CLIOPATRA: Extracting Private Information from LLM Insights
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09781v1
- Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:17:14 GMT
- Title: CLIOPATRA: Extracting Private Information from LLM Insights
- Abstract summary: We present CLIOPATRA, the first privacy attack against "privacy-preserving" LLM insight systems.<n>We show that CLIOPATRA can reach close to 100% when Clio is configured with other state-of-the-art models.
- Score: 30.13886480710163
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: As AI assistants become widely used, privacy-aware platforms like Anthropic's Clio have been introduced to generate insights from real-world AI use. Clio's privacy protections rely on layering multiple heuristic techniques together, including PII redaction, clustering, filtering, and LLM-based privacy auditing. In this paper, we put these claims to the test by presenting CLIOPATRA, the first privacy attack against "privacy-preserving" LLM insight systems. The attack involves a realistic adversary that carefully designs and inserts malicious chats into the system to break multiple layers of privacy protections and induce the leakage of sensitive information from a target user's chat. We evaluated CLIOPATRA on synthetically generated medical target chats, demonstrating that an adversary who knows only the basic demographics of a target user and a single symptom can successfully extract the user's medical history in 39% of cases by just inspecting Clio's output. Furthermore, CLIOPATRA can reach close to 100% when Clio is configured with other state-of-the-art models and the adversary's knowledge of the target user is increased. We also show that existing ad hoc mitigations, such as LLM-based privacy auditing, are unreliable and fail to detect major leaks. Our findings indicate that even when layered, current heuristic protections are insufficient to adequately protect user data in LLM-based analysis systems.
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