AI chatbots are giving out people's real phone numbers

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/MITTR Photos: Getty

People report that their personal contact info was surfaced by Google AI—and there’s apparently no easy way to prevent it.

By Eileen Guoarchive
May 13, 2026

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A Redditor recently wrote that he was “desperate for help”: for about a month, he said, his phone had been inundated by calls from “strangers” who were “looking for a lawyer, a product designer, a locksmith.” Callers were apparently misdirected by Google’s generative AI.

In March, a software developer in Israel was contacted on WhatsApp after Google’s chatbot Gemini provided incorrect customer service instructions that included his number.

And in April, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington was messing around on Gemini and got it to cough up her colleague’s personal cell phone number.

AI researchers* and online privacy experts** have long warned*** of the myriad dangers**** generative AI poses for personal privacy. These cases give us yet another scenario to worry about: generative AI exposing people’s real phone numbers. (The Redditor did not respond to multiple requests for comment and we could not independently verify his story.)
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https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/13/1137203/ai-chatbots-are-giving-out-peoples-real-phone-numbers/

*https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1120466/a-major-ai-training-data-set-contains-millions-of-examples-of-personal-data/|
**https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/12/1074449/real-ai-risks/
***https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/28/1131835/what-ai-remembers-about-you-is-privacys-next-frontier/
****https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/21/1135919/ai-surveillance-privacy-llms-bulk-data/