4 ways to tame shadow AI (hint: you need them all)

In olden days — last year, say — employees using unsanctioned AI tools might copy-and-paste sensitive data that could end up in the AI company’s training data set. Today, an unsanctioned AI can hack into another company for an employee even if they didn’t explicitly ask it to. This doesn’t just mean the latest unreleased frontier models undergoing security testing. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini have all evolved from being mere chatbots, answering questions and helping people write emails. They now have agentic capabilities and are able to carry out complex tasks on behalf of users. And they do, sometimes to dangerous effect. In August, ABC News in Australia interviewed a man identified only as “Andrew” who asked an AI agent to sign him up for a gym class. The agent hacked into the gym’s system and deleted someone else’s wait list reservation. The AI was Anthropic’s Claude, and the agentic framework was OpenClaw. Now imagine an employee asking their agentic AI assistant to help them make a sale. The request might inadvertently inspire the agent to hack into the prospect’s company. To keep this — and other worst-case scenarios — from taking place, enterprises are building guardrails a…

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