Sweden's Government Offices—the administrative body that supports the prime minister and cabinet—will block ChatGPT and Claude on staff computers starting Monday, October 26, directing civil servants to Microsoft's Copilot as the only approved AI tool. The move was reported by Sweden's national, publicly funded radio broadcaster Sveriges Radio.

Information security concerns drove the decision, with Copilot remaining cleared for use after undergoing a dedicated security review.

The reasoning was laid out by Mikael Wettercrantz, the Government Offices' director of digitalisation, who posted on the staff intranet that using AI services without a formal contract can have "consequences our information security."

"We have seen several examples of problematic use of open AI services. The examples concern both the sensitivity of the information that has been entered and how the AI-generated responses have been handled," he said.

Consumer AI tools operating without formal agreements transmit user queries to external company servers, and U.S. law allows authorities to compel those companies to hand over data on request. A formal security agreement, at minimum, defines what the provider may and may not do with government employees' inputs—which is why the distinction between a vetted enterprise contract and an open consumer tool matters here.

Copilot passed because the Government Offices reviewed the tool and raised its security settings afterward—something it did not do for ChatGPT or Claude. Some employees will still be able to access both blocked tools through an AI platform the Government Offices built internally, though the press office has not said how many people that covers or what restrictions apply.

The restrictions extend a pattern across Swedish authorities. The Tax Agency and the National Board of Institutional Care have already imposed similar bans on consumer AI tools, and the Enforcement Authority—the agency responsible for debt collection and enforcing court orders—is preparing a decision of its own. Separately, an internal audit at the Transport Administration found roughly 10 AI services being used there in a "widespread and risky way."

At the European level, the European Parliament went further in February, disabling AI features across all of its work devices—ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot included—after concluding it could not guarantee the security of the data those tools processed. European government concerns about AI data security have been building since Italy's ChatGPT ban in 2023. Sweden is now drawing a narrower line than Brussels, sanctioning one U.S. tech company's product while shutting out two others.

The boundary is further blurred by the fact that Microsoft incorporated Claude models into Copilot in early 2026. In the EU—where Sweden sits—Anthropic's models default to off and require administrators to deliberately enable them. The Government Offices has not confirmed whether its Copilot instance has Claude switched on, which means the distinction between the "banned" AI and the "approved" one is not as clean as the announcement implies.

Source: Decrypt