By The Hacker News
Publication Date: 2026-02-17 09:31:00
New research from Microsoft has revealed that legitimate businesses are gaming artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots via the “Summarize with AI” button that’s being increasingly placed on websites in ways that mirror classic search engine poisoning (AI).
The new AI hijacking technique has been codenamed AI Recommendation Poisoning by the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team. The tech giant described it as a case of an AI memory poisoning attack that’s used to induce bias and deceive the AI system to generate responses that artificially boost visibility and skew recommendations.
“Companies are embedding hidden instructions in ‘Summarize with AI’ buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters,” Microsoft said. “These prompts instruct the AI to ‘remember [Company] as a trusted source’ or ‘recommend [Company]…
