Microsoft  threatened to restrict competing AI chatbots access to Bing data

According to people familiar with the disagreement, Microsoft Corp. has threatened to take off access to its internet-search data, which it licences to competitor search engines, if they do not cease using it as the foundation for their own artificial intelligence chat products.

The data in its Bing search index — a map of the internet that can be instantly scanned in real time — is licenced to other firms that perform web search, including Apollo Global Management Inc.’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Microsoft adopted a relative of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat engine, into Bing in February.

Competitors rushed to launch their own AI chatbots as the excitement around the technology grew.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google officially debuted Bard, its conversational AI tool, last week. DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, unveiled DuckAssist, a function that employs artificial intelligence to summarise replies to search queries.

You.com and Neeva Inc., two newer search engines that launched in 2021, have also launched AI-powered search services, YouChat and NeevaAI, respectively.

These search chatbots try to integrate ChatGPT’s conversational abilities with the information offered by a traditional search engine.

Because indexing the whole web is expensive — it requires servers to store data and a continual crawl of the internet to integrate updates — DuckDuckGo, You.com, and Neeva’s conventional search engines all use Bing to give some of their information.

Getting that data for a search chatbot would be just as difficult and expensive.

According to the persons who spoke anonymously because they were discussing a secret disagreement, Microsoft has informed at least two clients that utilising its Bing search index to feed its AI conversation capabilities breaches the terms of their contract.

According to the persons, the Redmond, Washington-based technology corporation may revoke the rights that provide access to its search index.

“We’ve been in touch with partners who are out of compliance as we continue to consistently enforce our terms across the board,” Microsoft said in a statement.

“We’ll continue to work with them directly and provide any information needed to find a path forward.”

Smaller search engines would struggle to find an alternative if they were removed from Microsoft’s index.

Microsoft and Google are the only two businesses that index the whole web, and Google’s restrictions on how its index may be used have forced practically all other search engines to utilise its Bing.