7 Riskiest AI Apps & Extensions Your Employees Are Using Today
You didn’t approve of it. Yet another AI extension is blinking in someone’s browser and siphoning data like it’s no big deal.
The era of rogue innovation is here. Your employees Google their way to productivity, and IT is left cleaning up the mess.
Vendors know this. They’re smart enough to skip over your security team and slide into your staff’s inboxes with promises of “superhuman efficiency.”
The problem is that many of these tools sneak under the radar. You don’t know what they’re collecting and who they’re sharing it with.
That’s what puts data compliance at risk.
This guide breaks down 7 of the riskiest AI apps and extensions your employees might be using right now (and why your security team should lose sleep over them).
The Rise of Shadow AI in the Workplace
It usually starts with good intentions.
Someone’s swamped with tasks and finds a Chrome extension that writes emails well. Meanwhile, someone else stumbles on an AI chatbot that summarizes reports in seconds.
And just like that, Shadow AI enters your workplace.
Unlike Shadow IT, which typically involves unauthorized software, Shadow AI refers to unapproved artificial intelligence tools that employees use independently. Think AI writing assistants, transcription bots, summarizers, or smart scheduling tools.
Forbes highlights that around 75% of knowledge workers globally use generative AI. Most of them don’t mean harm. They only intend to save time.
But these tools can access sensitive data. They then store it off-platform or, worse, feed it into training models. And you don’t know what’s leaving your environment until it’s already gone.
That’s where SSPM (SaaS Security Posture Management) comes in.
It provides deep visibility into your organization’s SaaS ecosystem. You can quickly identify what’s connected and where the risks live. It also lets you enforce compliance policies, all in real time.
7 Riskiest AI Apps & Extensions – and the Threats They Pose
You’d be surprised how many AI tools are living rent-free in your employees’ browsers right now.
They’re not listed in your approved software inventory. But they’re there, summarizing Zoom calls or helping with sales outreach.
Below, we share seven AI extensions your teams might already be using and the specific threats they introduce into your environment.
ChatGPT Chrome Extensions
One of the most popular categories of AI tools employees are adopting is ChatGPT Chrome extensions. These add-ons promise to make life easier by letting you summarize web content or even rewrite internal documentation with a single click.
But under the hood, they auto-save every prompt typed into them. Yes, even the ones loaded with proprietary data or confidential project plans.
Others request access to sensitive browser activity or clipboard data far beyond what’s necessary.
Because they process input through third-party APIs, the risk of data exposure is built in.
Take, for example, a real case from early 2023. An engineer at Samsung uploaded proprietary source code into ChatGPT, inadvertently causing an internal data leak.
The exact scope of the breach was never made public, but it was serious enough to trigger a sweeping corporate ban on generative AI tools across the company.
The primary concern was that the data now lived on external servers, owned by OpenAI or its partners, with no guarantee it could ever be retrieved or erased.
Right now, the Chrome Web Store has a whopping 10,000 ChatGPT extension users. They’re widely adopted and often one bad configuration away from compromising your internal data.
Grammarly (With Generative AI Features)
What started as a helpful grammar checker has evolved into a powerful writing assistant. It’s now capable of rephrasing, rewriting, generating content from scratch, and whatnot.
And because it integrates so easily into browsers, email clients, Word docs, and even mobile keyboards, it’s easy to forget just how deep its access runs.
That’s where the risk creeps in.
Grammarly’s generative AI features analyze full bodies of text, often in real time. Think legal contracts, sensitive HR communications, unreleased product announcements, or executive emails.
All of it may pass through Grammarly’s servers, where it’s processed and improved (but not always in ways your compliance team would sign off on).
The tool works at the keystroke level, meaning it can theoretically capture text before it’s even saved or sent.
In regulated industries like law or healthcare, it’s a legal issue. And with Grammarly’s user base now in the tens of millions, and its enterprise version gaining traction across large organizations, the odds that someone on your team is pasting sensitive material into its suggestion box are near 100%.
Copy.ai /Jasper.ai
Tools like Copy.ai and Jasper.ai thrive on context. The more you give, the better the output.
That’s why users often paste entire product details, internal sales decks, customer personas, and unreleased campaign messaging into the prompt box. It feels harmless.
But what they’re actually doing is feeding proprietary strategy into a machine that lives outside the company’s four walls. It stores, learns from, and potentially reuses that data across its massive user base.
Unintentional exposure of intellectual property is a huge risk here. Unlike traditional writing tools, these AI platforms are building models off the words you share.
That means what your team uploads today could influence what someone else gets tomorrow, especially in systems without strict data siloing.
And even if your exact phrasing doesn’t resurface elsewhere, the DNA of your work might.
AI Meeting Assistants
AI meeting assistants like Otter.ai or Fireflies.ai can transcribe meetings in real time and analyze key takeaways for quick reference. The convenience is undeniable, especially for teams juggling dozens of virtual calls each week.
But here’s where things get tricky: those transcripts? They’re often stored in the cloud, sitting on servers that you might not control.
AI meeting assistants are designed to capture and process every spoken word, but they don’t just record the meeting.
They store it, transcribe it, and sometimes even analyze it for patterns or action points. No wonder Harvard has restricted their usage during meetings.
After all, the risk of exposing personal information grows exponentially if these conversations aren’t properly secured or deleted after a set period.
And as meeting assistants become more commonplace, the ease of adoption also means these tools might be used without full awareness of the risks they carry.
AI-Based Code Assistants
Tools like GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer are praised for boosting productivity, especially in fast-moving dev teams under pressure to ship.
But they’re powered by massive public code repositories, including open-source projects governed by restrictive licenses that most engineers never stop to think about.
And that’s the problem. When AI assistants generate code on your behalf, they’re remixing patterns learned from billions of lines of existing code, some of which may be under GPL or other copyleft licenses.
If a developer unknowingly accepts AI-suggested code that traces back to a GPL source, and that code makes its way into a proprietary system, you’ve just walked into a compliance issue.
Companies face a very real risk of tainting their proprietary products with open-source obligations they didn’t knowingly accept.
And the more widespread these assistants become – already embedded in IDEs and cloud platforms by default – the harder it becomes to track what’s human-written and what came from the AI’s memory of the internet.
Browser-Integrated AI Shopping Assistants or Research Tools
Those little browser add-ons that help you “shop smarter” or “research faster” might feel like harmless convenience.
But many of these AI-powered extensions are far more invasive than they appear. They quietly track your clicks and profile your online habits across tabs you never gave them explicit permission to access.
PR Newswire highlights that two-thirds of shoppers refuse to use AI shopping assistants, despite them being convenient. And 58% are concerned about the way AI manages their private data.
Third-party vendors can aggregate customer data to build rich user models, sometimes sold or shared for purposes far beyond what someone imagined.
For regulated industries, this opens the door to compliance violations. For everyone else, it’s still a quiet drain on privacy and a doorway to shadow data exposure.
Canva AI/ Magic Design Tools
Everyone from interns to executives is using Canva these days. And why not? It’s intuitive and makes even the most design-averse employee feel like a creative genius.
With Magic Design and a host of AI-driven tools, Canva promises to create polished assets out of rough ideas within minutes. But in that speed lies the problem.
Most employees don’t think twice before uploading internal brand assets or even customer-facing data into Canva’s platform.
What they might not realize is that Canva is an externally hosted SaaS tool, and the content they’re feeding into its AI features doesn’t just stay neatly tucked away in a local folder.
It’s uploaded, processed, and sometimes stored in ways that can be hard to trace or delete entirely. While this is not necessarily a risk to your corporate data, proprietary designs are meant to stay private / internal until released.
Why does this matter in the grand scheme of things? If your company is planning to release a new product line and has design assets for the big announcement, it could get leaked ahead of time and wind up in the hands of a competitor.
The solution here is to lock down usage policies and treat creative tools with the same scrutiny you’d apply to any SaaS handling sensitive data.
How to Detect and Manage These Risks
Employees don’t need admin privileges to install a Chrome extension or sign up for a flashy new productivity tool.
And once it’s in use, traditional defenses like DLP (Data Loss Prevention) and CASBs (Cloud Access Security Brokers) are often too slow or plain blind to spot what’s happening.
That’s where SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) helps.
Unlike older tools that rely on predefined lists or manual configuration, SSPM tools specialize in surfacing what you didn’t know to look for.
They detect unsanctioned AI apps automatically. Following this, they assign risk scores based on behavior and permissions, and (this is key) can often initiate access revocation without waiting for a ticket to be filed.
This lets you look for odd behavior: the designer who suddenly starts uploading dozens of files to an AI design tool or the developer relying a bit too heavily on AI-generated code that might come with legal baggage.
SSPM sees that. Traditional tools? Not so much.
Creating a Secure AI Usage Policy
Most employees aren’t out to cause a data breach.
They’re only trying to meet a deadline or write an email that doesn’t sound like it was written at 2 a.m. And that’s exactly why an AI usage policy matters.
Without clear guidelines, even well-meaning team members can end up installing tools they barely understand and terms of service they definitely didn’t read.
Ideally, start with the obvious: what tools are approved, what types of data can (and cannot) be entered into them, and which departments are responsible for monitoring usage.
After that, define acceptable use cases. Drafting marketing copy with an approved AI tool? Probably fine. Uploading client contracts into a free browser extension? Hard no.
Crucially, your policy doesn’t have to be a dusty PDF in the compliance folder. Employees need real-world examples and refreshers that don’t sound like legalese lectures.
So, offer bite-sized playbooks: “When to say no to AI,” “How to spot shady browser extensions,” or “Red flags in free tools.” Make training a part of onboarding and lunch-and-learns.
Conclusion
It doesn’t start with espionage. It starts with someone in accounting trying to make their quarterly report worth reading. One browser extension later, they unknowingly piped sensitive financials into a server in who-knows-where.
Multiply that by a few hundred employees, and you’ve got a growing cybersecurity blind spot.
You can’t stop people from trying to work smarter. But you can make sure they don’t burn down the house while they’re at it. The secret is higher visibility and a smarter way to manage what’s already happening behind the scenes.
That’s where Spin.ai comes in. With an SSPM platform designed to catch risky AI usage, flag shady behavior, and automate clean-up, it lets you pull the plug before the headlines hit.
Because if shadow AI is inevitable, shadow control shouldn’t be.
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