Discover shadow AI

Shadow AI is the set of AI apps and services that people in your organization use without the security team knowing about them or approving them. It includes a chat assistant in a browser tab, a desktop AI app, a coding agent on a developer’s laptop, and a script that calls an AI API. Arcjet Discovery finds shadow AI on your organization’s computers and shows you who uses which AI services, from which app, and on which device.

Why shadow AI is a security risk

Every AI service that someone uses is a place that company data can reach. A developer might paste source code into a chat assistant, or run a coding agent with a personal account that your organization’s agreements with the vendor don’t cover. You can’t review, approve, or restrict a tool that you don’t know about.

Software inventory and network logs each show part of the picture. An inventory lists installed apps, but it misses command-line tools and AI services used in a browser. Network logs show that a device reached an AI service, but they don’t show which app made the connection. Discovery records both facts for each connection: the AI service and the app that connected to it.

How Discovery finds shadow AI

Discovery uses an endpoint agent that runs on your organization’s managed macOS and Windows devices. You deploy it with your device management (MDM) tool, and each device then reports to your Arcjet project. For more information, see Deploy the endpoint agent.

The agent observes outbound connections on the device. When a connection goes to an AI service, or comes from a known AI app, the agent records the following details:

The AI service that the connection goes to.
The app that made the connection, and the publisher that signed it.
The device and the local account that the app ran under.
When the connection happened.

For more information, see What Discovery collects.

Review shadow AI in the Arcjet Console

To see what Discovery found, open your project in the Arcjet Console and select the Discovery tab. It has the following views:

People: which people use AI services, with their devices, apps, and providers.
Devices: each device that runs the agent, whether it’s reporting, and the apps and AI activity observed on it.
Providers: each AI provider that your organization reaches, with the people, devices, and apps that connect to it. Use this view to investigate a service that you didn’t expect to see.

The agent reports the local account that an app ran under, which doesn’t identify a person by itself. On a device’s page, you assign each local account to a person, such as a member of your Arcjet team or a person that you add. Activity from an account without a person stays visible, so you can still investigate it.

Discovery and other Arcjet data sources

Arcjet has other ways to see AI agent activity. Coding agent hooks and OpenTelemetry report activity from the agents that you configured to send data to Arcjet. The Claude Compliance API reports Claude activity from your organization’s Anthropic account. Discovery finds the AI apps and services on your managed devices that nobody registered with Arcjet.

Use Discovery to learn which AI tools people use. Then bring the coding agents that you approve under policy with the hooks, which can refuse a tool call before it runs. For more information, see the following pages: