Incident 811: AI-Powered Transcription Services Allegedly Leak Confidential Workplace Discussions

Description: AI-powered meeting assistants, such as Otter.ai’s OtterPilot and Zoom's AI Companion, have reportedly shared sensitive and private conversations beyond the intended audience. These AI tools, which are set to automatically record and distribute meeting transcripts, allegedly sent confidential discussions after participants had left the meeting, the consequences of which led to unintended exposure of proprietary information, privacy breaches, and potential reputational harm.

Editor Notes: Reconstructing the timeline of events and more details: In late September 2024, Alex Bilzerian received a transcript from Otter.ai after a Zoom meeting with venture capital investors. The transcript included sensitive post-meeting discussions that occurred after he had logged off. Following the incident, the investors apologized to Bilzerian for the unintentional leak of private information, but the damage was already done, leading to the cancellation of the deal. On October 2, 2024, The Washington Post published a report on the broader implications of AI-powered workplace tools sharing sensitive information without sufficient user control or discretion, using Bilzerian's account as a specific case to discuss these wider vulnerabilities and likely ongoing incidents among other users of the technology.

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Alleged: Otter.ai and Zoom developed an AI system deployed by Alex Bilzerian , Unnamed venture capital investors , Employees , Employers , Companies and Organizations, which harmed Alex Bilzerian , Unnamed venture capital investors , Employees , Employers , Companies and Organizations.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

811

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-10-02

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

AI assistants are blabbing our embarrassing work secrets

washingtonpost.com

AI Transcription Services Are Spilling Company Secrets: Report

entrepreneur.com

Some AI Assistants Have This Big Flaw: They Talk Too Much

inc.com

AI Glitch Exposes Confidential Conversations: Otter AI Transcribes Private Talks After Zoom Meeting Ends

timesnownews.com

washingtonpost.com · 2024

Corporate assistants have long been the keepers of company gossip and secrets. Now artificial intelligence is taking over some of their tasks, but it doesn't share their sense of discretion.

Researcher and engineer Alex Bilzerian said on X …

entrepreneur.com · 2024

Can AI be trusted with confidential information?

That was the question at stake when popular AI transcription service Otter, which has more than 14 million users, sent an automatic transcript of a Zoom meeting to AI researcher Alex Bilzeria…

inc.com · 2024

The weird thing about AI tech is that it's so new and so exciting that it's still fun and novel to include it in everyday experiences like building a social media post, or into everyday business processes like generating content or automati…

timesnownews.com · 2024

Alex Bilzerian, an engineer and researcher, recently experienced an unsettling AI mishap involving Otter AI, a popular transcription tool. After a Zoom meeting with a venture capital firm, Bilzerian received not only the meeting transcript …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.