Copilot trust and RAM hit
Microsoft is in a trust bind: its legal terms reportedly warn users not to rely on Copilot, phrasing it as effectively ‘for entertainment purposes only,’ which undercuts claims that it’s a business productivity assistant. (techcrunch.com) At the same time, a new Copilot for Windows 11 ships bundled with a full Microsoft Edge package that increases RAM use, and testers who disabled Copilot say they reclaimed about 200MB of RAM — a real‑world cost for running those UI‑heavy assistants. (windowslatest.com) (makeuseof.com)
Microsoft has a Copilot problem that no product demo can fix. The company wants people to treat the assistant as part of daily work. It has spent the last two years weaving Copilot into Windows, Office, and its broader pitch for the AI PC. But its own consumer Copilot terms, effective October 24, 2025, say something far blunter: Copilot “is for entertainment purposes only,” can make mistakes, may not work as intended, and should not be relied on for important advice. The terms apply to the standalone Copilot apps, the web service, and Copilot-branded experiences that link back to them. They explicitly do not cover Microsoft 365 Copilot unless that product says they do. That legal carveout matters, but it does not erase the larger point. Microsoft is selling one cultural message and writing down another. That gap would be awkward even if Copilot were lightweight and easy to ignore. It is not. A new Windows 11 version now rolling out replaces the recent native WinUI app with a more web-heavy build that looks and behaves much like the browser version. According to Windows Latest, the Microsoft Store listing now acts more like an installer stub than a direct app download, and the package that lands on the machine contains what appears to be a full Edge runtime. In its tests, the new Copilot used up to 500MB of RAM in the background and could climb to around 1GB during use. The older native app had been under 100MB. That is not a small engineering detail. It changes what Copilot feels like on an ordinary PC. Windows Latest reports that the new package includes an Edge version folder, core browser binaries, and an installation footprint built around WebView2 and Chromium components rather than a truly native shell. The result is familiar to anyone who has watched desktop software drift toward embedded browsers. You get faster iteration and a uniform interface. You also get the memory profile of a browser hiding inside an app. That hidden cost shows up in the most mundane place possible: idle system memory. MakeUseOf tested disabling Copilot and other AI features on a Windows 11 machine and says it immediately recovered about 200MB of RAM. The same piece describes Copilot as a background presence that can consume CPU and memory even when the user is not actively chatting with it. On a high-end machine, that may sound trivial. On an 8GB laptop, it is the difference between a system that feels merely busy and one that feels sticky. This is what makes the trust issue worse. If Copilot were clearly a toy, people could shrug at the disclaimer and move on. If it were clearly a serious work tool, Microsoft would need to stand behind it more confidently. Instead, users are being asked to give it both authority and resources while accepting that it is, in legal terms, not something they should trust for anything important. Then Windows asks them to keep a browser-sized chunk of memory warm so that assistant can sit there waiting. In Windows Latest’s testing, that waiting room included an approximately 850MB Edge folder, with a 315MB `msedge.dll` sitting inside the Copilot package.
