to company data to be useful, but that same access creates massive security risks when things go wrong. has been assuring customers that Copilot respects existing permissions and security boundaries. This bug proves those assurances were built on shakier ground than anyone realized.
