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The cybersecurity pushback against AI-powered browsers is escalating, with research giant Gartner and a UK government agency flagging them as potential threats.
"Cybersecurity must block AI browsers now," Gartner writes in a new report published last week. “AI browsers are nascent and innovative, yet too risky for general adoption by most organizations."
Gartner is sounding the alarms as more tech companies are starting to offer AI browsers that promise to streamline the web-surfing experience. The programs let you outsource and automate tasks, such as online searches or writing an email, to an AI agent. The only problem is that these same AI capabilities can be tricked into executing malicious commands hidden in websites or emails, effectively turning the browser against the user.
The security community refers to this threat as "prompt injection attacks," which exploit the fact that AI chatbots can’t always distinguish between a user's request and a malicious one. Gartner calls out Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI's Atlas as browsers that companies should be careful with since they can automate various functions.
Gartner goes as far as to advise that all chief information security officers (CISOs) “block all AI browsers in the foreseeable future to minimize risk exposure,” adding that the default settings “are optimized for end-user experience rather than cybersecurity best practices or privacy.”
On Monday, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre also warned, “There's a good chance prompt injection will never be properly mitigated” in the same way as SQL injection flaws, which can result from improper computer coding. “The best we can hope for is reducing the likelihood or impact of attacks,” the agency wrote on Monday.
However, the public can expect pushback from the tech industry, including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Perplexity, which have all been developing safeguards to counter prompt injection attacks. This includes assuming all content read from the web is untrusted and requires user permission before executing more sensitive commands. On Monday, Google announced its own effort to prevent such attacks in Chrome, which taps the Gemini chatbot for its AI capabilities.
In our own testing, we’ve found AI browsers to be underwhelming, with poor performance. So, users should be well aware of the limitations, including the privacy and security compromises.