Shadow AI
Shadow AI is the unauthorized use of consumer AI tools — typically ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini on personal accounts — by employees handling work that includes sensitive company or customer data.
Shadow AI is the AI-era successor to shadow IT and shadow SaaS. The drivers are the same: the sanctioned tool is slow, restricted, or absent, and the consumer alternative is one tab away.
The risk is not theoretical. Pasted contracts, code, customer records, and merger drafts have all been documented in consumer model training pipelines. Most enterprises discover shadow AI usage only after a leak.
The durable solution is not a block list. It is a sanctioned multi-model workspace, governed by an AI Firewall, that is genuinely faster and better than the consumer alternative — so the incentive to go around it disappears.
An AI Firewall is a software layer that detects and redacts sensitive data — PII, PHI, trade secrets, or custom entity types — from a prompt before it leaves your network boundary and reaches any AI model.
Prompt-time PII redaction is the removal or substitution of personally identifiable information from an AI prompt before it leaves the user's network, so the model and its provider never receive the original values.