Require user authentication for Copilot Studio agents¶
Licence and role
Power Platform admin (included with Copilot Studio)
Why it matters¶
An agent published with No authentication can be used by anyone who reaches its channel, and it answers from whatever knowledge and tools the maker connected. Blocking one connector in a data policy makes authentication mandatory for publishing.
Steps¶
- Power Platform admin center > Security > Data and privacy > Data policy.
- Edit the policy that covers your Copilot Studio environments (or create one) and add the environments.
- On Assign connectors, find 'Chat without Microsoft Entra ID authentication in Copilot Studio' and select Block.
- Save, then open an agent in Copilot Studio: agents without authentication show an error banner and cannot be published until the maker selects Authenticate with Microsoft or Authenticate manually.
- Tell makers before you switch it on. Use the downloadable violation list on the agent's Channels page to follow up.
Impact on users¶
Makers can no longer publish agents set to No authentication: the Publish button is unavailable and an error banner appears until they choose Authenticate with Microsoft or Authenticate manually. Users must then sign in to chat with those agents. Microsoft Learn does not say whether agents already published without authentication keep working, so test on one environment first and tell makers before you switch it on.
Rollback¶
Data policy > Edit Policy: move the connector out of Blocked (or remove the environment from the policy) and select Update policy. Agent-level exemptions are no longer supported, so roll back per policy or environment.
Read-only check¶
Reads settings only. It changes nothing in your tenant or on the device.
Modules, connection and role
Requires: Microsoft.Graph (Conditional Access + agent identities), ExchangeOnlineManagement (audit search), Microsoft.PowerApps.Administration.PowerShell (data policies).
Connect first:
Connect-MgGraph -Scopes AgentIdentity.Read.All,Policy.Read.All
Connect-ExchangeOnline
Add-PowerAppsAccount
Note: Microsoft retires Search-UnifiedAuditLog on 15 Oct 2027 (MC1505599). AG04 will move to the Graph AuditLogQuery API before then.
$j = Get-DlpPolicy | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 30
if ($j -match 'Chat without Microsoft Entra ID authentication') { 'Connector is referenced in at least one data policy: confirm it is in the Blocked group for every Copilot Studio environment' } else { 'Connector not referenced in any data policy: agents can be published without authentication' }
How to verify¶
Trying to publish a test agent with No authentication fails with a data policy error.
Sources¶
This control is in the M365 AI Agent Hardening Kit
The free Top 5 has this control with its Jira import, Excel project plan, tracker CSV and the read-only PowerShell script. The Complete kit has all 20 controls.