For Entertainment Purposes Only (Bonus Post!)
Microsoft's own terms say don't trust Copilot with anything important. They'd also like $30 a seat to put it in your spreadsheets.
Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Bonus drop — the ToS was too good to sit on.
Microsoft's Terms of Use for Copilot recently attracted renewed attention from the internet, and once you read the relevant clause it's easy to see why:
"Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don't rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk."
Entertainment purposes only.
This is the same Copilot that Microsoft sells for enterprise use inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams at $30 per user per month on top of your existing Microsoft 365 license. The same Copilot that GitHub announced last week will start training on your interaction data by default starting April 24th. The same Copilot that the Welsh government used to justify closing an organization. The same Copilot that Gartner recommended banning on Friday afternoons because tired users might not verify its output carefully enough.
AI on Friday is the new push to production on Friday. Same failure mode, different decade, somehow we're paying $30 a seat for it.
Now — Microsoft will tell you these are technically different products with different terms. Microsoft 365 Copilot has its own enterprise agreements. The consumer ToS is for the free tier. Technically accurate. The odds that they're running on meaningfully different underlying models are slim to none. The "entertainment purposes only" disclaimer isn't describing a toy version — it's describing the actual capability ceiling of the technology. The enterprise agreement just doesn't say it out loud.
The Register also surfaced something in Anthropic's terms worth reading. Their ToS for Pro and Max subscribers, served from a European IP address, includes this: "Non-commercial use only. You agree not to use our Services for any commercial or business purposes."
A plan called Pro that cannot be used professionally.
As one Hacker News commenter put it: "It's funny that a plan called 'Pro' cannot be used professionally."
It is funny. It's also the fine print on the tools being sold as the future of enterprise productivity, being embedded into every developer's workflow, being given access to your files and your email and your regulated codebases. Yesterday's post covered what the Claude Code leak revealed about what these tools are actually doing under the hood. This is what their own terms reveal about what they actually think of their reliability.
Read the terms. They're more honest than the marketing.
Find me on Mastodon at @ppb1701@ppb.social. The thread, as always, keeps not running out.
Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series.