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AI clones will become a serious threat of the companies and Google has shared the worrying details about how these attacks are done.
Google is warning about hackers cloning AI models to attack victims. (Photo: AI generated)
Google and other tech companies have more reasons to be worried about the rise of AI and it is not just about them replacing coders or taking away your jobs. Google has come out with a detailed report which says some attackers tried to prompt Gemini into making a clone version of the AI model which can have a massive impact on how the AI arena operates over the next few years.
The company is calling it “distillation attacks,” which is designed to push the AI chatbot to share the confidential details about its model and how it functions in the background.
We’ve heard various forms of AI going rogue, including the ability to inject the regular looking prompts with malicious code that can be used to steal data. But the risk of hackers being able to break the AI into making a clone, that is another level of danger.
AI Clones From Prompt: What Google Has Said
Google says the attackers are trying to clone Gemini with “model extraction” and this is easily done by feeding 100,000s of prompts to the AI chatbot (anyone) and getting it to reveal the finer details that makes it tick. All the data can be used to build or even enhance existing/competing AI models, the company warned.
Google has made these allegations before, but the details shared in the new report suggest these attacks are orchestrated by private companies (its rivals) or even researchers, which doesn’t seem feasible with the level of clout and power needed to pull these off.
Rogue AI Everywhere
What Google has shared should be alarming for companies that are in the AI business but don’t have the resources or manpower close to Google that can not only help them detect such attacks but also prevent them.
Imagine if hackers succeed in using these tricks into cloning AI tools from smaller companies, the whole industry will struggle to put a leash on how the technology evolves, and even if it does, could be stolen from under their watch. Stealing the ideas and thought process of AI models can have massive repercussions for businesses, who are already spending billions to keep them running and evolving.
Hard To Avoid
For regular users, who are the real source of making AI models powerful, will have a hard time differentiating between the original and the rogue AI model.
The data scraping could happen at such a level where all your information is fed into the system which makes you believe that rogue AI version is actually the main AI that you have been using all this while. Gemini probably won’t be the first and the last to face these cloning attacks, and people are going to need to be even more smarter to avoid becoming victims to these new-gen attacks on the internet.
California, USA
February 13, 2026, 10:44 IST
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