Microsoft says it will assume legal responsibility for commercial customers who get sued for copyright infringement as a result of the company’s AI Copilot product services. A new initiative called the Copilot Copyright Commitment is designed to provide peace of mind to Microsoft business users as more copyright holders challenge the handling of protected works by the companies building AI models. “If a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer” and pay any resulting fees, including settlements, Microsoft says.

The protection is in place “as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products,” Microsoft explains in a blog post by Vice Chair and President Brad Smith and CVP and Chief Legal Officer Hossein Nowbar.

The new policy “extends our existing intellectual property indemnity support to commercial Copilot services and builds on our previous AI Customer Commitments,” the executives write. It also specifies that Microsoft is not offering to indemnify general use customers of products like the free AI-powered Bing.

“Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI already face a lawsuit alleging Copilot regurgitates licensed code without giving credit to creators,” The Verge reports, adding that “authors and visual artists have filed lawsuits claiming AI companies illegally used their work to train generative AI models,” targeting other companies as well.

Microsoft says it expects the Copilot Copyright Commitment to alleviate concerns over current uncertainty with regard to AI’s standing in copyright law, which has yet to be tested at the appellate level. The idea is to make customers comfortable using the company’s generative AI services while acknowledging respect for intellectual property rights.

“It is critical for authors to retain control of their rights under copyright law and earn a healthy return on their creations,” the blog post states, adding the need to “ensure that the content needed to train and ground AI models is not locked up in the hands of one or a few companies in ways that would stifle competition and innovation.”

In order to be protected, “customers must use the content filters and other safety systems built into the product and must not attempt to generate infringing materials, including not providing input to a Copilot service that the customer does not have appropriate rights to use,” Microsoft stipulates, adding that “this new benefit doesn’t change Microsoft’s position that it does not claim any intellectual property rights in the outputs of its Copilot services.”

Microsoft began introducing generative AI services under the Copilot brand in 2022, beginning with GitHub, and has since integrated features into the Edge browser, Bing search, Windows 11, Teams, Outlook and other products.