Microsoft Strips Copilot's Free Features — and Puts Deep Research Behind a Subscription
Open the Microsoft Copilot app this week and it may be missing a few things you used. As of 18 August, Microsoft began retiring a clutch of free consumer features — the standout being Deep Research, the tool that turned a prompt into a long, sourced report — while it folds its two Copilot apps into one. The most useful of them doesn’t vanish so much as move: the in-depth research successor now…
Microsoft has removed several free features from its Copilot app, including Deep Research, Group Chat, AI-generated Podcasts, Copilot Labs and the animated Mico character. The company is merging its consumer Copilot app with the business-oriented Microsoft 365 Copilot app, with the most useful features now behind a paid Microsoft 365 plan.
Deep Research, a tool that compiled long, sourced reports from the web, has been replaced by Researcher, which is only available to Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers for $19.99 per month. The company has provided some means of saving and retrieving existing reports, but the burden of preservation falls on the user, with a save-or-lose deadline of 18 August.
The removal and reclassification of features is not a scandal per se, but it is worth reading slowly to understand the implications, particularly the requirement for users to manually save and retrieve their own content before a deadline.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
