Microsoft 365 Copilot trips over angle brackets, frustrating coders

Chatbot seems to choke when fed tricky less-than character

updated Microsoft 365 Copilot appears to have developed an allergy to the less-than typographical symbol, which is preventing users from pasting HTML markup and programming code into the text area for Copilot prompts.

Copilot is Microsoft's term for its generative AI service, and Microsoft 365 Copilot makes that service available within Redmond's productivity application suite. The AI assistant, however, appears to be having some trouble with text handling.

A Copilot user contacted The Register to alert us to the issue, noting the inability to use the less-than (<) characters is "a massive issue for anyone who uses [Copilot] to help with coding."

For the past few days, Microsoft customers have been complaining about Copilot's symbol handling on its community forum. Last week, for example, a user noted the issue in a post titled, "Copilot won't allow me to copy and paste HTML code into prompt."

Several others chimed in to confirm that they too have been thwarted when submitting code to Copilot. On Monday, an individual posting under the name Dominick Fetters wrote, "Just started experiencing this as well. I am unable to copy paste any C# XAML code into the prompt textbox at all. After experimenting by copy-pasting different values into the prompt textbox it is clear that it is the '<' character causing issues. Definitely need a fix for this sooner rather than later."

Fetters subsequently raised the issue in a separate post on Monday. And another post on Tuesday also reported "Copilot issues with HTML, XML, and JS."

Yet another Copilot user today posting to the November 15th thread wrote, "Indeed, this issue started for my team after the Copilot page frontend changed. The < symbol appears to completely break the prompt after pasting into the prompt area, and hides everything between < and >."

Were we to hazard a guess about why this is happening, we'd suggest it may have something to do with a poorly implemented content sanitization routine. Web forms often disallow the submission of characters used for HTML markup to prevent cross-site scripting attacks. It may be that something similar was added to Copilot without recognizing how this might affect code-based input, or that the Copilot prompt input element is somehow inheriting web-based content filtering code from the underlying page.

But really, you'd have to ask Microsoft. We did that, asking the tech giant to explain what's going on and whether a fix is forthcoming. While our inquiry was acknowledged, we've not heard back. Perhaps the Copilot team is busy talking up AI software at Microsoft Ignite. ®

Updated to add at 1520 UTC on November 22, 2024

In a statement provided after this story was filed, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "We are investigating this report and will take appropriate action to address it. We are continuously updating the service and incorporating learnings and feedback to deliver a positive experience, and encourage users to report any issues by using the 'Send Feedback' option at the top right corner of the screen."