Will hackers use your own AI against you?

Muhammad Usman

Most businesses now have artificial intelligence (AI) inside their systems whether or not they ever decided to adopt it. It arrived with a software update. It sits in your email, your document library, your chat platform and your customer records, waiting to be asked a question. Businesses have spent years asking what AI can do for their employees. Fewer have asked what it would do for an intruder inside an employee’s account.

Your AI Knows Where Everything Is

Consider how a network intrusion used to unfold. An attacker obtained credentials, logged in, and then faced the slow work of orientation. Which server holds the financial records? Where are the contracts? Who has access to payroll? That reconnaissance took days or weeks, and it generated noise. Failed queries, unusual file browsing and repeated searches are exactly the activity security monitoring is built to catch.

An AI assistant removes that obstacle. An intruder holding valid credentials no longer needs to hunt. They can simply ask. Show me everything about the pending acquisition. Summarize our correspondence with our largest customer. Find any document containing bank account numbers. The assistant searches every location that employee can reach, reads the results, and delivers an organized answer in seconds.

Why Your Security Tools May Not Notice

Threat detection works by identifying activity that looks abnormal. A compromised account that suddenly downloads thousands of files at three in the morning stands out. An account that asks an AI assistant a few questions does not. The credentials are valid, the permissions are legitimate, and the assistant is performing precisely the function the business licensed it to perform. The system has no way to tell the two apart, because they’re the same thing to it.

Here Is What You Can Do

1. Establish Governance and Accountability. Assign a group with legal, technology, and operational representation to decide what AI is deployed and who owns each deployment.
2. Conduct AI Impact Assessments. Before pointing AI at sensitive information, conduct an impact assessment. That means identifying what information the tool can reach, who within the business will be able to use it, and what harm could follow if it were exposed; determining what safeguards reduce that risk; recording those conclusions in writing; and repeating the process annually.
3. Develop Comprehensive AI Policies. Draft internal policies addressing transparency, explainability, bias mitigation, and data privacy, informed by what the audit and assessments revealed. Ensure the policy can adapt as tools and requirements evolve.
4. Grant AI Access Based on Job Duties. Most businesses turn AI on for every employee because that is how it arrives, bundled into software already in use. Set access to match the role, so an entry-level employee cannot reach through AI what a company officer can.
5. Conduct Vendor and Technology Due Diligence. Confirm in the contract itself how the vendor secures the information its tool can reach, its data retention practices, and how it uses and shares that data.
6. Train Employees. Employees should be trained on AI principles, operational policies and procedures, what information may be entered into AI tools, and how to use AI responsibly in their day-to-day work. Phishing awareness belongs here too, because a stolen login is what gives an intruder access to AI in the first place. Training should reach every department and every level, not only technology staff.
7. Audit and Monitor AI Activity. Keep a record of what the assistant was asked and what it returned. If an account is compromised, that record is how the business determines what information was actually exposed, and obligations to notify individuals, regulators, and contractual counterparties turn on that determination.
8. Prepare an Incident Response Plan That Accounts for AI. Most response plans were written before AI sat inside the network. Yours should address how to disable AI access quickly, and how to reconstruct what an assistant may have disclosed during the period an account was compromised.

AI is too useful to avoid, and businesses that hesitate will lose ground to those that do not. But the same capability that makes these tools valuable to employees makes them valuable to anyone who reaches an employee account. Deploy the technology, but govern it more carefully than you would govern any single employee or system. It can see more, reach more, and expose more than any one person on your payroll.

Muhammad Usman is an associate in McLane Middleton’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Group. The group of six attorneys and one paralegal assist businesses and private clients to improve their security, privacy and AI compliance, and address any incidents or breaches that occur. He can be reached at muhammad@usman@mclane.com.