Known Limitations

We’d rather be upfront than over-promise. Here’s what Shadow AI does not do today, and how to work around each one where you can.

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Certificate-pinned apps

Some native desktop apps pin their own certificate and reject any certificate they didn’t ship with — including the agent’s CA. Those apps bypass the inspection proxy entirely and are out of scope by design. We never silently fail open on a tool we do cover — pinned apps simply aren’t inspected at all, rather than being inspected unreliably. There is no device-side workaround; coverage there depends on the app vendor.

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QUIC / HTTP-3

The agent intercepts HTTP/HTTPS through a local proxy. QUIC / HTTP-3 runs over UDP and can route around an HTTP proxy, so that traffic can reach an AI vendor without inspection. Chrome and some Google properties (including Gemini) prefer QUIC. Mitigation: disable QUIC via browser policy (for Chrome, the QuicAllowed=false enterprise policy). The browser then falls back to HTTPS over the proxy and inspection resumes. See Troubleshooting.

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Image OCR not yet supported

The agent extracts and inspects text — including from PDF, DOCX, XLSX, and plain-text files. It does not yet run OCR on images, so text embedded in an uploaded image (a screenshot of a credential, for example) is not detected. Image OCR is on the roadmap.

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Coverage is a host allowlist

Shadow AI works from a maintained host allowlist of known AI vendors — it inspects traffic to those hosts and leaves everything else untouched. This bounds what’s inspected (and what it costs), but it means a vendor we don’t yet recognize passes through without a verdict. The current allowlist covers:

• ChatGPT / OpenAI
• Claude / Anthropic
• Google Gemini
• Perplexity
• Mistral
• Cohere
• Microsoft Copilot
• GitHub Copilot
• Cursor
• DeepSeek
• Grok (x.ai)
• Poe
• HuggingChat
• Meta AI

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Requesting a vendor

Adding a vendor to the allowlist is a small config change on our side — not a new build for you to deploy. To request one, email support@promptguard.co with the vendor and the hostnames its app or API uses.

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Platform availability

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Next steps