Microsoft Teams now flags suspicious meeting bots: they go to the lobby first

In mid-May 2026, Microsoft began rolling out a new bot-detection feature in Teams. If Teams suspects a participant is a bot, it sends that account to the meeting lobby instead of letting it join the call right away.

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Microsoft says Teams now checks behavioral and infrastructure signals to spot bots that may have connected once and then kept auto-joining later meetings. The idea is to make it harder for third-party tools to record, transcribe, take notes, or generate recaps without the people in the meeting fully realizing it.

The timing makes sense. Privacy, compliance, and data-exposure risks across collaboration platforms are already climbing: Mimecast says 44% of organizations saw more attacks on these tools over the past year, publicly reported data shows breach victims jumped 211% year over year in 2025, and industry estimates put the average breach cost at $4.88 million.

If you use Microsoft Teams a lot, this is a smart update to have on hand, especially since Microsoft says the rollout started mid-May 2026 and should reach most commercial and government customers by mid-June 2026. The company is also previewing a registration path for approved meeting-bot vendors, and it plans to add an August 2026 admin control that can block all identified external bots at the tenant level.

You won’t need a separate download for it. The feature arrives through the Microsoft Teams service rollout.