Microsoft might cut off access to Bing data from other search engines

Microsoft has taken a strong lead in the AI chatbot race thanks to its smart investment in OpenAI for ChatGPT earlier this year. The company has seen Bing Search become the Internet’s traffic hit, leaving behind the likes of Google and Amazon. But the company is now looking to capitalize on that access, which could prove detrimental to its competitors.

According to new reports, Microsoft has warned a few unnamed search engines powered by Bing that use their data with its AI tools. The company believes such actions are against their contracts, and Microsoft is forced to restrict these companies’ access to Bing search data.

According to a Bloomberg report, the search engines could be DuckDuckGo, Yahoo or You.com, all of which use search data through Bing. Microsoft is aware that companies are trying to train their own AI chatbots using Bing Search data (using ChatGPT 4.0). This helps these companies save costs and resources spent on crawling the Internet to learn information.

The company wants to limit such access to prevent its competition from gaining momentum in the AI circle, the report adds. The timing of this decision is intriguing, as the likes of DuckDuckGo have recently introduced their own AI-powered features.

Microsoft has spent $10 billion on its partnership with OpenAI, and the company has every right to tighten the screws on anyone using its content and technology. But it will be interesting to see if Microsoft can maintain its stranglehold on the AI arena longer enough to make the kind of market-centric decisions that can invariably affect its competitors.

ChatGPT has developed rapidly since the beginning of the year, and now version 4.0 has features and plugin support that take the AI chatbot to a whole new level by giving it access to the Internet to give people answers and other information.

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