What Open Source Doesn’t Show

In xai-org/grok-build, now open source, Simon Willison inspected the newly released Grok Build code after reports that it uploaded users’ repositories to company-controlled cloud storage.

“There are still remnants of the code that used to upload everything to Google Cloud.”

That is noteworthy.

The published repository contains more than 800,000 lines of Rust, but it arrived as a single commit. We can inspect the current code and see that the upload paths appear to be disabled, but we cannot see when they were created, how they changed, or why the behavior existed in the first place.

Open sourcing the current version is better than keeping it closed. It is not the same as releasing the project’s history.

I would be very interested to see the commits, discussions, and decisions that led to users’ repositories being uploaded by default. That history would tell us far more than a cleaned-up snapshot released after the backlash.

Read Simon Willison’s inspection of the Grok Build code and The Register’s report on its release.