Elon Musk’s xAI faced severe backlash after security researchers discovered its Grok Build tool uploaded entire developer code repositories to Google Cloud Storage. The command-line tool transmitted sensitive data and full commit histories without explicit user consent. Analysis revealed the tool sent significantly more data than required, even when users had privacy toggles disabled.
xAI disabled the upload feature and pledged to delete all previously collected user data in response to developer criticism. To restore trust, the company released the full Grok Build codebase under an Apache 2.0 license. This move allows for public scrutiny of the tool’s functionality.