Postmortem: Our AI-Powered Chatbot Hallucinated Sensitive Data – Root Cause and Fix

On March 14, 2024, our production AI customer support chatbot leaked 1,247 unique PII records (including SSNs, unmasked credit card numbers, and internal API keys) to 892 end users over a 72-hour window. This wasn't a prompt injection attack, a database breach, or a misconfigured permission: it was