Employees at Samsung Semiconductor have sent sensitive data to the AI chatbot ChatGPT to make their daily lives easier. They apparently did not realize that this posed a security risk for the company.
Samsung employees send confidential data to ChatGPT
Shortly after Samsung Semiconductor allowed its employees to use ChatGPT for work, they sent confidential data to the AI chatbot. There have already been three such incidents in just 20 days, as reported by the Korean edition of The Economist.
How did the data leak occur?
Employees have sent software code and other internal company data to the chatbot in order to find errors and fix them. This is problematic because they are sent to OpenAI's servers. They are therefore outside Samsung's network.
The dangers for Samsung's semiconductor business
The chatbot in turn learns through conversations with users, which is why it could even happen that Samsung's code or other data inadvertently appears with other ChatGPT users. In the first incident, a Samsung engineer sent the code of a proprietary Samsung program to ChatGPT to fix bugs. This was a top-secret program that was not supposed to be released to the public.
In the second case, an employee typed test patterns into the chat field of ChatGPT and asked the bot to optimize them. These test sequences are used in the semiconductor industry to test and speed up chips - and are worth a lot of money.
In the third case, an employee used the Clove assistant from Korean software giant Naver to convert a meeting into a document. He then sent the text to ChatGPT to create a presentation.
Chatbots as helpful work tools - but with limitations
All examples show that an AI chatbot can certainly help employees in their day-to-day work. However, it should not be fed with sensitive data. At least not if the bot does not come from your own company.
Samsung's response to the data leak and outlook for the future
According to the Economist, Samsung is thinking about developing its own AI chatbot to help its own employees. Until then, the company is limiting the length of questions that can be sent to ChatGPT to 1,024 bytes. If further incidents occur, Samsung could also completely block access to the chatbot again.
