- Copilot Chat was reading sent and draft emails, but the Inbox folder appears to have been protected
- The bug (CW1226324) was identified in January and fixed in February.
- Although the fix is being rolled out, this remains a persistent issue.
Microsoft has confirmed that a bug in M365 Copilot Chat allowed the AI chatbot to summarize sensitive emails without users’ permission, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies and sensitivity/confidentiality labels designed to prevent Copilot from accessing the emails in the first place.
Although inboxes were not affected, Copilot Chat gained access to the Sent and Drafts folders, and presumably entire threads within them, which also include incoming emails.
The bug, tracked internally as CW1226324, was first identified on January 21, 2026, but the company has already implemented a fix and continues to monitor the situation.
M365 Copilot Chat was reading your confidential emails
“Email messages from users with a sensitive label applied are being incorrectly processed by Microsoft 365 Copilot chat,” the notice reads.
Microsoft says a bug code caused the issue, allowing those tagged emails to be picked up: “A code issue allows Copilot to pick up items from the Sent Items and Drafts folders even though sensitive labels have been set.”
The company began rolling out a fix in early February that it continues to monitor, but it appears this is an ongoing issue that has not yet been fully resolved.
Microsoft is also believed to be contacting affected users as the patch rolls out while continuing to verify the fix.
The timing of Microsoft’s mistake is also very unfortunate: the European Parliament recently banned all AI tools on workers’ devices on the grounds that many systems were sharing data with the cloud, even though they could theoretically process it locally.
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