Grok Build abruptly goes open source — 844,530 lines of Rust exposed as xAI deletes retained coding data
TL;DR
xAI open-sourced Grok Build after an upload controversy and says it is deleting retained coding data.
Grok Build abruptly went open source after a privacy controversy. On July 15, xAI published the Rust source for its AI coding agent on GitHub under Apache 2.0 and reset server-side usage limits for all users. The official repository says Grok Build can edit files, run commands, and search the web from a terminal, and can run locally with a user's own inference.
A day before the release, users found that Grok Build could upload working directories to xAI's Google Cloud storage. Developer Simon Willison cited one user who said running it in a home directory uploaded SSH keys, a password-manager database, documents, and photos. xAI later said the choice to disable uploads had been respected, while data retention was enabled by default for non-zero-data-retention users in the early beta.
xAI says it disabled default retention on July 12 and is deleting all previously retained coding data. Elon Musk wrote that previously uploaded user data would be “completely and utterly deleted.” The deletion and retention assertions are company statements and have not been independently audited.
Willison counted 844,530 lines of Rust in the repository, about 3% of it vendored code; it had one commit at release. GCS upload code remains visible, but the current
via Crypto Briefing / GitHub / xAI / Simon Willison
A day before the release, users found that Grok Build could upload working directories to xAI's Google Cloud storage. Developer Simon Willison cited one user who said running it in a home directory uploaded SSH keys, a password-manager database, documents, and photos. xAI later said the choice to disable uploads had been respected, while data retention was enabled by default for non-zero-data-retention users in the early beta.
xAI says it disabled default retention on July 12 and is deleting all previously retained coding data. Elon Musk wrote that previously uploaded user data would be “completely and utterly deleted.” The deletion and retention assertions are company statements and have not been independently audited.
Willison counted 844,530 lines of Rust in the repository, about 3% of it vendored code; it had one commit at release. GCS upload code remains visible, but the current
upload_session_state() returns an unavailable error.via Crypto Briefing / GitHub / xAI / Simon Willison
