Use an AI browser? 5 ways to protect yourself from prompt injections - before it's too late

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. The sudden release of the artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot ChatGPT took the world by storm, and now we are beginning to see how AI is being applied in everything from surveillance cameras to productivity tools. Also: How researchers tricked ChatGPT into sharing sensitive email data Enter agentic AI. In general, these AI models are able to perform tasks that require some reasoning or information gathering, such as acting as live agents or helpdesk assistants for customer queries, or are used for contextual searches. The concept of agentic AI has now spread to browsers, and while they may one day become the baseline, they have also introduced security risks, including prompt injection attacks. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) AI makes mistakes, and the datasets that large language models (LLMs) rely upon aren't always accurate -- or safe. Even if a browser is from a trustworthy, reputable provider, that doesn't mean any integrated AI systems, including search assistants or chatbots, are free of risk. Google tasked a Red Team to find ways that AI systems are commonly abused, and these include data poisoning, inputting adversarial prompts into LLMs, creating backdoors, and prompt injection attacks. Prompt injection attacks occur when a threat actor inserts malicious conten...