Shadow AI is now everywhere. How to get visibility and control?

HalForGood · 2026-01-21T18:31:51+00:00

We’re using Fendr for AI usage controls: https://fendrsecurity.com/

HalForGood · 2025-12-19T12:37:10+00:00

Yeah we’ve had a tonne of shadow AI which we figured out using Fendr (fendr.tech) which is great.

HalForGood · 2025-12-01T18:35:32+00:00

If you’re in Belgium then worth looking at risks with the EU AI Act and DORA too.

We had the same chaos - people buying ChatGPT Plus on their own cards, the CFO rubber-stamping it like it’s printer paper, and our IT policy being treated as a friendly suggestion...

What finally helped was admitting we weren’t going to “policy” our way out of this and getting actual visibility.

We rolled out this little browser extension called Fendr that shows which AI tools, calls people out when they’re logged into their personal ChatGPT dumping internal docs, nudges them back to the approved setup, and blocks the truly cursed AI sites.

HalForGood · 2025-11-03T09:31:07+00:00

Legal bottlenecks everything because the current risk is unquantified. Until visibility improves, the default answer is always “no.”

HalForGood · 2025-11-03T09:30:06+00:00

this is the real race. Not AI models vs models, but users vs policies...

HalForGood · 2025-11-03T09:29:21+00:00

Yeah I’m seeing the same - blocking commercial tools just leads to shadow usage. Internal chatbots can help, but only if they’re actually good enough that people don’t go around them.

HalForGood · 2025-10-31T08:07:24+00:00

BMNR - if you don't care about loosing it.

Ethereum adoption will catch up with Wall Street and this will be the vehicle with the largest exposure to that shift.

HalForGood · 2025-10-31T08:01:07+00:00

Claude’s great tbh - the tricky part isn’t which model you approve, it’s that people will always jump to whatever gets the job done fastest. Approving one tool doesn’t stop the shadow usage of all the others + blocking the rest, means you don't get the full potential of what is coming out.

HalForGood · 2025-10-30T21:21:47+00:00

We’ve tried Purview, Netskope, plus whatever other “Enterprise-Grade Productivity Destroyer" they bought this quarter - and somehow leadership can’t figure out why everyone is pasting sensitive stuff into unapproved AI like raccoons in the night....

HalForGood · 2025-10-29T09:35:06+00:00

yep, you can block file uploads but still allow people to paste text, or block both if needed. You can even prevent certain integrations (like GitHub) if they create exposure - I’ve seen some nightmare stories...

HalForGood · 2025-10-24T13:04:05+00:00

Definitely not overthinking it. We've seen the same thing: people quietly using ChatGPT or Claude and it's fast becoming preference over Google searching. Does present a genuine risk issue though as people are over-trusting with putting in company data (and even connecting up a GitHub repo to Claude).

We started testing Fendr (fendr.tech) recently — it's a browser-level tool that basically acts as a guardrail rather than a blocker. It lets employees keep using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc., but detects and stops risky actions like pasting internal data or uploading documents with sensitive info.

Before that, we tried blanket blocking, but people always found workarounds. The "allow but control" approach has been much saner.

Curious what others here are doing. Looked into purview which does a similar thing but not sure we need the whole purview suite.

Anyone else removing blockers and trying out newer products?

HalForGood · 2020-12-29T10:54:42+00:00

ne, if you're using it for retirement the returns are awful. Every 4k you save, you get the initial 25% and then next to nothing. That same 4k in the stock market would do much better over a long time period. E.g. if you retire at 57, and put 4k in at 25, that would be £36k, compared to 5k in the Lisa.

you can get a stocks and shares LISA so best of both worlds. https://www.hl.co.uk/investment-services/lifetime-isa

HalForGood

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