The promise of AI is clear—tools like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s AI models are revolutionizing how businesses handle everything from customer service to data analysis. But with great power comes great responsibility, and along with that responsibility, a whole host of new risks. One of the most dangerous and rapidly evolving attack vectors against AI models today is prompt injection—an attack where malicious inputs are used to manipulate AI behavior.
When you think of securing your AI, it’s tempting to rely on the AI provider to take care of it for you. After all, they built the model, right? However, there are several reasons why depending solely on AI providers to solve vulnerabilities like prompt injection may not be enough. Here’s why having a dedicated AI security layer—like WitnessAI—is critical.
1. AI Providers Focus on Broad Use Cases, Not Your Specific Needs
Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI design AI models to serve a massive variety of use cases, from chatbots to language translation and more. This means their primary goal is to create models that are general-purpose and widely applicable across industries. While they certainly make efforts to improve the security of their models, these improvements are often designed to address broad, common issues.
For example, while OpenAI might focus on blocking commonly exploited vulnerabilities, they’re not specifically tailoring their security for the nuances of your industry, your workflows, or your unique data sensitivity requirements. If you’re in healthcare, finance, or any industry with strict compliance and security standards, you’ll need granular controls that go beyond what the AI provider offers. This is where WitnessAI comes in—providing customizable security guardrails tailored to your business’s unique needs.
2. Security Fixes from Providers Can Be Slow
Even though major AI providers are constantly improving security, their release cycles and update schedules are often slow. Fixes are typically reactive, meaning they may address vulnerabilities only after they’ve been exploited in the wild or flagged by researchers. If you’re relying solely on AI providers to patch these vulnerabilities, you could be left exposed for extended periods while waiting for an update.
WitnessAI is proactive. Its Model Protection Guardrail is designed to detect and block prompt injection attacks in real time, well before any broader security patch is released by AI providers. By placing this extra layer of protection over your AI models, you ensure that you’re not left waiting in a security limbo between updates.
3. No Unified Security Across Multiple Providers
It’s increasingly common for businesses to use multiple AI models from different providers, often for different purposes. For example, you might use Google’s AI for analytics, OpenAI’s GPT for natural language processing, and Anthropic’s AI for ethical decision-making. Each of these models could have different security vulnerabilities and different timelines for addressing them.
Managing security across these different platforms is complex. WitnessAI offers cross-provider protection, ensuring that your security posture is consistent and that all your models, no matter where they come from, are protected against prompt injection and other AI-specific attacks. Rather than relying on individual providers’ timelines and protection methods, WitnessAI acts as a centralized, vendor-neutral security layer.
4. Lack of Custom Control and Transparency
When you rely on AI providers for security, you’re also often relying on black-box models. You don’t have full visibility into how they handle security, how they manage data, or how they respond to specific prompt injection scenarios. This lack of transparency makes it difficult to audit or build confidence in the security of your AI deployment.
WitnessAI provides full visibility into AI interactions, monitoring and logging every query and response. You can audit, investigate, and adjust security policies in real time. By having that level of insight and control, you not only ensure compliance with internal and external regulations but also reduce the risk of unmonitored vulnerabilities.
5. Customizability for Your Business Needs
AI providers offer generic security solutions that don’t always allow for customization. For example, if you want to redirect technical queries to internal models or block specific behaviors like job searching, most AI providers won’t offer that flexibility.
WitnessAI’s Behavioral Activity Guardrail allows you to create custom rules and security measures based on your organization’s needs. You can control exactly what behaviors are allowed, blocked, or redirected—making it possible to fine-tune AI usage in ways that match your organization’s policies and risk profile. Want to block certain types of technical support queries from being processed by external AI models and direct them to a secure internal system instead? With WitnessAI, that’s easy to do.
6. Future-Proofing Your AI Security
As AI continues to evolve, so will attack vectors like prompt injection. AI providers will certainly work to address emerging risks, but they have a large, general user base to serve. Their security priorities may not always align with your specific use cases or industry regulations.
By leveraging WitnessAI, you get a security solution that is focused solely on protecting AI systems from advanced threats. Our platform continuously learns from new attacks, adapting its defenses and offering you future-proof protection. With real-time updates and machine learning-based monitoring, you stay ahead of new threats without waiting for a generic patch from your provider.
Conclusion: Why You Need a Third-Party AI Security Provider
While AI providers like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are making strides in improving security, they’re not focused on the granular needs of your business or industry. WitnessAI provides the dedicated, real-time protection that ensures your AI models remain secure, even as new threats like prompt injection emerge.
By offering cross-provider security, custom control, and real-time responses, WitnessAI gives you the confidence to deploy AI models safely and securely, without waiting for your AI provider to catch up with the latest threats.
Interested in learning more about how WitnessAI can secure your AI models? Contact us today for a personalized demo.
Originally published on Information Security Buzz.