Shadow AI Forensics was built from an observation, not a business plan. Since generative AI tools reached mass adoption in late 2022, the governance conversation has been dominated by two things: policy documents and access controls. Lock down the tools, write a policy, check the compliance box.
"Forensic ground truth: anchor the evidence where you control it, not where the vendor does."
— Harish
Over two years working with generative AI tools, one gap kept surfacing that the governance conversation was ignoring: what these tools leave behind on the endpoint. Cached prompts in browser IndexedDB. Conversation artifacts in local storage. Authentication tokens retained long after a user believes they have logged out. Data a forensic examiner can recover from a workstation weeks or months later.
The research that followed focused on how these tools actually behave on the endpoint — which artifacts persist, where they are stored, how long they survive, and what a regulatory investigator or opposing counsel could reconstruct from a standard corporate workstation. That work became the Shadow AI Forensics methodology: built specifically around how AI tools behave in practice, not adapted from an existing IT security framework.
The gap was never in the AI tools themselves. It was between what organizations believed their controls covered and what was actually sitting on their endpoints. That gap is what we audit.
Shadow AI Forensics is led by Adil, an AI governance and digital forensics specialist focused exclusively on shadow AI exposure in regulated industries.
Litigation support and expert witness services are provided through our partner network of certified forensic examiners where legally required.
Every artifact collected under documented, defensible chain-of-custody protocols aligned with SWGDE and NIST standards.
Every finding is cross-referenced against HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, EU AI Act, and NIST AI RMF for your industry.
Every high-risk finding is manually validated before inclusion in the final report. We don't inflate findings to justify our fee.
Reports can be structured for delivery under attorney-client privilege where legally appropriate — protecting findings from opposing discovery.
We defined the category. We built the methodology. No firm currently specializes in uncovering what already happened before your AI policies existed — and the window to act before regulators and plaintiffs do is narrowing fast.
Insurers are adding AI governance questions to underwriting questionnaires. No documented AI controls = policy exclusions or denied claims.
Wrongful termination, malpractice, and data breach suits increasingly demand AI tool usage records. Most organizations cannot produce them.
OCR and the SEC are actively investigating AI tool usage at regulated entities. The question is not if — it's what your documentation shows when they arrive.
We focus exclusively on sectors where AI data exposure creates existential legal and regulatory risk.
Shadow AI Forensics is a specialized consultancy, not a software product. We limit active engagements to ensure every client receives rigorous, hands-on forensic analysis — not an automated scan with a report attached.
Entry point services (Policy Template, Vendor Assessment, Browser Scan) are available to organizations of all sizes.