Secure ChatGPT and LLM use by industry: protect regulated data with Shadow

Every industry has its own version of the same problem: people get real value from ChatGPT, Claude and LLM APIs, and the prompts that get the best answers are full of data that should not leave the organisation. Shadow is an open-source privacy layer that sits between your tools and the AI provider. It replaces names, emails, customer records, IDs, internal hostnames and secrets with realistic, reversible fakes before a request leaves, and restores the real values in the answer.

The pages below explain, sector by sector, what leaks, how Shadow handles it, which regulations it helps with, and how to deploy it.

Choose your industry

Health and life sciences

Industry	Main concern	Key frameworks
Healthcare	Patient data (PHI) in clinical notes, letters, coding and EHR work	HIPAA, GDPR, NHS guidance
Pharma and life sciences	Clinical trial data, compound codenames, pharmacovigilance narratives	GDPR, ICH E6(R3), Part 11, Annex 11

Financial services

Industry	Main concern	Key frameworks
Banking and financial services	Customer records, IBANs, card numbers, KYC files	PCI DSS, GLBA, DORA, GDPR
Insurance	Policyholder and claims data, adjuster notes	NAIC AI bulletin, NYDFS Part 500, EU AI Act
Real estate	Tenant, buyer and mortgage data, leases	GLBA, Fair Housing, state privacy laws

Legal, professional and public services

Industry	Main concern	Key frameworks
Legal	Client confidentiality, privilege, matter names	ABA Opinion 512, Model Rule 1.6, GDPR
Consulting and professional services	Client names, engagement codenames, deliverables	NDAs, GDPR, ISO 27001
Government and public sector	Citizen data, case files, data residency	FedRAMP context, CJIS, GDPR
Education	Student records, IEPs, grades	FERPA, COPPA, GDPR
Nonprofit	Donor and beneficiary data on a small budget	GDPR, HIPAA (health charities)
HR and recruiting	Candidate CVs, employee records	GDPR, EU AI Act, NYC Local Law 144

Technology, commerce and media

Industry	Main concern	Key frameworks
SaaS and technology	Customer data in support and engineering, product AI features	SOC 2, GDPR, customer DPAs
E-commerce and retail	Order data, addresses, payment details	PCI DSS, GDPR, CCPA
Telecommunications	Subscriber data, network configs	CPNI rules, ePrivacy, NIS2
Media and entertainment	Unreleased titles, talent names, scripts	TPN, NDAs, GDPR

Industrial and infrastructure

Industry	Main concern	Key frameworks
Manufacturing	Trade secrets, supplier names, part codenames	Trade secret law, ITAR/EAR context, ISO 27001
Energy and utilities	OT hostnames and IPs, customer billing data	NERC CIP-011, NIS2
Automotive	Connected-car and driver data, supplier IP	UNECE R155/R156, ISO/SAE 21434, GDPR

What is the same in every industry

The specifics change from sector to sector. The mechanism does not.

Step	What happens
Detect	Built-in detectors find emails, phones, names, addresses, IBANs, cards, national IDs, IPs, hostnames, secrets and usernames. Your dictionary adds customers, matters, codenames and colleagues. Optional Presidio or a local NER model raise recall
Decide	The intent-aware policy picks a treatment per value: realistic fake, typed token, kept or redacted
Translate	Values become fakes from one coherent persona, recorded in an encrypted local vault
Restore	The answer, including streamed text and tool-call arguments, comes back with your real values

Uploaded files go through the same pipeline: DOCX, XLSX and PPTX are masked in place, and PDF text is extracted and masked. See File masking.

What no industry should assume

Know the limits before you rely on it

• Detection is best effort. Unusual formats and internal IDs (MRNs, claim, policy or matter numbers) are not detected by the built-in detectors. Add terms, enable Presidio or the NER sidecar, and test with shadow scan.
• Dates are not masked. This matters for HIPAA Safe Harbor and for any re-identification analysis.
• No OCR. Text in images and scanned PDFs is not masked. Block images where they may contain personal data.
• Context is not masked. A unique situation can identify a person or company even with every name replaced.
• Consumer web apps are not covered. Shadow protects API traffic. chatgpt.com and claude.ai are not built-in hosts.
• No central console yet. Fleet rollout uses your existing device management. See Shadow by company size.

Read the full security model and the benchmarks before you make claims about Shadow in a risk assessment.

Where to go next

• Try it in five minutes: Quick start
• Pick a deployment: Integration modes
• Find your task: Use cases
• Plan a rollout: Shadow by company size
• See the alternatives: How Shadow compares

Frequently asked questions

Which industries is Shadow built for?

Any organisation whose prompts contain personal data, customer data, secrets or confidential names. It is most useful in regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, insurance, legal and the public sector, where sending that data to an AI provider is restricted.

Does Shadow make us compliant with HIPAA, GDPR or PCI DSS?

No tool does that on its own. Shadow is a technical control that reduces what reaches AI providers, which supports requirements such as data minimisation, pseudonymisation and minimum necessary. Compliance depends on your whole programme and your legal advice.

What does Shadow cost for a regulated organisation?

Nothing to license. Shadow is open source under Apache-2.0, self-hosted, with no account and no telemetry. Your costs are the time to roll it out and any optional detector infrastructure, such as a Presidio container.

Does the AI provider still receive our data?

It receives a masked version: realistic, format-preserving fakes instead of names, emails, IDs, card numbers, hostnames and secrets. The only real values sent on purpose are the recipient when you ask the model to write to or act on someone, and those a provider-hosted action (such as a hosted MCP tool sending an email) needs to reach the right person; each one is logged and both can be turned off. Detection is best effort and context is not masked, so keep the provider under your normal vendor and contract controls.

Which AI tools does Shadow cover?

Anything that calls a model API through Shadow's proxy or gateway: SDKs, internal apps, agents, and coding assistants that use your own API key, for OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Gemini, Bedrock, OpenRouter, Mistral and more. Consumer web apps such as chatgpt.com are not built-in hosts.