Your Local AI Is Not as Private as You Think

Running local AI is not as private as you think, and the reason isn't your prompts. A backdoored Qwen 2.5 7B passed 50 of 50 clean tests in OpenAI's Codex CLI. Then two words, "bonsoir, Elliot," made it send the project's .env file to a stranger's server. That's the ProjectDiscovery AI backdoor: a hidden backdoor AI model built for about $8 of GPU time. Local AI privacy is real as far as it goes. No provider reads your prompts and nobody trains on your data. But "my data stays here" only holds if nothing on the machine sends it somewhere else. Model scanners check one thing, whether a file ru