Microsoft has threatened to restrict competitor search engines' access to the internet-search data it licences to them if they continue to use it as the basis for their artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, Bloomberg reported early Saturday (March 25), citing sources. 

Microsoft licences the information included in its Bing search index, a map of the internet that can be rapidly scanned in real-time, to other web searches providers such as Yahoo and DuckDuckGo.

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Microsoft included a ChatGPT relative into Bing last month, and its competitors also pushed to launch their own chatbots using artificial intelligence. 

Google unveiled Bard, their AI product, this week. DuckAssist, developed by DuckDuckGo, which places a strong focus on preserving searchers' privacy, provides answers by searching a certain set of sites.

You.com and Neeva Inc., two relatively young search engines, also launched the AI-powered search services YouChat and NeevaAI. These search chatbots seek to integrate ChatGPT's conversational capabilities with the data offered by a traditional search engine.

On Friday, Bloomberg reported that because indexing the whole web is expensive, the normal search engines DuckDuckGo, You.com, and Neeva use Bing to deliver part of their information.

According to sources who spoke to the news agency, Microsoft informed at least two customers that using the Bing search index to fuel their AI chat tools was against their contract. Microsoft may also revoke licences granting access to its search index, they added.

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The research also claimed that smaller search engines would have trouble finding an alternative if they were excluded from the index. 

Google and Microsoft are the only two companies that now index the whole web. Due to Google's restrictions on the usage of its index, Bing is now used by almost all other search engines.