Copilot bug allows ‘AI’ to read confidential Outlook emails

For all its supposed intelligence, “AI” seems to make a lot of stupid mistakes—for example, scanning and summarizing emails marked “confidential” in Microsoft Outlook. That’s the latest issue with Microsoft’s Copilot assistant, according to a bug report from Microsoft itself.

Copilot Chat in Microsoft 365 accounts is able to read and summarize emails in the Sent and Drafts folders of Outlook, even if they’re marked confidential… a mark that’s specifically designed to keep automated tools out. BleepingComputer summarizes the issue labeled “CW1226324” and says that a fix is being rolled out to affected accounts. There’s no timeline for when the fix will be available for all users. (Unfortunately, the full report isn’t available for viewing by the general public—you need Microsoft 365 admin privileges just to see it.)

The problem is, as you might guess, alarming. The confidential feature in Outlook is often used for things like business contracts, legal correspondence, government or police investigations, and personal medical information. It’s the kind of stuff you absolutely do not want scanned by a large language model, and definitely not sucked up into its training data, as is so often the case.

Microsoft isn’t saying how many users are affected, but it is saying that “the scope of impact may change” as it investigates the problem. How comforting. That’ll really get people to start using Copilot, right?