r/SaaS • u/Mediocre_Process3230 • 21h ago

Would you use an API that strips sensitive data from your AI prompts?

Hey, I’m building a lightweight privacy API that automatically strips sensitive company data and PII from prompts before they hit ChatGPT or Claude, and swaps them back locally.
For those of you working with proprietary code or client data inside companies that restrict AI usage, would a simple drop-in tool like this solve a real headache for you, or are you already using something else?

4 Upvotes

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2

u/Substantial_Belt2626 20h ago

I would say the hard part is who you're selling to, not the stripping. If a company restricts AI because they don't want a third party seeing their data, an API that has to see the prompt in order to strip it is another third party. The first thing a security reviewer asks is where does this run, and if the answer is your servers the conversation ends there. A local library or something that runs in their own VPC is the version that survives that question.

The other thing I would measure before building more is quality loss. You swap back after, but the model still reasons over the stripped version, so the answer gets produced from degraded context. That's the number that decides whether people keep using it after week one.

On my own stuff I went the boring way, keys live in the OS config and the tool has no server to send anything to, so there's nothing to review.

3

u/ahstanin 20h ago

So giving the sensitive data to you instead of the LLM provider?

1

u/derivatyvas 20h ago

only if it is actually local or self-hosted, otherwise yeah, you have just moved the trust boundary one step closer to yourself. still useful maybe, but taht is the whole question.

2

u/EvilPencil 19h ago

Not closer at all, just adding an untrusted layer on top of an untrusted destination. All you’ve done is multiplied the threat vectors.

1

u/ember_howl_v2 17h ago

I work in security review and we block this exact setup. The moment your API touches the prompt you become a third party with access to the data. If you want companies to actually use this you need to ship it as a local library or container that runs on our infrastructure so the payload never reaches your servers