Grok CLI Was Uploading Everything

An independent researcher demonstrated that xAI’s official Grok CLI was not just sending the files the agent read to the model, it was packaging up the entire working directory as a git bundle, full history included, and uploading it to a Google Cloud Storage bucket named grok-code-session-traces.

That happened even when the agent was explicitly told not to read any files, and it included .env files with secrets in them, unredacted. Turning off “Improve the model” did not stop it.

Once the writeup went viral, xAI killed the behavior with a remote feature flag (the code stayed in the binary), open sourced the CLI within about a day after calls to do so from OpenAI, and said it is deleting the retained data.