Incident·WS-0005·Mar 2023·in the wild·Privacy & data leaks

Samsung engineers leak chip source code to ChatGPT

Samsung Electronics (semiconductor division) / OpenAI ChatGPT

29/100

WS-2 Moderate

Harm score 40, signal score 16. Autonomy: tool (a person misused it). How the scores work.

Harm 2/5

damage actually done

Reach 1/5

who was affected

Autonomy 0/4

how much the AI did on its own

Novelty 2/5

how new the behavior was

Permanence 3/5

how hard it is to undo

Shortly after Samsung's chip division permitted ChatGPT use, staff submitted proprietary source code for a fab measurement program, a yield-calculation program to optimize, and a recorded meeting to turn into minutes. Samsung imposed an emergency 1,024-byte prompt limit, opened disciplinary reviews and began building an internal tool.

Damage

3 disclosures of proprietary code/meeting content to an external provider; financial impact unquantified

Sources

Gigazine, second source. Evidence confidence: medium. Correction: leaks occurred in March 2023 (within weeks of permitting use) and were first reported by Economist Korea around end of March/early April, not April. A later company-wide generative-AI ban (May 2023) was widely reported but not verified here.

Factor ratings and the score are this index’s judgments by a published formula; facts, dates and figures come from the linked sources. Where a lawsuit is pending, the summary reports allegations, not findings.