While tech giants like Samsung and
Amazon
are increasingly working on their own
AI chatbots
, they have asked
employees
to not use the technology offered by other companies. Last year, Samsung banned the use of
generative AI tools
like ChatGPT on its internal networks and now Amazon has reportedly asked employees to not use third-party generative AI tools for work.
According to a report by Business Insider, Amazon sent an email to its employees warning them against using third-party AI models.
“While we may find ourselves using GenAl tools, especially when it seems to make life easier, we should be sure not to use it for confidential Amazon work,” the company warned employees. Amazon is among a group of tech companies like Google, OpenAI and Facebook-parent Meta, that are working on language models and providing them to others so that they can develop their custom chatbots for specific use cases.
Why Amazon has banned the use of AI chatbots for work
Just like Samsung was worried about its confidential data being potentially leaked to other companies, Amazon is also cautious about the privacy of its data.
“Don't share any confidential Amazon, customer, or employee data when you're using 3rd party GenAl tools. Generally, confidential data would be data that is not publicly available,” the company reportedly said.
The e-commerce giant also has a policy on internal third-party generative AI use and interaction that details that the companies offering generative AI services may take a licence to or ownership over the data that employees input into tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
“This means that any outputs such as email, PRFAQs, internal wiki pages, code, confidential information, documentation, pre-launch and strategy materials may be extracted, reviewed, used, and distributed by the owners of the generative Al,” the policy states.
“As such, all Amazonians must abide by our standard Amazon policies for confidential information and security for any inputs to generative Al,” it added.
It is to be noted that the companies that offer AI tools use user chats to train and fine-tune their models. Though they still offer options to users to prevent the company from accessing their data, it may be possible that some employees may not enable that option while working on such tools.
According to a report by Bloomberg last year, Samsung banned the use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT on its internal networks and company-owned devices citing fears that putting sensitive information on these platforms may be a security risk.
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