Uber Says Hack at AI Vendor Fireworks Exposed Drivers’ License Data
Uber is notifying thousands of drivers that their license details were stolen in a breach at Fireworks AI, a vendor whose hack also exposed Notion AI chats.
Uber is notifying thousands of its drivers that their personal details and driver’s license information were stolen after hackers broke into Fireworks AI, a cloud company that hosts artificial intelligence models for businesses. The ride-hailing company confirmed the incident in breach notices filed with several U.S. state attorneys general, TechCrunch reported on Friday. The same intrusion has already been linked to the exposure of AI chat transcripts belonging to users of Notion, the popular workspace software, which shows how a single compromised supplier can spread damage across many companies.
What happened
According to TechCrunch, Uber said Fireworks told it on October 9 that attackers had broken in and stolen internal credentials, which were then used to reach Uber data stored with the vendor. Uber then began contacting drivers whose information sat on Fireworks’ systems. A spokesperson for Uber described the notices as relating to “a security incident impacting one of our third-party vendors, Fireworks.ai,” and referred further questions to that company.
Uber has not said how many drivers or customers were affected in total. Breach notices reviewed by TechCrunch give a partial picture:
- Massachusetts: 2,567 people
- South Carolina: 3,430 people
- Rhode Island: 1,873 residents
- Illinois: some residents affected, with the number not yet published
- California: drivers notified, but no figure disclosed
TechCrunch noted that the count is expected to grow as more state filings appear. A Fireworks spokesperson confirmed by email that the company had found unauthorized access to some of its systems that affected customer data, but did not answer other questions.
A breach that reached Notion too
Fireworks AI lets developers run and fine-tune open AI models on its cloud infrastructure, and it has more than 10,000 customers, VentureBeat reported, citing The Record. Its troubles began earlier in the fall. In an October 9 bulletin, the company said environment variables, including API keys and tokens stored as secrets, may have been captured for certain accounts. Then, according to Fireworks’ own account cited by VentureBeat, a third-party cloud provider hosting Fireworks research machines suffered a security incident on October 23, and the next day an unauthorized party used that foothold to reach Fireworks development machines.
BleepingComputer reported that Fireworks confirmed resource metadata, billing information, model weights and datasets were compromised for some customers. Notion, which uses Fireworks to run some open-weight models and to analyze conversations for an administrator feature called Insights, said it was alerted on November 2 and cut off traffic to the vendor by November 3. On November 8, Fireworks confirmed that customer data, including Notion users’ data, had been accessed.
Notion said the exposed dataset contained AI chat transcripts from the Insights feature, most of which could not be tied to a specific author or workspace, and that fewer than 1% of its workspaces may have been affected. It has disabled Insights and urged affected users to change any passwords, API keys or other credentials they had pasted into those chats.
Who is behind it
Fireworks has attributed the intrusion to a financially motivated criminal group that aims to resell stolen tokens for access to large language models, a practice security researchers call “LLMjacking.” No group has publicly claimed responsibility, TechCrunch said. Lin Qiao, chief executive of Fireworks, said in a post on X that access to a subset of the company’s storage systems led to additional impact on customer data, VentureBeat reported.
The case also raises questions about vendor promises on data handling. Notion said Fireworks had contractually committed to zero data retention for its data. VentureBeat noted that Fireworks’ zero-retention default covers prompts processed in memory, while features such as stored responses, batch jobs and training do keep customer content, and that neither company has said which feature held the Notion transcripts.
Why it matters
The incident is Uber’s second known data breach this year, after an earlier attack on its truck-shipping unit, Uber Freight, which an extortion gang claimed. More broadly, it highlights a growing risk as companies send sensitive information to specialized AI providers. Cloud security firm Wiz counted at least nine AI developer platforms that disclosed security incidents in October alone, according to VentureBeat, and found that attackers began using stolen credentials within 30 minutes of obtaining them.
For now, the full scope of the Fireworks breach remains unclear. With more state notices expected and Fireworks still declining to answer detailed questions, the number of people affected could rise.
