2026 xAI Grok Build CLI — full Git repos uploaded to cloud; privacy toggle ineffective (Jul)

Verified developer-data exposure — disclosed July 12–14, 2026. Independent AI safety researcher Cereblab published a wire-level analysis of xAI's Grok Build CLI version 0.2.93 showing a background storage channel (POST /v1/storage) that packaged users' entire Git workspaces into bundles uploaded to a Google Cloud bucket named grok-code-session-traces. In a controlled test on a 12 GiB repository, the channel transferred 5.1 GiB in 73 chunks while the model's working requests moved only ~192 KB. Files the model was explicitly instructed not to read—including a planted canary and a .env with API keys—appeared verbatim in captured uploads, and git clone on the bundle recovered full history including deleted secrets. The user-facing "Improve the model" privacy toggle did not stop uploads; the server returned trace_upload_enabled: true regardless. xAI disabled uploads via a server-side flag on July 13, 2026 without issuing a client update; upload code remained in binary 0.2.99. On July 14, Elon Musk posted on X that all user data previously uploaded to SpaceXAI would be "completely and utterly deleted," and xAI staff reiterated enterprise zero-retention options on social media. xAI had not published a formal incident report, affected-user count, or deletion verification mechanism at catalog time. BreachHistory indexes recordsAffected 0 pending any attested developer count.