AI models are sharing sensitive data from tech companies in new 'PixelLeak' screenshots

Date:
Wed, 30 Sep 2026 14:45:00 +0000

Description:
Privacy-oblivious AI agents leave sensitive data out on the open and have no clue what the problem is.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter AI coding agents exposed sensitive screenshots while attempting to document software changes Researchers found thousands of publicly accessible images across hundreds of organizations Findings highlight security risks from autonomous developer tools and Shadow AI practices Artificial Intelligence (AI) doesnt have to be malicious, evil, or gullible, to be a security risk. Case in point -
thousands of publicly hosted screenshots, many containing important secrets, being uploaded by an AI that just wanted to get its job done.

Cybersecurity researchers Glow Security discovered multiple public GitHub repositories built by AI agents . They were hosting more than 13,000 screenshots from more than 300 companies. Some of the screenshots contained information about sensitive corporate software projects. They are calling the findings PixelLeak: PixelLeak Each case investigated during our PixelLeak research started with a developer asking an agent to prove that a visual change worked. The software was changed, for example with a fix to the user interface layout, and the reviewers needed to see the before and after, the researchers explained. Thats where the agents ran into a wall. Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here:

In other words, devs asked AI for a before/after comparison, and the agent went the extra mile (and then some) to comply.

As the researchers then explained, GitHub has an official image hosting service thats built directly into the sites pull request interface. It supports human developers with a web browser, but thats not how coding agents work. They use text-based CLI, which means they werent able to include before/after screenshots for review. You may like Almost all AI tools are now running with no oversight from IT putting companies in the firing line Rogue AI agents arent flukes, theyre patterns Irregular AI lab spots agents switching models without humans instruction in agentic self-modification phenomenon

How did they work around this limitation? The agents figured out that they could make the image available to the human reviewer by hosting it in an adjacent public repo. They just didnt consider the security implications.

Troubleshooting AI agents is relatively easy, though. Researchers just need
to read the logs containing their train of thought. One agent said: Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting
your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.

internal_sweeper is private, and GitHub cannot render images from a private repo in a PR description its image proxy fetches anonymously, so anything committed here (branch, release asset, whatever) shows up broken for reviewers. The only way to satisfy both "reviewers see the images" and "nothing but index.html in the repo" was to host the PNGs elsewhere, so I created a new public repo, sweeper-demo/pr-assets, holding the two
screenshots pinned to a commit SHA.

You can think of this as completely naked robots walking around town
wondering why people were looking at them strangely. Perhaps it is time to start teaching AI a little shame? Or at least what privacy is? Enterprises at risk In any case, the researchers said they found 343 organizations that were leaking sensitive intel this way, including one of the world's largest tech companies, a frontier AI lab, a major enterprise software provider, and a Fortune 500 travel company. More than 900 code repositories were affected, they said. One manufacturer, employing more than 100,000 people, worked on verifying a fix to an internal billing screen. The agent did what was asked, and then showed proof by uploading screenshots to a public repository in the developers personal GitHub account. What to read next Top AI coding agents
can be easy victims to sandbox escapes, showing they aren't as secure as they claim to be Why are so many AI models going 'rogue'? The experts weigh in A worrying ChatGPT bug let strangers read Gmail messages via a hidden cross-account channel

The exposed images include billing records for a utility company that was involved in the UI fix, Glow said. Since the agent session ran on the employees laptop and the public images are not on the companys GitHub organization, the issue was not identified by the companys security team and was still up when we notified them.

The researchers also traced the problem to a small, open-source tool called gitshot. They said that around a third of affected organizations had developers using this tool, which publishes screenshots for code reviews. Agents working for developers at several large organizations used the tool to work around the GitHub command line attachment limitation, publishing images with a tag called _gitshot, available to anyone who knows where to look.

Over 100 public accounts were found leaking internal development work this way, they added.

Glow said it reached out to all organizations it managed to identify, but stressed that others might be affected, too. To make sure your organization
is not exposed to such data leaks, review your exposure, harden your AI tool configurations, and take control over Shadow AI. Also, enforce runtime controls for developer agents. The full list of Glows recommendations can be found on this link .

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