Ranked: 8 Things You Should Never Paste Into an AI Chatbot

Pasting something into a chatbot feels casual, almost disposable. It’s the digital equivalent of thinking out loud. 

But that muscle memory is exactly the problem. 

In a rush to get an answer, people drop sensitive data, work docs, and personal details they’d never post publicly, even though the risk profile is a lot closer than it feels.

Below are the top eight things you should never paste into an AI chatbot, ranked from easy-to-overlook mistakes to the most dangerous exposures.

8. Live location data or detailed travel plans

Live location data and detailed travel plans include anything that reveals where you are or where you’ll be at a specific time, including home addresses, hotel names, flight numbers, boarding passes, or casual “I’m out of town until Friday” details. It feels harmless because the information is temporary, but location data ties your online activity to the physical world, exposing routines, absences, and patterns that can’t be revoked once shared.

Imagine pasting a hotel confirmation so a chatbot can rewrite a complaint or summarize your itinerary. In a single copy-paste, you’ve shared where you’re sleeping, how long you’ll be away, and that your home is likely empty. The exposure might only last days, but the consequences don’t need much time at all.

7. Private conversations involving other people

These include messages where everyone involved hasn’t clearly agreed to have their words reused or analyzed elsewhere. That covers work emails, DMs, HR messages, client conversations, and group chats, especially ones that were shared with an expectation of privacy. Even if your name is on the thread, pasting it into an AI chatbot changes the audience and the rules, and consent doesn’t automatically carry over.

Picture copying a tense Slack exchange with a coworker to ask a chatbot how to “reply more professionally.” Names are removed, but the role, timing, and context make the person easy to recognize to anyone familiar with the situation. Editing for polish can introduce risk, especially when private conversations weren’t meant to be shared at all.

6. Medical records linked to your identity

Health information that can be traced back to you, like lab results, diagnoses, patient IDs, portal screenshots, or intake forms, carries a different level of sensitivity than most personal data. Once it’s tied to a real person, it stops being a general health question and becomes regulated information, with privacy protections that don’t apply when you paste it into a chatbot.

Uploading a test result to ask, “Is this normal?” often means your name is visible, or at least your birth date, provider name, and reference numbers. That’s enough to link medical details to your identity, opening the door to privacy violations, insurance complications, or future misuse.

5. Legal documents tied to active disputes

Contracts, settlement drafts, demand letters, court filings, or communications with a lawyer connected to an active legal issue pose risks far more serious than privacy concerns. These materials are usually protected by legal privilege and strict confidentiality, both of which can be compromised the moment they’re copied into a chatbot, stripping away safeguards you may be relying on without realizing it.

It starts with a practical question, like pasting a contract clause to ask what it really means or uploading a draft response to a legal notice for tone help. In doing so, you could weaken privilege, expose legal strategy, or create a trail of disclosures that may later work against you, where wording, intent, and timing all matter.

4. Confidential internal company information

Unreleased plans, customer data, private source code, incident reports, or anything marked confidential or covered by an NDA is information your organization has explicitly decided must stay internal. Pasting it into a chatbot breaks that boundary instantly, in ways that violate company policy, contracts, or regulatory obligations.

This usually happens under the banner of efficiency: dropping in a snippet of private code to debug faster, pasting an internal roadmap to “clean up the wording,” or summarizing an incident report for clarity. What seems like a quick productivity win can turn into an unauthorized disclosure with real consequences, from legal exposure to loss of trust.

3. Government-issued IDs and personal identifiers

Details from official IDs, like Social Security numbers, passport data, driver’s license information, or tax IDs, are permanent markers tied directly to who you are. Whether they’re copied as text or pulled from a document, this kind of information has a long shelf life and high resale value, making even a single exposure costly.

It might look like pasting a tax form to check a number or uploading a photo ID to ask an AI chatbot to clean up the image or confirm which fields are required for a form, with key details visible in the image. Once that information is divulged, it can be used to open fake accounts, commit tax or benefits fraud, or impersonate you in ways that surface months or years later; damage that’s hard to repair.

2. Financial account details

Anything that can move, unlock, or recover money, such as bank account and routing numbers, credit card details, crypto private keys, wallet seed phrases, or recovery codes, falls into a high-risk category. This information is usable right away, meaning exposure can translate to loss in minutes, not days.

It typically happens while trying to solve a small problem, like pasting a statement to understand a charge or sharing wallet details to debug a transaction. In the wrong hands, that same information can be used to pull money directly, reroute payments, or empty accounts outright.

1. Credentials and account recovery secrets

Secrets that authenticate you, like passwords, API keys, access tokens, backup codes, or security question answers, sit at the top of the risk hierarchy because they remove every remaining barrier between an attacker and your accounts. Once pasted into an AI chatbot, those secrets can give someone else the ability to act as you.

This usually doesn’t happen on purpose. It happens while troubleshooting, when someone pastes a chunk of code, a config file, or an error message to figure out why something isn’t working. Netskope’s research has already shown that credentials and keys do end up in AI tools this way, and once they do, the damage can be immediate: accounts taken over, access revoked, and connected systems exposed, all from a single copy-paste.

Pasting, privacy, and promises

AI companies are quick to say they care about privacy, and many do take real steps to protect user data. But privacy policies don’t change the core issue: once you paste sensitive information into a chatbot, you’ve expanded the circle of exposure beyond what you can see or fully control. That alone raises the risk, regardless of intent or safeguards.

The danger is that chatbots tend to normalize oversharing. They make it easy to treat serious information like throwaway text, even when the consequences are anything but.

The safest rule is simple. If something could cost you money, your job, your identity, or your safety if it leaked, it doesn’t belong in a chat window.

Apple may still be reworking Siri, but inside the company employees are already using internal chatbots to write, research, and get work done.

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