This is not the right thing, this is the tactical thing. If you have an LLM with less than 1% of the share to begin with, you suffer from bad rep and you got caught uploading user data, one of the very few remaining tactical moves to try to climb out of it is this.
Another tactical move is to just stop. You're allowed to exit the AI business. Nobody's forcing you to keep throwing money into the furnace. Just be a rocket company. All of the xAI founders left. Your product's brand name is mud. Just stop doing that and build spaceships.
You misunderstand Musk's motivation. This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology. One of the main reasons he exited OpenAI was the fact that the other co-founders wanted to create a structure where no one, Musk included, would be able to seize full control of the company. That was the thing that prompted him to leave, which tells you a lot about what he really wanted in the first place.
But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.
As a social media site they need to understand content for recommendations and they allow people to ask questions about posts for free. Along with having a large amount of data that can be trained on xAI has good reason to continue developing AI.
They could use other people's models running on their hardware while renting most of the existing capacity to others. The real issue is that their leadership is delusional and their stock is literally based on this shared delusion and acknowledging reality would gut their ability to raise new funds and destroy paper wealth based on delusional returns that are never going to happen.
Ah, are you referring to the rockets that become autonomous 60 seconds prior to launch, like Falcon 9? The rockets that steer and diagnose themselves with a minimum of input/communication from ground stations? The crewed space capsules that deliver astronauts to the ISS and trans-lunar orbits, without the ordinary needs for manual piloting or astrogation? Those rockets?
Sure bro, "exit the AI business" and keep on with the rocket science, I guess
Yes, tactical is the right word because it might be a tactical win but it would be a strategic failure. Musks whole meme empire runs on vibes. The second there's a crack in the dam it all comes down. None of the valuations of anything he touches make sense and something like utterly failing to run with the AI big boys is enough to do that.
why pi over opencode? earnestly curious, trying to figure out what open solution people are consolidating on. (codex is also pseudo-open but contributions closed and nice)
pi is the neovim of agentic harnesses, its barebones and extremely configurable. if you're the sort of person who likes that sort of things its a forever product, nothing is going to displace it because you have full control.
opencode builds a lot more in, which is better if you dont want to fiddle with config.
Most of my harness experience is with Claude Code and Pi, a little bit of OpenCode.
I like how quick and snappy Pi is, it feels like a minimal harness, just enough to manage the agent and get out of the way. Earlier models also seemed to have an easier time working with the tools, e.g. GPT-OSS-20B is about a year old and had no trouble in Pi.
I imagine because they want to support plugins, and plugins in compiled language are a lot less natural than plugins in languages like TypeScript or Python.
It's a shame that they exfiled private data. The model is actually good (better than opus 4.8 imo) and the harness itself is butter smooth with the potential of being the best out there.
i think xai is now in pure damage control mode, after they caught exfiltrating data from users.
- There is a huge difference between logging user queries (which would include only the portion the model is reading) and exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here (https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...). I would stay away from this open-source malware with a 10ft pole.
- if you like grok-4.5 model (it is a good model), i suggest use the model directly via API, or use Grok's oauth tokens if you are using supergrok+heavy subscriptions and connect it to your own agent.
If I use a shovel to kill a man, the shovel maker did not engage in intentionally crafting a weapon of war.
How tools are used are a reflection of the people who use them, and I definitely sympathise that tools should have guardrails to not enable this, or at least detect it.
But if a pedophile uses Whatsapp to groom a child; I don't go after Whatsapp for being a neutral service... I go after the pedophile.
If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
> If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
This is impossible-nobody can possibly block all illegitimate uses without also blocking some legitimate ones as collateral damage. Any moderation process (whether automated or human) inevitably has a non-zero false positive rate.
Now, you can argue that some misuse is so harmful, that the cost of false positives is worth it - but that’s a different claim.
If WhatsApp knew their platform was facilitating CSAM, and they were fully within their power to prevent this but chose not to - yes this would rightly draw criticism…
Ok, but what if all Whatsapp competitors explicitly banned the ability to groom children on their platform, but Whataspp didn't, and directly advertised it.
> exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here
I think env files are filtered out [1]. Anyway, the most suspicious code would be `upload_session_state` which is currently a stub function, though it is hard to say if it was only planned (badly) or has been removed as a damage control.
It must have been removed, given that the initial evidence of the exfil specifically demonstrated .env files being included. And .ssh/* for the user which ran this in $HOME.
Interesting - seen some good experiencences in using grok by some devs, so maybe could be considered as an alternative to my beloved chinese models. Also, hard to give up on pi agent.
Grok Build seems faster to me than `omp` and Claude Code but I can't put my finger as to why. Anecdotally, after disabling code uploads the agent doesn't respond instantly anymore (it used to respond within milliseconds).
I wonder if releasing this may have been on the roadmap, but been prioritized as a bit of whiplash following the "you forfeit the entirety of your working directory as a condition of working with this tool" upset from a few days ago.
Most likely, SpaceX killed the code uploading yesterday so they are definitely concerned about the backlash
> 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.
What a bunch of slop: 182 top-level external dependencies (so, without considering nested dependencies) and 1318853 lines of code in Rust.
Building efficient agents is doable (I did it myself, github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack), companies just want to tokenmaxx, and as a by-product, produce and publish slop.
It looks like some of that high LoC is because they are vendoring some deps. There readme gives the reason to vendor some but not others as:
```
These crates sit on the path that renders untrusted model output (diagram source → SVG). Vendoring gives a full audit surface, pins exact source, and avoids crates.io yanks. Local patches and upgrade checklists live in each crate’s Cargo.toml header comments — treat those as the source of truth when re-vendoring.
```
Which honestly feels like a misunderstand of how cargo and yanks work. Each upstream package is locked to an exact version in your lockfile along with a cryptographic hash. The upstream can't change the source without you noticing. Unless you update your lockfile you will always pin to the exact source., When a package is yanked, it is still available for download if it is already in a lockfile. It just prevents new packages from resolving it. Crates.io will sometimes completely delete a package, but I've only seen that happen in cases of malware. It's fairly rare and seems out of line with the supply chain concerns here.
There are good arguments for relying on upstream package managers and there are good arguments for vendoring all packages. I've never seen a project mix before.
I'll probably never use this, but at least they're not delusional enough to attempt to justify keeping their coding agent closed-source, especially after their recent data-harvesting cockup:
Grok has had far too many instances where its clear that the team building it cannot be trusted and does not care to build trustworthy products.
I highly caution anyone from using any tools from xAi, as they have clearly shown themselves to be bad actors within the space.
First, why audit it when the agent can build a new one.
Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?
I don’t trust a company that pollutes the air of other people with illegal gas turbines because it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
> Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?
Any evidence for this conspiracy theory? It's not on anyone to disprove this claim.
> it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
Companies are chartered to make their shareholders value. To a first approximation, it's illegal for a company to "fuckit, we care about people's health" unless this is what the shareholders voted for (as opposed to making their shares valuable).
You can argue this is bad, but it isn't about XAI, it applies to every company you've heard of.
Rank ordered by reputation / caring about having a trustworthy corporate identity: [Google, Anthropic] in either order depending who you ask, OpenAI, most of the Chinese AI corporations, then Grok.
This is unfortunate situation to find ourselves in when Grok was also recently at the top of the Pareto frontier for quality/price. Dunno if it still is, this all moves too fast, but it was for at least long enough for me to have heard about it.
Google?!?!. From where I sit, Google is just above the Chinese. They've been bad-faith actors for more than a decade, I guess everyone is just so used to it that they ignore it.
I there's anyone I don't trust with AI, it's the worlds #1 company in spying on people, in collection of Pii, in tracking, and many many many times caught literally lying about it.
Google already knows more about everyone on the planet, than any other 10 organizations combined. Frankly, sadly, they're all, well.. scummy, just each in different ways.
Surprisingly, despite their motivations in doing so, the Chinese models being open-weight and therefore able to run locally on your own hardware, are far more trustworthy than any blackbox which solely exists to enrich X or Y billionaire.
Reiserfs. A good example on how oss cannot save the product. There are others, but this is the first one that comes to my mind. If you use clearly unethical oss, are you just using oss or are you a part of the problem? Typically, oss purists take these into account.
> This seems more like, look we made something, now fix it for us
They disabled pull requests in the repo so I'm unsure where you're getting this
> you can’t expect people to praise your for making an n+1 harness open source.
I don't think anyone is asking for praise. My comment was neither hot or cold. I was just surprised that the top comment had nothing to do with any of the technical aspects of Grok Build (and whether there's any trace of uploads).
> I was just surprised that the top comment had nothing to do with any of the technical aspects of Grok Build (and whether there's any trace of uploads).
Most people don't restrict themselves to only discussing the technical aspects of a thing. A thing which is technologically novel (e.g. not this example) may nonetheless not be worth using, due to assorted risks.
I don't find it surprising that HN posters are helping their fellow hackers avoid getting victimized by predators. We just have that sort of nice community :)
This is clearly a good-faith criticism and there is no lens in which I could see it described as bad-faith.
We see this pattern all the time: Someone makes a criticism of a Musk product, and someone assails that criticism with bad-faith accusations of it being "bad-faith".
Oftentimes, we see that the criticism is undermeasured and ligther than is reasonable, possibly anticipating someone who might accuse it of being "bad faith".
Maybe someone can put a name to this phenomenon but we see it all the time.
> If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.
Yikes.
A. They were released all over the internet - from the article..
> The chatbot has a public account on X, where users can ask it questions or request alterations to images. Users flocked to the social media site, in many cases asking Grok to remove clothing in images of women and children, after which the bot publicly posted the A.I.-generated images.
B. There is a bunch of data about consumers of CSAM 'content escalating' and eventually attempting to make real contact with minors.
C. They were sexualizing pictures of real people and posting the pictures online.
> One of the young plaintiffs said she found out about the imagery after she received an anonymous message on Instagram pointing her toward images and videos, including her high school yearbook photo, which had been altered to show her in sexually explicit actions and full nudity.
The material was being shared on a Discord server, a private chat space on that platform, and included similar imagery that had also been altered using Grok of at least 18 other women who were minors, according to the complaint.
OP seems to be asking for examples with an intent to dismiss and downplay each of them, and not to actually read into them and challenge his existing beliefs about X/Grok/Musk.
Open to changing my mind. I would be interested in reading positive, uplifting news about xAI/Grok/Musk that demonstrated a repeated pattern of ethical, careful, compassionate, attentive, and/or responsible business and engineering practices.
However after looking at all of these articles, these all seem like instances of users misusing the product. The product happens to reply on social media, so media publications immediately capitalized on this.
Seems less like malicious intent from xAI's part and more like a product with young and/or insufficient moderation controls.
Starkly different. One was a well meaning attempt to squash model bias gone wrong, the other is a deliberately inserted bias. Even ignoring all that, whataboutism is not persuasive.
The reality is both are likely well meaning attempts to squash model bias gone wrong. Since you happen to align with the politics of one more than the other, you are having trouble being intellectually honest about your own biases.
In no way are you being intellectually honest if you think that hamfisted system prompt push to prod manipulation was an attempt to squash bias. And again, whataboutism doesn't make xAI better because others are doing bad, too. You asked for evidence of xAI untrustworthiness and received it.
I see your hamfisted cropping of my quote to downplay xAI's actions, since you brought up intellectual honesty.
Why do we have to quantity badness? The question you posed was what has xAI done to be perceived as untrustworthy? Stop trying to whatabout Google here. I'm no friend of theirs, it's simply irrelevant.
Also, it's Whataboutism: Other Company Y doing something bad/untrustworthy isn't a counter to Company X doing something similarly bad/untrustworthy. Both can be bad.
Both are bad and are examples of untrustworthy behavior from their companies, and I would not chime into a thread to defend either of them. Is one example enough to smear an entire company as untrustworthy? No. But numerous examples and patterns of behavior... possibly?
You can't separate the man or his business from the politics, he wades into every political debate he can and deliberately tries to troll as many of his perceived enemies as possible.
Aside from their CEO are they really that different from the other big US players? OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all have proven themselves to be untrustworthy as well. We should accept that we have an adversarial relationship with all these companies and shouldn't invest to much in any of them. Use them for what they are worth while the technology matures but be prepared to move on.
TUI is a lot better for me, and I have preferred it since the 00s, before LLM products were even a thing.
For all the reasons there can be, one big reason is that it works on anything you can get a terminal on, you can use it over SSH, and the UI will be the same no matter where you use it.
I also like that they are very very fast and they don't have the incessant animations that are put into most desktop environments nowadays. If you're on MacOS, the terminal is the only only part of your computer without roadblocks everywhere.
This is not the right thing, this is the tactical thing. If you have an LLM with less than 1% of the share to begin with, you suffer from bad rep and you got caught uploading user data, one of the very few remaining tactical moves to try to climb out of it is this.
Another tactical move is to just stop. You're allowed to exit the AI business. Nobody's forcing you to keep throwing money into the furnace. Just be a rocket company. All of the xAI founders left. Your product's brand name is mud. Just stop doing that and build spaceships.
You misunderstand Musk's motivation. This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology. One of the main reasons he exited OpenAI was the fact that the other co-founders wanted to create a structure where no one, Musk included, would be able to seize full control of the company. That was the thing that prompted him to leave, which tells you a lot about what he really wanted in the first place.
But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.
The stock market would not like that, though.
> You're allowed to exit the AI business.
Isn’t it more fun to fight the incumbents, the behemoths, the goliaths?
xAI is no David.
That would be a strategic move.
As a social media site they need to understand content for recommendations and they allow people to ask questions about posts for free. Along with having a large amount of data that can be trained on xAI has good reason to continue developing AI.
They bought a lot of GPUs. They could still do these things on that hardware with someone else's model.
Twitter (and others) had an algorithmic feed long before LLMs.
These don't actually seem like "good reasons" to me.
Before using large language models, they used language models. Large language models perform better, at the cost of being more expensive to run.
They could use other people's models running on their hardware while renting most of the existing capacity to others. The real issue is that their leadership is delusional and their stock is literally based on this shared delusion and acknowledging reality would gut their ability to raise new funds and destroy paper wealth based on delusional returns that are never going to happen.
But how will Musk stay a trillionaire without fake AI hype?
[delayed]
Renting his boatload of GPUs to Google, Anthropic, et al
He doesn't have _that_ many. And they're also not _his_, he just got them from NVidia.
I read that they bought quite a few, but their DC build out is not very fast. Maybe they should just resell the hardware
> Just be a rocket company.
Ah, are you referring to the rockets that become autonomous 60 seconds prior to launch, like Falcon 9? The rockets that steer and diagnose themselves with a minimum of input/communication from ground stations? The crewed space capsules that deliver astronauts to the ISS and trans-lunar orbits, without the ordinary needs for manual piloting or astrogation? Those rockets?
Sure bro, "exit the AI business" and keep on with the rocket science, I guess
LLMs have nothing to do with any of that.
And if they did, you still don't need to be developing a Twitter-bot LLM and/or nudify image model to support your rocketry projects.
Ah yes, rockets, famously invented in late 2024 after LLMs became popular.
Life sure changed when Elon invented the PID controller!
PID is a type of AI! That's why Space X blew up so many rockets, that was just RLHF.
Ironic username.
That is probably the best solution too!
It's definitely a smart move. Could easily leverage this to overtake competition.
Yes, tactical is the right word because it might be a tactical win but it would be a strategic failure. Musks whole meme empire runs on vibes. The second there's a crack in the dam it all comes down. None of the valuations of anything he touches make sense and something like utterly failing to run with the AI big boys is enough to do that.
I would recommend using https://pi.dev/ over Grok Build with your xAI subscription at this point
why pi over opencode? earnestly curious, trying to figure out what open solution people are consolidating on. (codex is also pseudo-open but contributions closed and nice)
pi is the neovim of agentic harnesses, its barebones and extremely configurable. if you're the sort of person who likes that sort of things its a forever product, nothing is going to displace it because you have full control.
opencode builds a lot more in, which is better if you dont want to fiddle with config.
Most of my harness experience is with Claude Code and Pi, a little bit of OpenCode.
I like how quick and snappy Pi is, it feels like a minimal harness, just enough to manage the agent and get out of the way. Earlier models also seemed to have an easier time working with the tools, e.g. GPT-OSS-20B is about a year old and had no trouble in Pi.
Opencode gives you better defaults and a Mac/Windows app for free but pi is much more extensible and portable.
Pi is good in concept, but why couldn’t they choose a compiled language instead of TypeScript?
since pi is built to modify itself, isn't it better to use a language like typescript where LLMs have a LOT of training data?
a harness doesn't do any computations by itself so what benefit is using a compiled language?
Sorry for self-insert, but that's exactly what I thought and I built https://github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack, so you are right I'd say
For TUIs, Rust/Go vs Typescript doesn't really makes a huge performance difference and you lose the 50x bigger community advantage of Typescript.
I imagine because they want to support plugins, and plugins in compiled language are a lot less natural than plugins in languages like TypeScript or Python.
I would imagine the extension system they built would be much more difficult to manage. They could have opted for Lua, though, I suppose.
I recommend using https://omnigent.ai over Grok Build or any other harness.
As a general rule I don't use new products whose websites don't resize properly on mobile.
If you fuck that up, makes me wonder what other obvious stuff you fuck up.
I tried twice and ran into bugs that prevented me to trust it
They claim to have deleted or will be deleting all the data they exfiltrated.
There are independent agencies that will certify destruction of data. For example FTI Tech, Kroll, Epiq, HaystackID and others.
No such certificates have been presented.
Nothing less is trustworthy.
How much can you really certify that data is destroyed?
Customer data could live on the computer Elon pretends to play Diablo 4 on for all we know.
Why bother with this when they already paid $60B for Cursor?
Cursor users are used to having multiple models from different providers
XAI wants people to use it's own model.
thats probably why they open sourced it and fix some reputation issue on top of it
It's a shame that they exfiled private data. The model is actually good (better than opus 4.8 imo) and the harness itself is butter smooth with the potential of being the best out there.
It definitely doesn't feel like opus. I constantly switch to opus to fix up or finish what grok generates, it feels like sonnet 3!
Grok 4.5 is somewhere between between Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5.
Source : https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/capabilities/coding
Its amazing the speed of build with grok 4.5 its a taste of whats to come.
Now this is contrarian!
Or a spaceTwtterAi stock holder…
This is an incredible amount of code for what it offers. I don't think this was intentionally designed at all.
You will be surprised how much code goes into creating harnesses.
Alright I’ll bite. Why do harnesses require so much code?
i think xai is now in pure damage control mode, after they caught exfiltrating data from users.
- There is a huge difference between logging user queries (which would include only the portion the model is reading) and exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here (https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...). I would stay away from this open-source malware with a 10ft pole.
- if you like grok-4.5 model (it is a good model), i suggest use the model directly via API, or use Grok's oauth tokens if you are using supergrok+heavy subscriptions and connect it to your own agent.
And for generating an absolutely gargantuan amount of CSAM and non-consensual sexualized images, but yeah, exfiltrating data too.
If I use a shovel to kill a man, the shovel maker did not engage in intentionally crafting a weapon of war.
How tools are used are a reflection of the people who use them, and I definitely sympathise that tools should have guardrails to not enable this, or at least detect it.
But if a pedophile uses Whatsapp to groom a child; I don't go after Whatsapp for being a neutral service... I go after the pedophile.
Just as well Grok isn’t a shovel then, hey?
If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
> If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
This is impossible-nobody can possibly block all illegitimate uses without also blocking some legitimate ones as collateral damage. Any moderation process (whether automated or human) inevitably has a non-zero false positive rate.
Now, you can argue that some misuse is so harmful, that the cost of false positives is worth it - but that’s a different claim.
If WhatsApp knew their platform was facilitating CSAM, and they were fully within their power to prevent this but chose not to - yes this would rightly draw criticism…
oh, we're just making shit up now because we don't like a company..
ok then.
Ok, but what if all Whatsapp competitors explicitly banned the ability to groom children on their platform, but Whataspp didn't, and directly advertised it.
I find the premise of your comment completely incredulous.
I totally understand tribalism, and Elon and X aren't exactly well favoured. (not even by me)
But what you're saying right now is that they advertised the fact that they can create child pornography and deepfakes..
I simply don't believe it, unless you provide evidence.
> exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here
I think env files are filtered out [1]. Anyway, the most suspicious code would be `upload_session_state` which is currently a stub function, though it is hard to say if it was only planned (badly) or has been removed as a damage control.
[1] https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/c1b5909ec707c069f...
It must have been removed, given that the initial evidence of the exfil specifically demonstrated .env files being included. And .ssh/* for the user which ran this in $HOME.
No, those are directory names not uploaded. Here are the file names skipped:
https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...
It's about not uploading compiled binary stuff, but they want all your environment data all the same.
Interesting - seen some good experiencences in using grok by some devs, so maybe could be considered as an alternative to my beloved chinese models. Also, hard to give up on pi agent.
Grok Build seems faster to me than `omp` and Claude Code but I can't put my finger as to why. Anecdotally, after disabling code uploads the agent doesn't respond instantly anymore (it used to respond within milliseconds).
I wonder if releasing this may have been on the roadmap, but been prioritized as a bit of whiplash following the "you forfeit the entirety of your working directory as a condition of working with this tool" upset from a few days ago.
Most likely, SpaceX killed the code uploading yesterday so they are definitely concerned about the backlash
> 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.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/14/musk-promis...
What a bunch of slop: 182 top-level external dependencies (so, without considering nested dependencies) and 1318853 lines of code in Rust.
Building efficient agents is doable (I did it myself, github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack), companies just want to tokenmaxx, and as a by-product, produce and publish slop.
It looks like some of that high LoC is because they are vendoring some deps. There readme gives the reason to vendor some but not others as:
``` These crates sit on the path that renders untrusted model output (diagram source → SVG). Vendoring gives a full audit surface, pins exact source, and avoids crates.io yanks. Local patches and upgrade checklists live in each crate’s Cargo.toml header comments — treat those as the source of truth when re-vendoring. ```
Which honestly feels like a misunderstand of how cargo and yanks work. Each upstream package is locked to an exact version in your lockfile along with a cryptographic hash. The upstream can't change the source without you noticing. Unless you update your lockfile you will always pin to the exact source., When a package is yanked, it is still available for download if it is already in a lockfile. It just prevents new packages from resolving it. Crates.io will sometimes completely delete a package, but I've only seen that happen in cases of malware. It's fairly rare and seems out of line with the supply chain concerns here.
There are good arguments for relying on upstream package managers and there are good arguments for vendoring all packages. I've never seen a project mix before.
That is an insane amount of code for something like this!
to be fair, coding agent harnesses have been becoming more and more complex.
it's not an llm in a loop with tools anymore (as claude code was rumoured to be on HN).
It's not a kernel either, 1.3M LoCs is ludicrous.
But I thought just cutting and pasting your whole source code file into grok.com was the way to go? Better than a harness like Cursor.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1943178423947661609
Neat, trying to reverse engineer some specifics of how it does stuff has been a pain in the ass, and this will make it easier.
I'll probably never use this, but at least they're not delusional enough to attempt to justify keeping their coding agent closed-source, especially after their recent data-harvesting cockup:
https://cereblab.com/
It's awesome to see openness in these coding agents from the labs making the agents: Codex, Kimi Code, and now Grok Build.
Grok has had far too many instances where its clear that the team building it cannot be trusted and does not care to build trustworthy products. I highly caution anyone from using any tools from xAi, as they have clearly shown themselves to be bad actors within the space.
It's Apache 2.0. You can have your agents audit it if you want.
What does this release have to do with "trusting" XAI?
It's auditable, just redirect, don't pipe. Or fix your bash to not allow this.
It has nothing to do with XAI, other than maybe not enforcing good practice (which most devs don't follow anyway).
Just build it
First, why audit it when the agent can build a new one.
Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?
I don’t trust a company that pollutes the air of other people with illegal gas turbines because it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
Nothing you said here can't be applied to literally any company on earth. And nothing you said here is even a new concern.
I doubt that every company could hide malicious code so well that AI can’t find it.
And who said it need to be new concerns? Are the old ones resolved and are they not enough?
> Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?
Any evidence for this conspiracy theory? It's not on anyone to disprove this claim.
> it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
Companies are chartered to make their shareholders value. To a first approximation, it's illegal for a company to "fuckit, we care about people's health" unless this is what the shareholders voted for (as opposed to making their shares valuable).
You can argue this is bad, but it isn't about XAI, it applies to every company you've heard of.
Your choice is Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or the Chinese. Who are the good actors within the space?
Rank ordered by reputation / caring about having a trustworthy corporate identity: [Google, Anthropic] in either order depending who you ask, OpenAI, most of the Chinese AI corporations, then Grok.
This is unfortunate situation to find ourselves in when Grok was also recently at the top of the Pareto frontier for quality/price. Dunno if it still is, this all moves too fast, but it was for at least long enough for me to have heard about it.
For me, the Chinese labs are far and away the most trustworthy.
Google?!?!. From where I sit, Google is just above the Chinese. They've been bad-faith actors for more than a decade, I guess everyone is just so used to it that they ignore it.
I there's anyone I don't trust with AI, it's the worlds #1 company in spying on people, in collection of Pii, in tracking, and many many many times caught literally lying about it.
Google already knows more about everyone on the planet, than any other 10 organizations combined. Frankly, sadly, they're all, well.. scummy, just each in different ways.
None. There are no good actors in a profit-driven endeavour. But open-weight seems pretty good (the chinese)
The open source and open weight models.
Surprisingly, despite their motivations in doing so, the Chinese models being open-weight and therefore able to run locally on your own hardware, are far more trustworthy than any blackbox which solely exists to enrich X or Y billionaire.
The Chinese are surely less evil than Anthropic, OpenAI and/or Google, at this stage at least.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Last I checked, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google haven’t systematically exterminated an entire culture of people.
Wow, we're talking tech, jump back in your box. Americans have done exactly the same, that is not what is being discussed here.
You're really walking empty handed and with your pants around our ankles in this one.
Do you really think the US and US big tech in general have a leg to stand on in this regard?
They made it open source. Are you just trying to be bad faith here? Isn't this what the community was asking for?
Reiserfs. A good example on how oss cannot save the product. There are others, but this is the first one that comes to my mind. If you use clearly unethical oss, are you just using oss or are you a part of the problem? Typically, oss purists take these into account.
"Guys, HAL 9000's harness is open source. You can let your agents inspect the code!"
How about stopping the upload of all the data
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48877371
and running their data center with gas turbines without permission while they pollute the air
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705717
you can’t expect people to praise your for making an n+1 harness open source.
This seems more like, look we made something, now fix it for us
> This seems more like, look we made something, now fix it for us
They disabled pull requests in the repo so I'm unsure where you're getting this
> you can’t expect people to praise your for making an n+1 harness open source.
I don't think anyone is asking for praise. My comment was neither hot or cold. I was just surprised that the top comment had nothing to do with any of the technical aspects of Grok Build (and whether there's any trace of uploads).
> I was just surprised that the top comment had nothing to do with any of the technical aspects of Grok Build (and whether there's any trace of uploads).
Most people don't restrict themselves to only discussing the technical aspects of a thing. A thing which is technologically novel (e.g. not this example) may nonetheless not be worth using, due to assorted risks.
I don't find it surprising that HN posters are helping their fellow hackers avoid getting victimized by predators. We just have that sort of nice community :)
Any criticism in a thread related to anything Elon Musk is made in “bad faith” nowadays. That’s a community of personality.
by this standard no good faith criticism of anything musk-adjacent is possible
Understandably
This is clearly a good-faith criticism and there is no lens in which I could see it described as bad-faith.
We see this pattern all the time: Someone makes a criticism of a Musk product, and someone assails that criticism with bad-faith accusations of it being "bad-faith".
Oftentimes, we see that the criticism is undermeasured and ligther than is reasonable, possibly anticipating someone who might accuse it of being "bad faith".
Maybe someone can put a name to this phenomenon but we see it all the time.
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Then you better not use Claude Code, since that is still closed source.
Do you have any examples to illustrate these extraordinary claims?
The many controversies are not hard to find as the children to your comment will show.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/technology/grok-x-ai-elon...
Why is that even a problem? If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.
Blocking AI from generating sexualized images because people could publish deepfakes is no different than banning alcohol because of drunk driving.
Tools are neutral. Blame the people who misuse the tools and hurt others.
> If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.
Yikes.
A. They were released all over the internet - from the article..
> The chatbot has a public account on X, where users can ask it questions or request alterations to images. Users flocked to the social media site, in many cases asking Grok to remove clothing in images of women and children, after which the bot publicly posted the A.I.-generated images.
B. There is a bunch of data about consumers of CSAM 'content escalating' and eventually attempting to make real contact with minors.
C. They were sexualizing pictures of real people and posting the pictures online.
> One of the young plaintiffs said she found out about the imagery after she received an anonymous message on Instagram pointing her toward images and videos, including her high school yearbook photo, which had been altered to show her in sexually explicit actions and full nudity.
The material was being shared on a Discord server, a private chat space on that platform, and included similar imagery that had also been altered using Grok of at least 18 other women who were minors, according to the complaint.
> Tools are neutral.
Ha.
They had a bug in their model that they fixed within days is evidence they are "untrustworthy"?
Elon initially sold xAI as having a spicy mode and being politically incorrect.
It was only deemed a bug when it became a liability - you can't simply rewrite history and expect it to go unnoticed.
They put it behind a paywall and didn't fix it, according to more recent lawsuits than that article.
Also, failed to correctly notify authorities even when they eventually notified them at all.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
You didnt even address my link, this is why you are being called out as a bad-faith actor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892468
read the top comment
read any of your other replies
OP seems to be asking for examples with an intent to dismiss and downplay each of them, and not to actually read into them and challenge his existing beliefs about X/Grok/Musk.
LOL, pot meet kettle for real.
Open to changing my mind. I would be interested in reading positive, uplifting news about xAI/Grok/Musk that demonstrated a repeated pattern of ethical, careful, compassionate, attentive, and/or responsible business and engineering practices.
I agree about OP.
However after looking at all of these articles, these all seem like instances of users misusing the product. The product happens to reply on social media, so media publications immediately capitalized on this.
Seems less like malicious intent from xAI's part and more like a product with young and/or insufficient moderation controls.
Just today I saw an article where xAI is suing a creator for creating illegal content. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musks-xai-sues-grok...
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/06/x-faces-global-investigati...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/grok-s...
https://apnews.com/article/grok-ai-elon-musk-xai-f3f8195a176...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/grok-assumes-use...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/grok-praises-hit...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/elon-musks-xai-s...
https://apnews.com/article/grok-4-elon-musk-xai-colossus-14d...
https://apnews.com/article/grok-ai-south-africa-64ce5f240061...
https://apnews.com/article/france-ai-musk-grok-holocaust-e8c...
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/xais-grok-suddenly-cant-s...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-making-changes...
Starkly different. One was a well meaning attempt to squash model bias gone wrong, the other is a deliberately inserted bias. Even ignoring all that, whataboutism is not persuasive.
The reality is both are likely well meaning attempts to squash model bias gone wrong. Since you happen to align with the politics of one more than the other, you are having trouble being intellectually honest about your own biases.
In no way are you being intellectually honest if you think that hamfisted system prompt push to prod manipulation was an attempt to squash bias. And again, whataboutism doesn't make xAI better because others are doing bad, too. You asked for evidence of xAI untrustworthiness and received it.
What is worse a "hamfisted system prompt push to prod" or a system and organization built to enforce systematic bias in the name of anti-bias?
I see your hamfisted cropping of my quote to downplay xAI's actions, since you brought up intellectual honesty.
Why do we have to quantity badness? The question you posed was what has xAI done to be perceived as untrustworthy? Stop trying to whatabout Google here. I'm no friend of theirs, it's simply irrelevant.
Also, it's Whataboutism: Other Company Y doing something bad/untrustworthy isn't a counter to Company X doing something similarly bad/untrustworthy. Both can be bad.
OK great, do you consider Gemini/Google untrustworthy software that shouldn't be used? Just making sure we're being intellectually honest here.
Both are bad and are examples of untrustworthy behavior from their companies, and I would not chime into a thread to defend either of them. Is one example enough to smear an entire company as untrustworthy? No. But numerous examples and patterns of behavior... possibly?
getting into politics again...
I think examples such as letting people nudify children qualifies xAI as a bad actor without having to be political.
How is it possible for deciding whether or not to build on the labor of some other organized group of people to not be politics?
You know who is apolitical? Russian voters. Works out great for them.
There's plenty of non-political reasons to avoid believing anything that a con-man says.
You can't separate the man or his business from the politics, he wades into every political debate he can and deliberately tries to troll as many of his perceived enemies as possible.
Grok is a generator of child sexual assault material.
Aside from their CEO are they really that different from the other big US players? OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all have proven themselves to be untrustworthy as well. We should accept that we have an adversarial relationship with all these companies and shouldn't invest to much in any of them. Use them for what they are worth while the technology matures but be prepared to move on.
Oh yeah, aside from their CEO? OK.
Has anyone tried building from source?
The commit message says "initial sync from the monorepo." Is this even compilable without the rest of the source code?
yup you can compile, we tested and made sure all the features work before posting
Sigh, why has the industry converged on TUI? Branding and aesthetics over functionality?
TUI is just much worse for me. I tried Codex CLI vs Codex UI and Codex UI beats it at every level.
TUI is a lot better for me, and I have preferred it since the 00s, before LLM products were even a thing.
For all the reasons there can be, one big reason is that it works on anything you can get a terminal on, you can use it over SSH, and the UI will be the same no matter where you use it.
I also like that they are very very fast and they don't have the incessant animations that are put into most desktop environments nowadays. If you're on MacOS, the terminal is the only only part of your computer without roadblocks everywhere.
It is a fashion thing. I am not saying that agentic TUIs are bad or anything but it is certain fashionable to use one in 2026.
And why are you assuming the industry converged to it when your following statement dismantles your assumption?
Spacex bought cursor, so it now has it’s agent ui which is just as good as codex + it’s multi-modal
Anthropic also has it’s own ui
Zai also launched theirs last month.
Everyone is converging back to UI.
The terminal was just a prototype, everyone knew that.
Just a prototype? I have no reason to leave the terminal for a GUI IDE. TUI works great, does what I need and is very easy to use and interact with.
Claude code which is most used agent harness doesn’t have desktop equivalent
It has had one for months. The desktop app has a "code" mode which is Claude Code in GUI form
Apart from Claude desktop, that is...
Is this the infamous "cloud upload" routine? I'm not sure it is indeed insidious, though it is of course possible that the code has been filtered out. https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...
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Why snowflakes? You can use /feedback in the app.
This is 100% smoke and mirrors. Prove the bucket is empty and nothing was transferred out and I'll believe they deleted it.