Your company plans to use generative AI to help summarize and analyze internal business documents.

Preventing generative AI from accessing confidential or classified information is primarily a data access and classification control problem. The most effective broad solution is data governance (B) —the framework of policies and controls that ensures sensitive content is identified, classified, protected, and access is restricted using least privilege. Data governance includes information classification/sensitivity labels, access control reviews, secure sharing practices, data loss prevention (DLP), and auditing—controls that directly limit what data is available to the AI through permission trimming and policy enforcement.

An information barrier (A) policy is more specific: it’s intended to prevent communication and collaboration between defined user groups (often for regulatory/ethical walls). It does not comprehensively address document classification or restrict AI access to sensitive files across the tenant. A data retention policy (C) governs how long content is kept and when it’s deleted; it’s not a primary access-prevention mechanism. Communication monitoring (D) is a detection/oversight control; it can help identify risky activity, but it does not itself prevent access to confidential content by the AI.

Therefore, to prevent AI from surfacing confidential/classified data during summarization and analysis, you should recommend data governance as the primary control layer.