An AI assistant is a conversational system that interprets natural language, answers questions, and can trigger actions through connected tools or workflows. In security terms, it sits between a person and the systems they want to use, so it may search data, draft messages, create orders, or call APIs on the user’s behalf. That makes it more than a chatbot: it can become a decision-making and action layer.
This matters because attackers can target both the conversation and the tools behind it. Malicious prompts, untrusted documents, or embedded content may try to manipulate the assistant into leaking data, making unsafe recommendations, or performing unauthorized actions. Defenses include least-privilege tool access, user confirmation for state-changing steps, schema validation for structured outputs, and logging to review what the assistant did and why. In practice, secure AI assistants are designed to help without being easy to trick into doing the wrong thing.