The AI Attack Surface: How Threat Actors Abuse Trusted AI Platforms

As more people use AI models such as Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini, threat actors are abusing trusted AI platforms in a variety of ways to trick users into downloading malware.

Over the past nine months, Huntress has seen incidents where threat actors have weaponized shareable AI content, public mini-apps, and sponsored search placement to target AI users.

Individuals can take a number of measures to shrink their AI attack surface, including the use of ad blockers. Businesses should restrict script execution from the clipboard, enforce application allow-listing, and monitor for new scheduled tasks and antivirus exclusion changes.

AI is here, and we're hearing about all the high-profile security risks that come with it. AI security discussions often focus on attacks against AI companies and models (such as the recent OpenAI-HuggingFace intrusion). However, the Huntress Security Operations Center (SOC) is seeing a more prolific, day-to-day threat: threat actors abusing the ways users interact with AI platforms.

Over the past nine months, we have seen threat actors abuse legitimate AI features and services, including:

Claude Artifacts: content that Claude generates and displays as a separate preview pane within a chat; Claude Artifacts can be "published" and made publicly available via a link.

Claude.ai/share links: shareable URLs generated when a user publishes a Claude conversation. These links can appear in search results when they are posted in locations that search engines can crawl, such as forums or social media.

ChatGPT and Grok conversations: shared conversations that are hosted on legitimate AI platforms that can be indexed and surfaced in search results, including for troubleshooting queries.

There's a common thread here: these are all part of an AI attack surface, which involves a trust boundary around shareable AI content, public mini-apps, and sponsored search placement.