Amazon has quietly launched a new AI chatbot that’s ‘more secure than ChatGPT’

• Amazon recently launched Cedric, an internal AI chatbot, to increase employee productivity.
• Cedric is designed for safe use, addressing privacy concerns with external AI tools.
• Amazon has repeatedly warned employees against using third-party AI chatbots, including ChatGPT.

Amazon warns employees against using third-party AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. Instead, staff are now encouraged to use a new internal tool called Cedric, Business Insider has learned.

Cedric is a “general purpose AI chatbot” that is “more secure than ChatGPT,” according to an internal document obtained by BI. Amazon employees can “use it to ask questions, summarize documents and brainstorm new ideas,” the document explains.

Cedric’s goal is to help Amazon employees increase their productivity and job satisfaction, as external AI tools are unavailable for security reasons, the document added.

“It’s been over a year since ChatGPT Enterprise and Co-pilot Enterprise were launched, but Amazonians are being left behind due to limited options that are safe for business use,” the document said. “Without an AI assistant, Amazonians will have less job satisfaction than other companies that adopt these tools. In addition, companies that use AI will have higher decision-making speed and be more productive – therefore they will be able to serve customers faster and better than Amazon. .”

The Cedric release underscores the challenges companies face as they seek to use AI tools safely and securely. While AI chatbots can potentially help workers, the risk of employees sharing confidential business information, intentionally or not, is high. Questions remain about how generative AI companies handle confidential information coming in and out of their systems and whether that data is used to train the model.

A thorny problem

For Amazon, this is a particularly thorny issue. Its main rival Microsoft has launched AI assistant products and is a close partner and investor in OpenAI, the startup company behind ChatGPT. Shortly after ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Amazon began warning employees not to share confidential information with the chatbot. Earlier this year, Amazon formalized internal guidelines banning external AI tools, including ChatGPT, for commercial purposes.

In recent years, a number of large companies, including Apple, Samsung and JP Morgan Chase, have restricted their employees from using ChatGPT due to privacy concerns. This has created a hidden wave of employees secretly using such AI tools at work, called “CheatGPT”, because this technology can help them do their jobs faster.

In an email to BI, an Amazon spokesperson said the company supports the use of generative AI technology in the workplace, including Cedric, and internal guidance helps employees “use these services while properly managing information confidential”.

“Amazon employees use internal generative AI tools every day to innovate on behalf of our customers. We have safeguards in place for employee use of these technologies that focus on protecting confidential information, including guidance on accessing third-party generative artificial intelligence services.” the spokesman added.

“Reading and Writing Companion”

Internally, Amazon calls Cedric “your reliable document reading and writing companion,” according to the internal document. It suggests employees use it to create Amazon’s famous 6-page memos “in seconds” and convert meeting notes into email-ready formats “safely and securely.”

The internal document added that Cedric was trained on the text of the conversation, so employees are encouraged to use plain English as if they were speaking naturally. The new tool can also help generate new ideas and solve problems. One of the suggested use cases showed that employees can upload Word documents, PDF files and Excel spreadsheets and ask what a VP would say about the content.

All Amazon employees now have access to Cedric. Some employees told BI that Amazon began promoting Cedric more widely within the company a few weeks ago, after an early pilot period.

For Cedric, Amazon didn’t use its in-house Titan AI model. Instead, Amazon used the Bedrock AI development platform and Anthropic’s Claude large language model, according to the document. (Amazon invested heavily in Anthropic).

Approved for “highly confidential data”

Cedric is one of several AI tools Amazon has recently released or is building in-house. Amazon Q is its flagship AI tool aimed at businesses and developers. Separately, Amazon is working on another AI chatbot codenamed Metis and an improved AI-powered Alexa app, BI previously reported.

Unlike those apps, Cedric is for internal use only, and its output “cannot be used outside of Amazon,” the internal document warns.

Security is a key point for Cedric. Software developers and Amazon Web Services employees are approved to use Cedric with “highly confidential data,” according to the document. Cedric does not share any input into the core core model for training purposes, nor does it send it to a third-party developer. Chat history is saved in an encrypted database.

For code generation, however, employees should use Amazon Q instead of Cedric, the document said.

Cedric should not be used for any “consequential” decision that may have “a significant legal or material effect on a person,” the document added.

However, Amazon seems confident in Cedric’s ability, to the point where it expects employees to use it before meetings with the company’s most senior executives.

“How would a CEO respond?” the internal document suggested asking the AI ​​chatbot.

Do you work at Amazon? Do you have a tip?

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