Users say a Gemini glitch may have surfaced someone else’s prompt, with some calling it a system prompt leak

Several Gemini users noticed something strange in their conversations yesterday. Instead of getting a normal response to their questions, some were getting what appeared to be prompt text from a completely different conversation, as if Gemini had mixed up who it was talking to.

Reports started coming in across Reddit and X around March 3. On r/GeminiAI, a post titled “Gemini is potentially leaking user prompts” described getting replies that contained “[User Input]” style text that had nothing to do with the user’s own session.

A separate thread on the same subreddit, “Did Gemini just share a system prompt? TF is going on?”, had users reporting something similar, with instruction-style text popping up out of nowhere mid-chat. The text also does indeed seem like a prompt an actual human user would use rather than being hallucinated. Here’s the screenshot the OP shared on the post:

Over on r/google, a thread asking whether Gemini had leaked its system prompt picked up hundreds of upvotes, with users sharing that Gemini was mixing false user info or internal guidelines into otherwise normal replies.

On X, developer Benjamin De Kraker flagged the same issue, saying system instructions were “leaking” directly into chats. Users replying to these posts also claimed they saw the issue in more than one Gemini surface, including AI Studio, which added to the confusion about whether this was tied to one product interface or something deeper.

Not everyone agrees on what was actually showing up. One commenter speculated it was simply a system prompt leak and argued that user prompts were probably still private, calling it “interesting” if you’re into that kind of thing. The OP pushed back and claimed it was more about API requests leaking, not system prompts.

That distinction matters. If it really was a system prompt leak, that would mean Gemini was exposing internal instruction text that is usually hidden from users. But if the API request angle is right, that would be a different and potentially more serious kind of mix-up, since requests can include structured metadata or snippets that look like someone else’s input.

To be clear, user reports alone do not confirm that Gemini actually pulled live data from other people’s chats. In some cases, models can produce prompt-shaped text through role confusion or hallucination, which can look like a “leak” even when it is not. Still, for users who ran into it, the experience looked a lot like cross-chat prompt bleed, and that is enough to make people hesitate before pasting anything sensitive into an AI chat.

Google has not publicly explained what caused the behavior described in these threads, so for now the story sits where many AI incidents start: users noticed something off, posted receipts, and everyone tried to reverse-engineer what it meant in real time.

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