Grok Build CLI uploads entire local repos and secrets, researcher finds

xAI’s Grok Build CLI, the company’s agentic coding tool, uploads a user’s entire local Git repository to a Google Cloud Storage bucket every session, an independent security researcher reported on July 12.

The finding matters because the upload appears to ignore the tool’s privacy control. The researcher, who publishes as cereblab, said Grok’s ‘Improve the model’ toggle governs only training-data use, not this separate upload channel, so files the coding agent was never asked to read leave the machine anyway.

In a wire-level network analysis of version 0.2.93, cereblab measured 5.10 GiB moving across 73 chunks to a bucket named grok-code-session-traces on a 12 GB test repository, versus 192 KB sent through the normal model-inference channel, roughly a 27,800-fold gap between what the model needed and what left the device. A tracked .env file holding test API-key and database-password values appeared unredacted in both the live requests and the stored archive.

A separate community audit tool, grok-upload-audit, corroborated the behavior and documented a server-controlled flag, trace_upload_source, that can switch uploads on remotely without a local opt-in.

The analysis is one researcher’s traffic inspection, corroborated by a second independent audit tool, and xAI has published no advisory confirming or disputing it. After the disclosure, the server’s remote flag reported uploads paused as of July 13, and a new local disable_codebase_upload option appeared that hard-blocks the whole-repo upload. It remains unclear whether that change is global or permanent, or whether repositories already uploaded were deleted.