Somebody Else’s Hack: Notion AI Chats Exposed Through a Vendor Breach

Here’s a reminder that your data is only as safe as the least-secure company your apps rely on. Fireworks AI, a platform developers use to run open AI models, has confirmed that attackers got into some customer data. According to TechCrunch, the hackers first broke into Fireworks’ cloud provider, used that to reach one of Fireworks’ development systems, and from there took billing information and some datasets. Fireworks says it has tens of thousands of customers, including well-known names like Harvey and Cursor.

At least one customer has gone public about the damage: Notion. The note-taking and docs company says around 1% of its customers were affected. This week it confirmed that the stolen data includes chat transcripts from people who used a Notion AI feature called Insights, meaning anything typed into the chat or written back by the model. Notion says a lot of the data can’t be tied to a specific customer. It cut its systems off from Fireworks on November 3 and deleted the data held there.

As for motive, Fireworks thinks the attackers were in it for the money. Their apparent goal was to grab access to AI models and resell the tokens to people who’d rather not pay for their own compute. It’s also the second security incident at Fireworks in about two months.

The bigger story is how layered modern software has become. You sign up for Notion, Notion uses Fireworks, Fireworks uses a cloud provider, and a weak spot anywhere in that chain becomes your problem. Most users never see those connections. Should apps be forced to tell you which AI vendors touch your data?