Microsoft confirms that Windows 11 will ask for your consent before it allows an AI Agent to access your files stored in the six known folders, which include Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and Videos. You can also customize file access permissions for each agent.
This clarification comes after growing concerns around Microsoft’s push to bring AI agents deeper into Windows. Over the past few weeks, the company has been laying the groundwork for agent-based experiences that can interact with your files, apps, and system settings, even while openly admitting that AI models can misbehave, hallucinate, or create new security risks.
Until now, Microsoft hadn’t clearly explained how file access would work in practice, or whether users would have control over what these agents could see.
As first spotted by Windows Latest, on December 5, Microsoft quietly updated its Experimental Agentic Features support document to explain how consent, permissions, and agent connectors work in preview builds 26100.7344 and newer, finally confirming that AI agents cannot access your personal files by default and must explicitly ask for permission.
AI Agents in Windows 11 will need your permission to access files from known folders
A couple of weeks ago, Windows Latest pointed out how Microsoft wants to give AI access to your files and apps, even while admitting that such AI agents can misbehave and pose security risks.
“AI models still face functional limitations in terms of how they behave and occasionally may hallucinate and produce unexpected outputs”, says the company in their support document.
Of course, a company confessing that its most promoted product introduces novel security risks cannot be taken lightly under any circumstances.
We noticed that although Microsoft insists that AI agents run under an agentic workspace, which is separate from the user workspace, and have limited permissions, Windows will still grant them access to your Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders, which are collectively called the known folders.
This happened when you enabled the “Experimental Agentic features” toggle in Settings > System > AI components. Earlier, enabling the above toggle was supposed to grant access to these folders to all AI agents.
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