On Monday, September 28, 2026, Microsoft posted MC1481313 to Message Center. The title is a mouthful: Legacy Teams retention policies that cover Copilot will be treated as Teams-only.
A lot of tenants keep Copilot prompts and answers under a retention policy they built for Teams chats. They never made a Copilot policy, because they never had to. The Teams one quietly did the job.
The rollout starts in late October 2026 and should finish by mid-November 2026. Once it reaches your tenant, the old Teams policy covers Teams and nothing else.
Message Center · MC1481313
The rollout line is the one that matters. Late October to mid-November, worldwide. Checked in a live tenant in October 2026.
Why a Teams policy was covering Copilot at all
Most admins I talk to assume Copilot was never covered, or that their mailbox policy covered it. For most tenants, neither is right.
Copilot prompts and answers are stored in a hidden folder in each user’s Exchange mailbox. Teams chat messages are stored the same way. Because the two used the same plumbing, Microsoft put them in one retention location, called Teams chats and Copilot interactions.
Microsoft’s own Learn page says it directly: messages from Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat “were automatically included” in that location. Users didn’t even have to use Teams for it to apply.
Then Microsoft split them. Newer tenants see separate locations: Teams chats for chat, and Microsoft Copilot experiences for Copilot. Policies built before the split still carry the old combined location. Those are the “legacy” policies in MC1481313.
So if you set up a Teams chat policy a year or two ago, it has very likely been keeping your Copilot prompts too. You were never told it started, and the policy page won’t show you when it ends.
What changes, and what does not
MC1481313 lists four outcomes.
| Before the rollout | After the rollout | |
|---|---|---|
| Teams chat messages | Covered by the legacy policy | Still covered, no change |
| Copilot prompts and responses | Covered by the legacy policy | Not covered by it |
| Your legacy policy itself | Teams and Copilot | Teams-only |
| What you need for Copilot | Nothing extra | A policy for the Copilot workload |
The message is aimed at compliance admins and records management admins. In a 50 or 200 person company, that is usually the same IT person who set the Teams policy up in the first place.
The case people miss: delete policies
Most write-ups frame this as “you’ll lose your Copilot records.” For some tenants the risk runs the other way.
Plenty of organisations built their Teams chat policy to delete, not to keep. Delete chats after a year, or after 90 days, to cut the clutter and the discovery risk. Those policies were quietly deleting Copilot prompts on the same schedule.
After the rollout, nothing deletes them. Copilot prompts and answers will start to build up in mailboxes with no end date. If your lawyers asked for a short chat window on purpose, Copilot now sits outside it.
Before you build the new policy, find out whether the old one kept chats or deleted them. Then decide if Copilot should keep doing the same.
Are you affected? A two-minute check
Open the Microsoft Purview portal and go to Data Lifecycle Management › Policies › Retention policies. I checked this path in a live tenant this week.
Open each policy that touches Teams, and look at its locations. You are affected if you see Teams chats and Copilot interactions. You are not affected by MC1481313 if you only see the newer Teams chats location, or if you already have a policy on Microsoft Copilot experiences.
Purview · Data Lifecycle Management › Policies › Retention policies
My test tenant has no policies yet, so the list is empty. The banner is the useful part: Copilot retention does not need pay-as-you-go billing. Checked in a live tenant in October 2026.
If you prefer PowerShell, connect to Security & Compliance PowerShell and list your policies with their Teams chat location:
Get-RetentionCompliancePolicy | Format-Table Name, TeamsChatLocationAny policy with a value in TeamsChatLocation is built on the older cmdlets, which is where the combined location lives. Open those ones in the portal to confirm.
The policy to add before late October
The fix is one new retention policy. Match it to the old one, so Copilot keeps the same rules it has today.
- Write down the old policy’s settings: retain, delete, or both, and for how long. Note who it covers too, all users or a group.
- In Retention policies, select New retention policy and give it a clear name, like “Copilot interactions, 7 years”.
- On Policy Scope, leave Full directory as it is.
- On the type page, choose Static unless you already use adaptive scopes.
- On Choose where to apply this policy, turn on Microsoft Copilot experiences. Microsoft’s docs say it covers Microsoft 365 Copilot, Security Copilot, Copilot in Fabric and Copilot Studio.
- Set the same retain or delete settings you wrote down in step 1.
- Save it, then check its status on the Retention policies page after a day or two.
Purview · Create retention policy › Locations
One switch is the whole fix. Enterprise AI apps and Other AI apps stay greyed out without billing, which is fine, because Copilot doesn't need it. Checked in a live tenant in October 2026.
Don’t panic at the locations page. When I opened it, Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint classic and communication sites, OneDrive accounts and Microsoft 365 Group mailboxes & sites were all switched on by default, and Copilot was off. The moment I turned on Microsoft Copilot experiences, those four switched themselves off. Check that they did before you click Next.
You’ll also see a separate location called Microsoft Copilot memory, off by default. It is not part of Copilot experiences and MC1481313 doesn’t mention it. If your users have Copilot memory turned on, decide about it on purpose rather than by accident.
You don’t need pay-as-you-go billing for this one. The banner on the policies page says so, and the billing rule only applies to other AI apps like ChatGPT or Gemini.
Run both policies side by side until the rollout is done. While the old policy still covers Copilot, the two overlap. With matching settings, that overlap changes nothing.
The PowerShell route, if you want to split the old policy
Microsoft also documents a way to split an old combined policy yourself. This command turns it into a Teams chats-only policy:
Set-RetentionCompliancePolicy -Identity "<policy name>" -Applications "User:TeamsChatUserInteractions"That is the same end state the rollout will give you. It doesn’t add any Copilot coverage on its own. You still need the new policy above. The one benefit is timing: you choose the day, not Microsoft.
One more thing from the same Learn page. Once your tenant has the separate locations, you can’t edit a legacy combined policy in the portal. It keeps working, but any change means a new policy on the new locations.
How Copilot retention behaves once it’s on
A few points from Microsoft’s Learn page, so the new policy does not surprise you later.
- It keeps prompts and responses. That includes the text users type, and the text, links and references Copilot sends back.
- It does not keep the files. Documents Copilot reads or links to live in SharePoint and OneDrive. Your policies for those locations still decide what happens to them.
- What users see is not the record. A user can close a chat and it still sits in the hidden mailbox folder. Check your records with eDiscovery, not with the Copilot window.
- Deletion is slow. A background job runs about every 1 to 7 days. Microsoft’s own example shows a “delete after 1 day” policy can take 16 days before an item is gone from eDiscovery.
- Leavers are covered. If a user leaves and their account is deleted, their Copilot messages move to an inactive mailbox and stay under the policy.
What this does not fix
A new Copilot policy closes the gap MC1481313 opens. It does not settle everything around Copilot data.
- Other AI apps need more. ChatGPT, Gemini and other apps need a collection policy that captures content first. Some also need pay-as-you-go billing or an Agent 365 subscription. The Copilot location does not cover them.
- What’s already held is unclear. MC1481313 says nothing about Copilot items the old policy has already retained. I would not assume they behave any particular way. If you have a legal hold or an open case, ask Microsoft support before the rollout reaches you.
- Nobody has picked the period for you. If your organisation hasn’t decided how long Copilot prompts should live, copying the Teams setting is a fine stopgap until someone owns the call. Put it on the agenda for your next records review.
- Oversharing is a separate problem. Retention decides how long Copilot’s chat history lives. It has no effect on what Copilot can read. That is a permissions job, covered in the HR folder post, and the archive post covers taking stale files out of Copilot’s reach.
The bottom line
If a Teams chats policy was built before Microsoft split the locations, it has probably been covering Copilot, and that ends between late October and mid-November 2026. Check your policies for the Teams chats and Copilot interactions location today. If you find one, create a matching policy on Microsoft Copilot experiences this week, so it has its seven days to apply before the rollout reaches you.