Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know A prompt injection manipulates a model into following an attacker's instructions instead of the system's. It works for a structural reason rather than an implementation one: a language model cannot reliably separate instructions from data, because both arrive as natural-language text through the same channel. Your system prompt and a sentence buried in a supplier's PDF are, at the level the model operates on, the same kind of object. Nothing in the architecture marks one as authority and the other as content. In a chatbot that produces text, that is a content problem. In an agent that holds tools, it is an authorisation problem, because a successful injection can leak data, bypass safety controls, or trigger actions nobody asked for. And the important consequence…
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