Guwahati, June 9 -- Teams at a fintech startup spent three weeks refining the AI ??assistant they launched. They had set up the system prompts so precisely. The results were clean, and user feedback was great. The team was celebrating.

That's when someone changed six words. It wasn't done with bad intentions, nor was it done carelessly. A product manager noticed that the bot's speech sounded robotic and made a small change to its instructions. That trivial change was made on a Tuesday afternoon.

But by Thursday, the loan approval assistant was rejecting even valid applications. By Friday, the company had lost a significant amount of money in a single day. By the following week, the team was shocked when they saw the prompt. There was no...