What if Best Employee Turned Worst Threat Was Your AI?

Gianni Dell'Aiuto | WBN News Global - WBN News  | October 10, 2025

In my last article I asked what happens when your best employee suddenly becomes your worst threat. That scenario is unsettling enough when we are talking about people. But what if the “employee” in question is not human at all, but the AI you have just trained and deployed inside your business?

Generative AI is often seen as the perfect worker: it learns fast, never tires, and delivers answers in seconds. Yet the very qualities that make it appealing also carry risks that look strangely familiar to anyone who has ever dealt with insider threats. A GenAI model learns from enormous amounts of training data. If those datasets include sensitive business information—client lists, proprietary code, strategic documents—then the model itself is carrying inside knowledge you may never have intended it to reveal. All it takes is the wrong prompt, or the wrong user with the wrong level of access, and suddenly the AI starts “speaking out of turn.”

The betrayal, if we can call it that, is subtle. Unlike the employee who walks away with a hard drive under their arm, the AI does not need to physically remove anything. Sometimes it is enough for the system to generate an output that reconstructs pieces of data buried in its training, or that exposes patterns you considered confidential. A malicious actor can even poison the system itself, slipping in misleading or biased information so that the model produces answers that serve their purpose rather than yours.

And the problem is not only technical. With AI, compliance, privacy, and liability questions become unavoidable. A model that leaks personal data, or that was trained on information it should never have seen, exposes the company not only to operational risk but also to regulatory and reputational damage. In other words, the “rogue employee” here does not resign or demand severance pay: it keeps running, generating, and potentially leaking until you put the right governance in place.

The lesson is that the parallel with human insiders holds, but with an important twist. With GenAI, the profile of the unfaithful employee becomes thinner and harder to detect. No need to steal a database: sometimes it is enough to make the system give the wrong answer. Which leaves us with a new and urgent question: if AI is the new employee, who is really managing whom?

Protecting your data today is not just a matter of setting strong passwords or having employees sign a standard confidentiality letter. It requires a system that combines technical safeguards with legal frameworks, designed to anticipate risks rather than react to them. If AI can become the new “employee,” then data protection must evolve into a discipline where technology and law work side by side — because only together can they keep your most valuable assets truly safe.

Read Gianni's last article here: https://www.wbn.digital/whose-data-built-your-ai-and-algorithms/

Tags:
#Artificial Intelligence, #Insider Threats, #Business Security, #Generative AI Risks, #Data Privacy, #Tech Regulation, #Cybersecurity #AI Risk Management

Gianni Dell’Aiuto is an Italian attorney with over 35 years of experience in legal risk management, data protection, and digital ethics. Based in Rome and proudly Tuscan, he advises businesses globally on regulations like the GDPR, AI Act, and NIS2. An author and frequent commentator on legal innovation, he helps companies turn compliance into a competitive edge while promoting digital responsibility. Click here to connect with him.

Source Listings:
Sources: NIST AI Risk Management Framework, MIT Technology Review, OpenAI Usage Policies, Harvard Business Review on AI Governance, Wired Tech Security Reports, FTC Guidelines on AI Use, IBM Security AI Trends

Editor: Wendy S Huffman