Every business is rushing to adopt AI. Productivity teams want faster workflows, developers want coding assistants, and executives want “AI transformation” on this year’s roadmap, not next year’s. However, as enthusiasm for AI spreads, so does a largely invisible expansion of your attack surface. This is what we call shadow AI.

If you think it’s the same as the old “shadow IT” problem with different branding, you’re wrong.  Shadow AI is faster, harder to detect, and far more entangled with your intellectual property and data flows than any consumer SaaS tool ever was.

In this blog, we’ll look at the operational reality behind shadow AI, and how everyday employee behavior is adding to your exposure landscape, why conventional threat models don’t account for it, and how to use continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) principles to see what’s happening under the surface.

What is Shadow AI, Really?

Shadow AI is the use of AI tools (LLMs, code assistants, model-as-a-service platforms, data-labeling sites, browser extensions) that are not sanctioned, governed, or monitored by the security team.

This includes, but is not limited to:

Shadow AI is not malicious in nature; in fact, the intent is almost always to improve productivity or convenience. Unfortunately, the impact is a major increase in unplanned data exposure, untracked model interactions, and blind spots across your attack surface.

Why Does Shadow AI Create New Exposure Blind Spots?

AI tools aren’t like regular apps. They don’t just take in data: they can change it, remember it, learn from it, and sometimes keep it in ways you can’t easily track or undo. This is why they create new blind spots in your security.

1. Your attack surface is expanding through human behavior, not infrastructure

Historically, exposures happened when new assets were added (think servers, applications, cloud tenants, or IoT devices). Shadow AI changes this because now the attack surface widens when an employee does something as simple as copying, pasting, or uploading content.

You can harden servers, but hardening human instinct isn’t as easy.

2. You’re losing visibility into where your data is going

Most AI tools don’t clearly explain how long they keep your data. Some retrain on what you enter, others store prompts forever for debugging, and a few (like the early DeepSeek models) had almost no limits at all.

That means your sensitive info could be copied, stored, reused for training, or even show up later to people it shouldn’t.

Ask Samsung, whose internal code found its way into a public model’s responses after an engineer uploaded it. They banned AI instantly. Hardly the most strategic solution, and definitely not the last time you’ll see this happen.

3. Threat modeling struggles to account for model behavior

Traditional threat modeling treats tools as software. AI models are systems with:

LLMs can be fooled or misled. We’ve seen it again and again, everything from prompt‑leak attacks to cases where even top‑tier models like GPT‑5 can be coaxed into doing unsavory things they shouldn’t.

If you can’t predict model behavior, you can’t fully predict your attack surface.

4. Exposure management becomes fragmented

Shadow AI bypasses:

All that “AI data exhaust” ends up scattered across a slew of unsanctioned tools and locations. Your exposure assessments are, by default, incomplete because you can’t protect what you can’t see.

Why is Traditional Policy Not Enough?

Of course, you need an AI Acceptable Use Policy (AI AUP), but on its own, it’s not enough. Policy won’t fix blind spots that happen due to behavior, not intention.

Employees bypass policy when:

Shadow AI is fundamentally a visibility problem. You cannot govern what you cannot detect.

How Can CTEM Help Detect, Assess, and Respond to Shadow AI?

Continuous threat exposure management offers you a practical way to anticipate and mitigate the risks of shadow AI before they escalate into major incidents. Yes, CTEM cannot eliminate unpredictability, but it provides a practical way to work with it.

Here’s how:

1. Scoping: Map your real AI usage, not your expected usage

Shadow AI often surprises security teams because the perception of AI use does not align with employee reality.

Scoping means discovering:

Exposure visibility platforms already give you the telemetry for this. Tools that have shadow-AI-detection capabilities can pinpoint when workers access unapproved AI platforms, including emerging (and unsafe) models like DeepSeek.

Never think of this as trying to stifle innovation; rather, it is about understanding what is really happening and the potential dangers.

2. Discovery: Identify the assets, identities, and data flows involved

Shadow AI exposure is rarely isolated. It’s connected to:

The discovery phase maps out how these AI tools interact with your systems, users, and settings. In essence, it shows where attackers could get a foothold. You’re creating a clear picture of how and where shadow AI touches your environment.

3. Prioritization: Which shadow AI activities introduce real risk?

Not every use of an outside AI tool is dangerous, but some are potentially catastrophic.

Your prioritization needs to answer these questions:

Threat intelligence research is very helpful here. When new models enter the market (sometimes with zero safety layers at all), security teams need context quickly so they can categorize risk before it becomes a problem.

4. Validation: Test the risk, not just the policy violation

Validation means simulating the real impact:

This is where exposure management differentiates itself from traditional vulnerability scanning. Remember, you’re testing behavioral exposures, not software defects.

5. Mobilization: Enforce guardrails without crushing innovation

The final step is where most businesses face a challenge. They either blanket-ban all AI tools instantly (Samsung’s move) or do nothing until an incident forces a frantic reactive scramble.

Instead, mobilization should look like:

This is where an exposure-management mindset pays off: it’s unrealistic and unproductive to try stopping employees from using AI. Instead, try to prevent the exposures that start with well-intentioned, albeit unadvisable behavior.

Shadow AI is Now Part of Your Attack Surface, Whether You’re Ready Or Not

Shadow AI has changed from an occasional or unusual instance case to everyday behavior happening across all departments. Because it touches your sensitive data, your IP, and your identities directly, it must apply the same level of rigor that cloud, identity, and SaaS exposures do.

The companies that succeed here will be the ones that:

AI will change the way every business operates, while shadow AI will decide how many of them get breached along the way.

If you want to understand how exposure management can help your business get ahead of these risks,  research from market leaders, threat intelligence, and exposure-visibility resources are a good starting point.