Written in February 2024, reporting on hands-on testing of AI tools available that month. This is not a claim about today’s tools, which are a different generation of products with different mitigations. Treat the finding below as a snapshot of that testing, not a standing verdict on the category.
Itwerx is a service-disabled veteran-owned managed IT provider serving Seattle-area businesses, founded in 2005, and part of that work is helping clients evaluate AI tools before sensitive data goes anywhere near them.
What testing that month turned up
Across dozens of AI tools tried in early 2024, testing repeatedly found tools that could be prompted into revealing something they should not have: another user’s input, or the underlying system prompt behind the product. That included tools that charged hundreds or thousands of dollars a month and advertised themselves as secure. It was not an exhaustive survey of the market, and it is not a claim about which tools have since fixed the issue – some certainly have.
The practical implication at the time did not depend on which specific products were vulnerable. If you are a developer building a public-facing AI product, assume competitors can extract your prompt design quickly. If you are a business feeding data into a third-party AI service, assume that data is more exposed than the vendor’s marketing suggests – fine for a marketing blurb, a real problem for accounting data, legal documents, trade secrets or HR records.
The response that still holds up
The design principle from that period is one we still give today: if data is sensitive, keep it out of shared public tools and isolate whatever model touches it, rather than trusting a vendor’s security claims at face value. That is a heavier lift than typing a prompt into a browser tab, and it has an up-front cost. It is also the difference between an incident that stays internal and one that puts a company on the front page for the wrong reason.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our AI integration work deals with – talk to us about yours.
