Amid growing concerns over data privacy, Microsoft has strongly refuted claims that it uses customer data from its Microsoft 365 applications, including Word and Excel, to train its artificial intelligence models. The tech giant’s denial follows users’ concerns raised on social media about the company’s “connected experiences” feature, which they feared could be leveraged for AI training purposes.
“These claims are false. Microsoft does not use customer data from Microsoft 365 consumer and commercial applications to train foundational large language models,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters. The spokesperson further explained that the “connected experiences” feature enables functionalities like co-authoring and cloud storage and has no connection to how the company trains its large language models.
Despite Microsoft’s clarification, social media discussions continue to highlight ongoing concerns about the potential misuse of personal data for AI training without explicit consent. Microsoft also clarified to BleepingComputer that the “connected experiences” feature has been set to “on” by default since its introduction in April 2019.
“The Connected Experiences feature provides functionalities such as co-authoring, real-time grammar suggestions, and web-based resources,” Microsoft told BleepingComputer. “These features are enabled by default because they are expected in a cloud-connected productivity tool. However, customers have full control and can adjust their Connected Experiences settings at any time.”