Copilot prompts are about to leave your Teams retention policy

If a retention policy you built for Teams chats is what keeps or deletes your Microsoft 365 Copilot prompts and responses today, that coverage is ending. Microsoft's roadmap lists the change for October CY2026 (ID 571306): legacy Teams retention policies that also apply to Copilot interactions will be treated as Teams-only and will no longer govern Copilot. The matching Message Center post, MC1481313, gives a worldwide rollout from late October to mid-November 2026.

Teams retention stays as it is. The policy doesn't fail or vanish; it just stops reaching Copilot. One that was keeping prompts for, say, three years, or deleting them after 90 days, no longer touches them.

The decision sits with the records owner: are Copilot interactions records, and for how long? The compliance administrator then builds a policy on the Copilot location that says so, before the rollout reaches the tenant.

How Copilot ended up in a Teams policy

Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat messages used to fall into a retention location called "Teams chats and Copilot interactions", because Purview retained and deleted both through the same mechanism. Learn notes that users didn't have to be using Teams for that policy to apply to Copilot. A tenant could have Copilot coverage that nobody had explicitly chosen.

Purview now has separate locations. Microsoft Copilot experiences covers Microsoft 365 Copilot, Security Copilot, Copilot in Fabric and Copilot Studio, with Enterprise AI apps and Other AI apps beside it. Existing combined policies keep working, but once a tenant supports the separate locations they can't be edited, and every new policy has to use the new ones. For generative AI apps other than Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, prompts are retained only when a collection policy is set to capture content.

What happens to the policy you have

Policy in place todayAfter the rolloutWhat to doCombined policy that retains, for a period or foreverIt no longer retains Copilot interactionsRecords owner sets the period; build a retain policy on Microsoft Copilot experiencesCombined policy that deletes after a set periodIt no longer deletes Copilot interactionsConfirm deletion is still required; if so, rebuild it on the Copilot locationNo policy covers CopilotNothing changes, because nothing was governedMake the call now, not at the first legal requestPolicy already on Microsoft Copilot experiencesUnaffectedCheck its scope covers the people who use Copilot

The delete row is the one we'd look at first. An organization that chose short retention for Copilot, to limit what a search can later reach, loses that schedule with no visible sign in the Copilot app.

Where the prompts actually live

Copilot messages are stored in a hidden folder in the mailbox of the person who ran the prompt. Neither users nor admins open that folder directly; compliance staff reach it with eDiscovery. An Exchange timer job evaluates it and typically takes one to seven days to run. Expired items move to the SubstrateHolds folder for at least a day before they're permanently deleted, which is why Learn's own example has a one-day delete-only policy taking as long as 16 days to clear a message from eDiscovery results. Another retention policy for the same location, a Litigation Hold, a delay hold or an eDiscovery hold suspends permanent deletion.

That has two consequences for whoever owns the policy. Check retention with eDiscovery, never by opening Copilot. Learn is blunt about it: "Messages visible in your AI apps are not an accurate reflection of whether they are retained or permanently deleted for compliance requirements." And a leaver's Copilot history follows their mailbox. Where retention applies, it lands in an inactive mailbox and stays searchable, one more reason last Friday's leaver post put retention ahead of account deletion.

The change itself is short work

For an existing combined policy, Learn gives the PowerShell. Set-RetentionCompliancePolicy -Identity "<policy name>" -Applications "User:TeamsChatUserInteractions" turns it into a Teams chat policy on your own timing. Set-AppRetentionCompliancePolicy -Identity "<policy name>" -Applications "User:M365Copilot" adds Microsoft 365 Copilot interactions to a policy built on the newer locations. In the Purview portal, a new policy can simply select Microsoft Copilot experiences. A new or changed retention policy can take up to seven days to apply, so the work belongs before the rollout window, not inside it.

The hard part is the sentence the records owner has to write about what a Copilot prompt is worth keeping, and for how long. Our Purview labels post noted that retention policies can cover Copilot interactions. Until now, a Teams policy could do that without anyone choosing it. The policy that replaces that coverage should do it on purpose.