PromptPwnd Prompt Injection Vulnerability in AI-Driven CI/CD Pipelines

Aikido Security researchers have identified a new vulnerability class, dubbed PromptPwnd, that affects automated CI/CD pipelines such as GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD when integrated with AI agents like Gemini CLI, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and GitHub AI Inference. The vulnerability arises from prompt injection attacks, where untrusted user input—such as bug report titles—can be embedded into AI prompts, causing the AI agent to execute privileged actions, leak secrets, or manipulate workflows. This attack chain has been confirmed as practical and reproducible, with at least five Fortune 500 companies exposed, including a notable case involving Google’s Gemini CLI repository, which was patched within four days of responsible disclosure.

Aikido Security has open-sourced Opengrep rules to help organizations detect this vulnerability in their codebases and recommends several mitigation steps: restricting the toolset available to AI agents, avoiding the injection of untrusted input into prompts, treating AI output as untrusted, and limiting the blast radius of leaked tokens. This is the first confirmed real-world demonstration that AI prompt injection can compromise CI/CD pipelines, highlighting the growing risks of integrating AI automation into software supply chains. The discovery follows recent attacks like Shai-Hulud 2.0, underscoring the urgent need for robust security controls in environments leveraging AI-driven automation.