xai-org/grok-build, now open source
The Grok Build CLI from xAI unintentionally uploaded entire user directories to the company’s Google Cloud storage, prompting privacy concerns. In response, xAI disabled the upload feature, deleted previously retained data, and changed default retention settings. The company also open‑sourced the Grok Build code under an Apache 2.0 license to restore user trust.
- ▪Running the Grok Build command in a directory caused the tool to upload all files, including sensitive data, to xAI’s Google Cloud buckets.
- ▪Elon Musk announced that all previously uploaded data would be deleted and the default data‑retention setting was turned off as a precaution.
- ▪xAI released the Grok Build codebase under an Apache 2.0 license, enabling users to run the tool locally and inspect its implementation.
- ▪The repository contains over 844,000 lines of Rust code, with remnants of the disabled upload functionality still present.
Simon Willison files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 54 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Simon Willison's Weblog |
| Canonical URL | https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/15/grok-build/#atom-everything |
| Publication time | 2026-07-15T23:59:30+00:00 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-16T00:16:04.433Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-16T00:16:04.433Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | vdhSsF0DQqyL |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
xai-org/grok-build, now open source (via) xAI's grok CLI tool faced severe community backlash yesterday when it became apparent that running the command in a directory could upload that entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets. One user reported running it in their home directory and seeing it upload "my SSH keys, my password manager database, my documents, photos, videos, everything". I've not seen an official explanation for why it was doing this, but xAI did respond to the feedback (Musk: "As a precautionary measure, all user data that was uploaded to SpaceXAI before now will be completely and utterly deleted.") and have disabled the feature.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Simon Willison's Weblog.
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