According to insiders, Microsoft is threatening to stop providing access to its Bing search index data to rival search engines, including Apollo Global Management's Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, if they continue to use it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence chat products. Microsoft integrated OpenAI's AI-powered chat technology into Bing in February, leading rivals to create their own AI chatbots. These chatbots use Bing to provide some of their information because indexing the entire web is expensive and complex.
Microsoft has reportedly told at least two customers that using its Bing search index to feed their AI chat tools breaches their contract and may terminate their access. With Microsoft and Google being the only two companies that index the entire web, smaller search engines would find it challenging to find an alternative if they were cut off from Microsoft's index.