Microsoft adds OpenAI tools to Azure Government

Amid tech  leaders’ encouragement of lawmakers to regulate the technology, Microsoft is offering OpenAI tools to Azure Government customers, which includes some US federal agencies. Microsoft’s Azure Government customers will be able to access large language models from ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Bloomberg reported. The service, called Azure OpenAI, makes available to users OpenAI’s GPT-4, GPT-3, and Embeddings.

In an announcement, Microsoft CTO Bill Chappell stated that the tools can speed up research and analysis tasks and generate summaries of written content.

Azure is broadly offered as a vast collection of commercial and as a government products. Microsoft said its consumer product offering would continue to keep data isolated, noting on Learn, one of the companies’ developer documentation websites, that “Training data provided by the customer is only used to fine-tune the customer's model and is not used by Microsoft to train or improve any Microsoft models.” The company has claimed that this same is true for Azure Government customers.

The Defense Department, Energy Department, and NASA are Azure Government customers, Bloomberg reported; An official from DOD’s Defense Technical Information Center told Bloomberg it plans to experiment with the AI models offered through the service.

Microsoft said in May that it had 4,500 commercial customers “benefitting from the Azure OpenAI Service,” including companies like Volvo, Ikea, and Mercedes-Benz. This number increased from the 2,500 commercial customers it said were using it in the previous quarter.