Microsoft will let Microsoft 365 Family and Premium subscribers share Copilot and other AI features with up to five other people on a plan, The Verge reported, citing an email sent to subscribers. That reverses a limit which had confined AI benefits to the primary account holder since Microsoft folded the features into Personal and Family plans last year. Shared access now reaches Office apps and OneDrive storage too.
Storage is where the deal sours.
Instead of 1TB of OneDrive space for each account, the plan draws on a single 2TB pool that everyone shares. Microsoft argues that arrangement helps a household where one member exceeds a terabyte; The Verge reads it as an easy route to selling more OneDrive storage. In a six-person family, the change is as much as four terabytes less room than before, and heavy users of photos or video will reach the ceiling first.
Not every household loses.
Where one member stores far more than the rest, pooled space absorbs files that individual caps would have blocked, which is the flexibility Microsoft cites.
Microsoft 365 Premium, which packages Copilot Pro with a Family subscription for $19.99 a month, launched a year ago. Existing subscribers in eligible markets might qualify for transitional bonus storage, Microsoft said. It also plans to support families that use a lot of storage. The Verge noted that more flexible AI usage could leave some subscribers paying more for Copilot depending on how they use it.
Sharing AI entitlements costs Microsoft little at the margin. Copilot is already built into the bundle. Extending it to five more people therefore adds no product to develop and makes the family tier harder to cancel. Trimming storage pulls the other way. It caps what the company provisions across millions of accounts, opening a paid upgrade path for anyone who runs out.
Set against each other, the two moves raise the plan's stated value and lower what it costs to serve.
A plan that holds its price while cutting benefits raises the effective cost for anyone who was using the storage; subscribers come out ahead only if they use Copilot often and store well under their share of the pool.