AI and ml
Researcher confirms the uploads have stopped, but says xAI's privacy command was not what fixed them
The researcher who exposed Grok Build uploading users' entire repositories to cloud storage says the transfers have stopped after a server-side change. Elon Musk has separately promised that all previously uploaded user data will be deleted.AI safety researcher Cereblab published a report on Sunday about their investigation into Grok Build, SpaceXAI's command-line interface (CLI), and the data exchanged between the CLI and SpaceXAI's servers.Cereblab found that when Grok Build reads or processes a file, the contents of that file are transmitted without redaction to a Google Cloud Storage bucket used by SpaceXAI. Further, they claimed that Grok Build packages entire repos and uploads them as Git bundles, instead of just uploading the files required to answer a user's prompt.
According to Cereblab's report, SpaceXAI's data retention went far beyond that of other CLIs, such as Claude Code, Gemini, and Codex, which open individual files rather than entire repos before uploading them along with their Git histories.
The researcher tested the behavior using a benign prompt. They instructed the CLI to simply reply with "OK," and specifically ordered it not to open any files. Grok Build uploaded the entire repo regardless, along with its full Git history containing secrets that were deleted months prior – a finding Cereblab reproduced using a separate repo.Other Grok Build users reported similar results after Cereblab published their report, including one whose entire user directory, containing SSH keys, password manager databases, and more, was opened and uploaded.The findings attracted enough attention for SpaceXAI execs and Musk to comment on them publicly, as well as prompting the company to quickly implement a remedy.Cereblab confirmed that after the CLI's devs set disable_codebase_upload to "true," Grok Build stopped transmitting entire repos to its servers.
