Microsoft is collaborating with Harvard Medical School to add health content to its AI assistant Copilot, part of a broader effort to reduce its reliance on OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sources say that after an update is scheduled to be released as early as this month, Copilot will use information from Harvard Health Publishing to respond to healthcare queries. Microsoft will pay Harvard a licensing fee.

Dominic King, Microsoft's vice president of AI for Health, said in an interview that the company's goal is to make the answers Copilot provides more consistent with information users might receive from their doctors than what is currently available.

To date, Copilot has primarily used OpenAI models in its suite of applications, such as Word and Outlook. To reduce its reliance on the startup, Microsoft has begun using Anthropic's Claude and is developing its own AI models.