Postmortem: Our AI-Powered Chatbot Hallucinated Sensitive Data – Root Cause and Fix

On March 14, 2024, our production AI customer support chatbot leaked 1,247 unique PII records (including SSNs, unmasked credit card numbers, and internal API keys) to 892 end users over a 72-hour window. This wasn't a prompt injection attack, a database breach, or a misconfigured permission: it was a systemic failure of our LLM guardrail pipeline that cost us $412k in GDPR fines, 14% churn in enterprise accounts, and 3 weeks of all-hands incident response. 📡 Hacker News Top Stories Right Now Se