Refund requests flood Microsoft after tricking users into AI upgrades (www.afr.com)

Microsoft is being swamped with refund requests after many customers say they were misled into buying pricier subscriptions that included the company’s Copilot AI chatbot. Reports to The Australian Financial Review say demand for compensation could involve as many as 2.7 million consumers, and Microsoft has acknowledged operational hiccups — including sending the wrong unsubscribe link — that have delayed its ability to immediately process refunds. The scale of complaints has strained support channels and left the company unable to honour earlier refund pledges on schedule. For the AI/ML community, the episode underscores how product design, billing flows and consent mechanisms matter as much as model quality. Accidental or opaque upgrade paths for AI features can generate widespread customer backlash, regulatory scrutiny and reputational harm that slow adoption. Technically, this points to failures in subscription state management, UX testing, and automated billing controls; sensible mitigations include clearer opt-in prompts, robust rollback and reconciliation tooling, telemetry to detect involuntary upgrades, and legal-compliance checks. The situation is a reminder that deploying AI capabilities at scale requires rigorous end-to-end product, billing and trust engineering, not just advances in models or chat functionality.