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I’m one of the people directly responsible for ensuring that those terms are properly enforced. Presently I’m arguably the person for Copilot data specifically.

Current talk of the town in the data retention space is around AI safety. There’s been a recent slew of blog posts and academic papers around how LLM harms can manifest over multiple agentic turns, from individually innocuous requests. Identifying this inherently necessitates user data retention which we do everything possible to avoid (not even meaning data sharing as is alluded to in this thread, I mean literally persisting prompts and completions anywhere outside of ephemeral memory). I’ve been the one advocating for having the storage of any data retained for safety and security purposes to be as heavily access controlled and audited as is possible.

Also, if AI safety is a space that is interesting to you, we’re hiring! Manager, developer, and applied science roles, or we can figure out the HR shenanigans if you don’t fit any of those archetypes. If interested shoot me an email at taywrobel@github.com!

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(FWIW, in my conspiracy theory, the data sharing would be buried in the part of the company responsible for making sure that people don't upload e.g. CSAM to private repositories, so the Copilot people wouldn't be directly aware of it. I might've edited that in after you already started writing your reply though.)
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Still in my bubble! I am not involved in the human review or automated analysis portions of the safety pipeline for CSAM/TVEC harms, but my team is responsible for the data handling around identifying and responding to such content.

As of 11 days ago our vision support is GA (https://github.blog/changelog/2026-07-01-copilot-vision-is-g...) and let’s just say the technical implementation wasn’t the long pull there. Figuring out the what and how of responsible data handling around what I hope is agreeably harmful use was… quite a journey.

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