Key Takeaways
- Harvard Medical School’s consumer health division, Harvard Health Publishing, will license its content to Microsoft.
- The content will be used to enhance Microsoft Copilot’s ability to answer health and wellness questions accurately.
- The deal is part of Microsoft’s effort to diversify its AI sources and reduce its dependence on OpenAI.
- To provide users with trustworthy, high-quality health information that is more in line with what a medical practitioner might offer.
- The updated Copilot, featuring Harvard’s content, is expected to launch as early as this month.
Harvard University announced on Wednesday that its prestigious medical school has entered into a licensing agreement with Microsoft, granting the tech giant access to a wealth of consumer health content on various diseases and wellness topics. The content will be used to power Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, significantly enhancing its ability to provide reliable answers to health-related questions.
The partnership, made through Harvard Health Publishing, is a key component of Microsoft’s broader strategy to diversify its artificial intelligence inputs and reduce its reliance on a single provider, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. While the specific financial terms were not disclosed, a university spokesperson confirmed that Microsoft will pay Harvard a licensing fee for the content.
Until now, Copilot has primarily relied on OpenAI’s models to power its tools across the Microsoft 365 suite. However, the company has recently begun integrating models from other AI leaders, like Anthropic’s Claude, and is actively developing its own in-house models.
This collaboration aims to improve the quality and trustworthiness of the health advice Copilot provides, aligning it more closely with the kind of information a user might receive from a medical professional. The university stated that the latest version of Copilot, expected to launch as early as October 2025, will utilize the licensed content to answer user queries on a wide range of medical and wellness subjects.
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