Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, is cautioning employees about how they use chatbots at the same time as it markets the program around the world, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing four people familiar with the matter.

Alphabet has advised employees not to enter its confidential materials into AI chatbots, including its own Bard, the people said and the company confirmed, citing a long-standing policy on safeguarding information.

The chatbots, among them Bard and ChatGPT, are human-sounding programs that use so-called generative artificial intelligence to hold conversations with users and answer myriad prompts. Human reviewers may read the chats, and researchers found that similar AI could reproduce the data it absorbed during training, creating a leak risk.

Alphabet also alerted its engineers to avoid direct use of computer code that chatbots can generate, some of the people said.

Asked for comment, the company said Bard can make undesired code suggestions, but it helps programmers nonetheless. Google also said it aimed to be transparent about the limitations of its technology.

The concerns show how Google wishes to avoid business harm from software it launched in competition with ChatGPT. At stake in Google's race against ChatGPT's backers OpenAI and Microsoft Corp. are billions of dollars of investment and still untold advertising and cloud revenue from new AI programs.

Google's caution also reflects what's becoming a security standard for corporations, namely to warn personnel about using publicly available chat programs.

A growing number of businesses around the world have set up guardrails on AI chatbots, among them Samsung, Amazon.com and Deutsche Bank, Reuters reported.

Some 43 percent of professionals were using ChatGPT or other AI tools as of January, often without telling their bosses, according to a survey of nearly 12,000 respondents, including from top U.S.-based companies, done by the networking site Fishbowl.

A Google privacy notice updated on June 1 also states: "Don't include confidential or sensitive information in your Bard conversations."

(With input from Reuters)