DON'T JUST TRUST THE FILE. TRUST YOUR ENVIRONMENT.
I found a $308 payment link inside an AI-generated file. I never put it there. It wasn't the AI. It was my browser.
I opened a file I had just generated with AI. It was actually a guidelines document I needed to download.
Inside it was a $308 payment link.
I never put it there.
At first, I thought something was wrong with the tool. It felt like the file itself had been compromised. But it wasn't. It was my browser. I thought Claude gave me a virus.
A Chrome extension had injected the link into the file while I was viewing it. The original file was clean. What I was seeing had been altered in real time.
That's what made it dangerous.
Because if I hadn't questioned it, I could've assumed it was part of the output. Paid it. Moved on.
And this doesn't just apply to AI files.
It could happen in client documents, invoices, internal files. Anything you open in your browser can be modified if your environment isn't clean.
So I reset everything.
Removed all extensions. Rebuilt my setup from scratch. Now I only run what I actually need.
The takeaway is simple:
Don't just trust the file. Trust your environment.
It looked like an AI issue. It wasn't.
It was mine.