Perplexity, Anthropic and Other Big AI Companies Might Have Exposed Secrets on GitHub

Perplexity, Anthropic, and other leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies might have exposed sensitive data on GitHub, claims a cloud security firm. As per the firm's report, at least 65 percent of the leading AI companies have exposure risk around their proprietary AI models, datasets, and training processes. Some of the exposed data includes application programming interface (API) keys, tokens, and sensitive credentials, the report claimed. The researchers also highlighted the need for AI companies to use more advanced scanners that can alert them to such exposure.

GitHub Contains AI Secrets of Major AI Firms, Claims Research

According to the cloud security platform Wiz, 65 percent of the AI companies mentioned in Forbes' AI 50 list have their AI secrets exposed on GitHub. This would include companies such as Anthropic, Mistral, Cohere, Midjourney, Perplexity, Suno, World Labs, and more. However, the researchers did not name any particular company.

The sensitive data leaks on GitHub as the company's developers use the platform to code and create repositories. These repositories can inadvertently contain API keys, dataset information, and other information that can even reveal critical information about their proprietary AI models. The risk increases with a higher GitHub footprint, although the researchers found an instance where data was leaked even without any public repositories.

To test whether these AI companies have any exposure risk, Wiz's team first identified the employees of the company by scanning through the followers of an organisation on LinkedIn, accounts referencing the organisation name in their GitHub metadata, code contributors, and correlating the information across Hugging Face and other platforms.

After identifying the accounts, the researchers then performed an extensive scan across three parameters of depth, coverage, and perimeter. Depth search or searching for new sources lets the researchers scan the accounts' full commit history, commit history on forks, deleted forks, workflow logs, and gists. The researchers also found that the employees can sometimes add this sensitive data into their own public repositories and gists.

Some of the leaked data surfaced by the team includes model weights and biases, Google API, credentials of Hugging Face and ElevenLabs, and more.