Though I'm in the camp "people should really know to sandbox by now and be careful", I'd say we should also be mindful of how far from everyone has deep knowledge of the systems and tools they use. This behaviour of a tool is just malicious. You have to take into account the human factor, of how people likely end up using a system. And in this case, the consequences of exfiltrating so many secrets this way are really quite unacceptable.
This wasn't the LLM, it was Grok CLI preemptively uploading the entire CWD, regardless of where that CWD is, to its own server.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect every user (including those just starting out with the tools - maybe experimenting, maybe younger/less experienced in general) to think that the tool they're running for the very first time is going to automatically exfiltrate all of their data.
It's a pretty serious fuck-up. This guy tweeted about it, who knows how many didn't even notice. It should have been opt-in, it should give user an indication that it's about to do this, etc.
The grok-cli is on github[0] there is nothing that I can see in the code that is activily looping ~/ and uploading everything.
My two guesses would be one the LLM decided it needed these files for the task or two the user simple asked grok to do it so they could post the tool calls on twitter.
That is not the Grok CLI being discussed. That's an open source, third party CLI. https://x.ai/cli is the official Grok CLI being discussed, and it is not open source.
If your immediate reaction to a new piece of software siphoning up someone’s entire system full of highly personal data is, “you’re holding it wrong”, it might help to take a beat and remember that software was developed by a multi-trillion dollar company’s entire business model revolves around siphoning up as much highly personal data as possible
The point is more that you should not blame the user (why didn't you set up sandbox instead of directly using the tool of big corp) if a tool does something unexpected. If your Dropbox client would suddenly just upload your home directory instead of it's folder you configured you'd also not blame the user that they use Dropbox, you'd blame Dropbox for not doing their job correctly or being user hostile.
Agreed. You can still encourage people to use defense in depth without actively blaming them for not having the deepest moat imaginable. Software creators still have some responsibility
But Claude Code, arguably one of the most famous ones, is not. And recently got some heat about sending meta data that wasn't so obvious. Just as a counter-example.
My first thought would be their server side extentions, code excecutoon sandboxes and document RAG search, being on by default? Probably should be an opt-in instead of an opt-out.
Is the Grok CLI a 2 terabyte install? Did Elon dropship you an 8U rack of B200s?
No?
Well the model weights, the GPUs, and the context obviously all have to be in the same place, so “sending your project to them” is literally the only thing that could possibly happen, unless you think agents work by fucking magic.
This is the biggest case of PEBKAC in history, maybe ever.
This is the kind of confusion that Charles Babbage could not rightly comprehend, except at those politicians at least had the excuse that computers had only been invented five minutes prior.
It's fascinating how many people in this conversation think that LLMs need to have all of the files in your $CWD on the model provider's servers to be able to do anything.
https://gist.github.com/cereblab/dc9a40bc26120f4540e4e09b75ffb547
Elon did this horrible thing, so I made grok build available for omp with it's own endpoint; Without sending your private repos and secret keys to them.
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oh-my-pi-plugin-grok-build
Standalone oh-my-pi extension for the xAI Grok Build subscription provider. It adds OAuth login, authoritative model discovery, and OpenAI Responses streaming with the request identity expected by Grok Build.
Install (No-spywares):
omp plugin install oh-my-pi-plugin-grok-build
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https://github.com/metaphorics/oh-my-pi-plugin-grok-build
Star me if you like it or if you hate spywares, lol.
I don’t like piling on especially with security vulnerabilities, but man how many red flags do you need to ignore?
They won’t stop abusing us until we stop using their products.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect every user (including those just starting out with the tools - maybe experimenting, maybe younger/less experienced in general) to think that the tool they're running for the very first time is going to automatically exfiltrate all of their data.
It's a pretty serious fuck-up. This guy tweeted about it, who knows how many didn't even notice. It should have been opt-in, it should give user an indication that it's about to do this, etc.
My two guesses would be one the LLM decided it needed these files for the task or two the user simple asked grok to do it so they could post the tool calls on twitter.
[0] https://github.com/superagent-ai/grok-cli
Do Anthropic users consider themselves clever enough to not make the same mistakes as Microsoft?
Posting a complaint about Elon on Elon's platform and tagging him is ballsy. He tends to limit visibility of accounts who do that.
Not sure which weirdness happened here
This is why it is important to use open source harnesses instead of shady closed ones.
No?
Well the model weights, the GPUs, and the context obviously all have to be in the same place, so “sending your project to them” is literally the only thing that could possibly happen, unless you think agents work by fucking magic.
This is the biggest case of PEBKAC in history, maybe ever.
This is the kind of confusion that Charles Babbage could not rightly comprehend, except at those politicians at least had the excuse that computers had only been invented five minutes prior.
Only a buffoon would be confused by the straightforward logic.