xAI sells Grok Build, its AI coding agent CLI, as “local-first, your code never leaves your machine.” A wire-level packet capture of version 0.2.93 says otherwise: the CLI quietly packs your whole repository into a git bundle and POSTs it to a Google Cloud Storage bucket named grok-code-session-traces — no matter which files the agent actually reads.
What the capture proved
A planted canary .env with a fake API key showed up verbatim in the request bodies. A 12GB repo shipped 5.1GB in 73 chunks, full git history included. Telling the agent “don’t read any files” changed nothing. Toggling off “Improve the Model” changed nothing. The worst case on record: one session’s repo_path was the user’s entire home directory.
Why this matters
Two HackerNews threads pulled 527 points combined — the second trust crisis for AI coding agents in months. The pattern is the problem: privacy promise in marketing, exfiltration on the wire, opt-out that doesn’t opt out. xAI has since flipped a server-side flag disabling the uploads — after getting caught, not before. If you ran Grok Build on anything sensitive, rotate your keys now.
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