Can Bing Chat Access Content Behind Paywalls?

There is some concern and speculation on the internet that Microsoft Bing is feeding in content behind paywall and using such content to provide answers in Bing Chat. I asked Bing Chat if it can give answers based on content behind paywalls and it said no, it cannot.

But I am not sure if this answer is 100% true:

Here is one thread about Bing Chat referencing and citing content behind a paywall to provide an answer for Bing Chat:

It’s a tricky minefield. If proven that these generative AIs are trained on proprietary and/or paywalled content, it opens the door to, shall we say, interesting litigation.

— Barry Adams 📰 (@badams) March 19, 2023

Now, is this possible? Well, there can be answers on why Bing was able to access this content:

(1) Maybe the content was open for a period of time where it was not behind a paywall and Bing indexed it?

(2) Maybe the content provider is giving this paywalled content to Bingbot without a paywall. There are approved ways to give paywalled content to search engines, like the old first click free and flexible sampling solutions.

So technically, the content might now be behind a paywall for users but not for search engines.

So technically, Bingbot doesn’t see the paywall but users might.

That is a possible technical explanation.

Forum discussion at Twitter.