Imagine a scenario: Your developer is stuck on a complicated piece of code. The deadline is approaching. What do they do? They copy 50 lines of your application’s proprietary source code and paste it into a public AI chat with the prompt: “Find the bug and optimize”.
Within 10 seconds, they get a correct answer. Problem solved, right? No. An uncontrolled leak of your company’s intellectual property just occurred.
The Samsung Lesson
The risk is not theoretical. The most famous example in the industry occurred in Samsung’s semiconductor division. Employees, wanting to improve their workflow, inadvertently shared secret data three times in a single month:
- Source code for chip performance measurement software was pasted for debugging.
- Notes from confidential board meetings were uploaded to create a summary.
As a result, this data landed on external servers. Although the employees’ intentions were good (efficiency), the consequences could have been catastrophic. Samsung had to immediately ban the use of public AI.
What Leaks Most Often via “Shadow AI”?
Employees treat the chat window like a trusted assistant, forgetting that there is a public cloud on the other side. The most frequently leaked data includes:
- Customer Databases: “Write a personalized email to these 50 clients: [list with names and emails]” – an immediate GDPR violation.
- Financial Data: Pasting raw Excel data to analyze sales trends.
- Strategy and HR: “Help me write a termination letter for employee X due to Y” or “Evaluate this draft strategy for entering the German market”.
The Leak Mechanism: Where Does This Data Go?
By using free or standard versions of popular public models, you accept terms that often state: “We may use your content to improve our services”.
This means your unique know-how, pasted into the chat today, becomes part of the training dataset. There is a risk that in the future, the model, when asked by your competitor about a similar problem, might use fragments of your solution in its generated response.
Remember: Even if an AI provider promises not to train models on API data, they still process it on servers outside the European Economic Area (e.g., in the USA). Under European regulations (GDPR), this often means a lack of control over the data processing chain.
How to Defend Yourself? Blocking is Not the Solution.
Banning employees from using AI is a losing battle. People will find a way to use tools that make their work easier (e.g., on private phones), which only deepens the “Shadow AI” problem.
The only effective solution is to provide a secure alternative.
By implementing the PrivatAI.pl solution (a local language model instance):
- You give employees a tool with the capabilities of leading AI systems.
- You keep data inside the corporate network (On-premise or Private Cloud).
- You ensure that pasted code or contracts will never be used to train a public model.
Protect Your Knowledge from Leaks
Don’t wait for the first incident. Build an AI infrastructure that protects your trade secrets instead of exposing them.
The solution is PrivatAI.pl – everything stays in Poland (Your company -> encrypted data transfer tunnel -> PrivatAI.pl server).