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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

It appears they are only allowing Microsoft Copilot. So it seems like possibly this is contractual with their Microsoft office/windows licenses.

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That is likely the case. Microsoft is shoving Copilot down everyones throat, whether they want it or not. The sales argument is always: "Why pay for another license if it's already included in O365?" Plus the fact that some data protection contract is already negotiated to be able to use O365 for email.

In the end, if employees are dissatisfied with Copilot, blocking Anthropic and OpenAI will just make people switch to their personal devices and use those services on their smartphones if necessary.

You are forgetting something very important. Microsoft has a much better track record of data policies being correctly enforced. Neither OpenAi or Anthropic have that.

It's not about the model or who gets the bribe, like a few folks in this thread imply, it's simply the guarantees that Microsoft is able to give to a public institution about what happens to their data.

    > Microsoft is shoving Copilot down everyones throat

Of the three, I would rank Microsoft as less risky with data handling. Even if the other two are better products, I can see how data control is an important consideration in government. Of course, best is if they operate a fully controlled platform; that may yet be their endpoint.

That's why they backpedal on screenshoting entire screen, keeping images on device and feeding them to LLM? Yeah, for me all of them have 0% trust. Malware used to need to be installed, not part of OS

That's not how trust works in this context; the trust is in the handling of that data. It should be a given that if you're using a government machine, it's going to be under strict controls in the first place.

I would argue that there are two distinct kinds of trust here:

- Legal trust: Lawyers draft hundreds of pages specifying what may and may not be done with the data.

- Evidence-based trust: Looking at Microsofts actual track record, past privacy incidents, regulatory findings, and whether its data-handling practices have matched its disclosures and contractual commitments.

For the latter point, here is a nice summary from related to the use of Office prodducts in the Dutch goverment: https://www.privacycompany.eu/blog/new-dpia-on-microsoft-off...

They've already established and accepted that level of trust with Microsoft and deemed it acceptable. In this particular case of Copilot vs OpenAI vs Anthropic, the question is whether OpenAI or Anthropic are higher trust than Microsoft when it comes to AI, data handling/retention, etc.

Just a reminder: Last year, the email address of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was suspended. Karim Khan couldn’t access his Microsoft account and had to move to Proton Mail.

> Plus the fact that some data protection contract is already negotiated to be able to use O365 for email.

This is most likely the key thing. At least here in Europe, already having the processor agreements set up - and Microsoft actually at least trying to do the bare minimum regarding compliance - is worth a lot, even for a nominally inferior product.

One argument could be that they want to provide an AI solution, but maintain some level of control. Copilot can be bundled in with existing licenses, so it's a easier purchase in some sense.

Across the bridge, in Denmark, we've already seen a number of cases where government employees have use various AIs to help them do their job (and in many case used an AI to fail at doing their job). The result has been information about citizens just being entered into whatever AI the employee fancied, without worry about leaking private and sensitive information. I'm not entirely convinced that the public employees strictly speaking needs an AI, but if they are going to use one regardless, it makes sense that it's one that has been approved, whatever that might mean.

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