A Chrome extension Google banned for reading your AI chats is back - with 300,000 users

Getting kicked off the Chrome Web Store is supposed to be the end of the road for a bad extension. Not this time. An add-on called "AI Sidebar with DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Claude and more" - which Google removed in January 2026 for scraping people's AI conversations and shipping them to outside servers - is back in the store, and Netskope researchers say it has climbed to more than 300,000 installs with a 4.6-star rating.

What makes it sneaky is the patience. The version that returned in late July did nothing wrong at all: clean, working software, apparently to rebuild a trustworthy update history. About two weeks later, a follow-up update slipped in a 21-line addition to a single file that hijacks Chrome's own update and uninstall events to open affiliate links and earn the operator commissions. Small stuff on its own. The worry, as Netskope points out, is that the same channel - delivered through Google's built-in update system - could just as easily push something that steals your passwords or your AI chats again, which is exactly what got the extension banned the first time.

The lesson for anyone who's piled on "AI assistant" add-ons over the past year: each one can read what you type into ChatGPT, Claude and every other site you visit. Open Chrome's Extensions page, remove any you don't actively use, and be wary of tools that bolt an AI sidebar onto your browser - a banned name can reappear under new ownership.

If a rogue extension has already changed your search engine, homepage or new-tab page, Tendvane's "browser hijacked" repair wizard resets those back to normal in a few clicks.