What is AI DLP?
Data loss prevention, rebuilt for the one channel traditional DLP was never built to read: a prompt typed into a chat window.
AI DLP (AI data loss prevention) is data-loss-prevention technology built specifically to inspect what employees type into generative AI tools — catching PII, secrets, and prompt-injection attempts before that content leaves the organization, rather than watching files, email, or network traffic the way traditional DLP does.
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The definition
Data loss prevention, as a category, has always meant the same thing: stop sensitive data from leaving an organization through a channel it shouldn't. Traditional DLP built that around files, email attachments, and network egress — structured events with a known shape. AI DLP applies the same intent to a channel none of those tools were built to parse: free-form, conversational text typed into an AI tool, where the "exfiltration" is a sentence, not a file.
What makes it a different problem
Not a feature gap in traditional DLP — a different shape of input entirely.
Where it has to run
A prompt is typed directly into a third-party web app over an encrypted connection. A network proxy sees TLS traffic to a domain it must explicitly trust or inspect; a CASB only sees the tools already in its catalogue. AI DLP has to run at the point the text is composed — in the browser — to see it at all.
What it has to detect
No fixed schema, no file type to classify — just prose. Detection layers regex and heuristics for structured identifiers (Aadhaar, PAN, card numbers, API keys) with pattern-matching for prompt-injection phrasing, since a payload can be an instruction as easily as a piece of data.
What it does about it
The same four actions DLP has always had — allow, redact, warn, block — applied before the prompt leaves the device, not after the fact. Redaction is the highest- value action: the person still gets an answer, the identifier never leaves.
Do you still need traditional DLP?
Yes — AI DLP doesn't watch files, email, or network egress, and traditional DLP doesn't read a chat window. They cover different, non-overlapping channels of the same underlying risk, the way endpoint antivirus and a firewall cover different layers rather than competing for the same one.
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