Grok Build Share Links Exposed Users' Confidential Data, Researchers Say

Grok Build lets users share the apps they create through links. The service gives those links randomised addresses so that only people who know the exact URL can open them. Claroc's research found that a design choice on the platform makes it possible for anyone to list thousands of live projects. In most cases, opening a project shows the app and all of the data attached to it.

According to the research, the exposed material includes internal business plans, advertising proposals, medical exam results, galley checklists from a cruise line, and employees' names and ID numbers. That matters for companies whose staff build internal tools with AI coding services: data put into a quickly built app can be exposed by a flaw in the platform, not just by mistakes in the app.

Some of the exposed data belongs to the company that runs Grok Build. Claroc found 24 apps built by SpaceXSI, which Ars Technica uses as the name of the combined SpaceX and xAI. These included an onboarding plan marked confidential for a new member of the enterprise sales team, a sales territory map covering 594 accounts, internal addresses for sales tools and advertising proposals.

This is the second privacy problem with Grok Build this year. In July, a researcher found that the Grok Build command-line tool was uploading users' entire code repositories, including Git history and any secrets committed to them, to a Google Cloud Storage bucket. Musk said at the time that the company would delete Grok Build user data it had retained. The company then turned off data retention by default and released the tool's source code under an open-source licence.

The research does not say how long the shared projects were open to enumeration. Users who put credentials, customer records or other sensitive data into apps they shared through Grok Build will need to know whether the company has closed the gap and whether anyone accessed their data.