An independent security researcher uncovered a major data breach affecting Chat & Ask AI, one of the most popular AI chat apps on Google Play and Apple App Store, with more than 50 million users. The researcher claims to have accessed 300 million messages from over 25 million users due to an exposed database. [...] Behind the scenes, Chat & Ask AI is a "wrapper" app that plugs into various large language models (LLMs) from other companies, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini.
A Firebase database left open with no authentication, holding the complete chat histories of 25 million people along with their settings and the models they had used. What makes it worse than the usual misconfiguration is what people take to a chat app they believe is private, and the reporting is clear that the exposed conversations included some of the most sensitive things a person can type. The second half of the quote is the part founders should sit with: this is a wrapper. It holds no model of its own and its whole product is a front end onto three other companies' APIs, which means the safety work those three did was never the thing protecting these users. The weakest link in an AI product is routinely the ordinary web infrastructure around it.
