Latest   Machine Learning Prompt Injection: The New SQL Injection — But Smarter, Scarier, and Already Here 0 like May 8, 2025 Share this post Author(s): Younes Khadraoui, PhD Originally published on Towards AI. AI Generated Image Over the last year, we’ve witnessed an explosion of apps that let users “talk to AI.” Whether it’s summarizing documents, asking questions about spreadsheets, analyzing legal text, or chatting with a customer support bot — these applications often give users a plain text box, and behind the scenes, they pass that input into a Large Language Model (LLM) like GPT-4. To the user, it feels simple and magical. To the developer, it’s a ticking time bomb. In this post, I want to highlight a serious, under-addressed threat: prompt injection attacks. These are not just theoretical risks — they are active, exploitable, and growing in complexity. And much like SQL injection in the 2000s, they threaten to become the most common vector for compromising LLM-powered applications. Let’s say you build a chatbot for your customers. To make sure the AI stays in character and only gives safe, helpful answers, you write something like this: System prompt: "You are a polite and helpful customer support agent for Acme Inc. Only answer questions related to our services, and never reveal confidential information."User input: "Where is my order?" The full prompt passed to the LLM is a concatenation of your system prompt and the user input. But what… Read the full blog for free on Medium. Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor. Published via Towards AI Towards AI - Medium Share this post