Security firm Claroc says it opened 35,578 apps that people built with Grok Build, SpaceXSI’s AI app-building tool, without signing in. SpaceXSI is SpaceX‘s (Nasdaq: SPCX) AI division, formerly xAI. Of 37,571 live apps tested, 94.7% opened to anyone. Most were games, calculators, and ordinary websites, but Claroc estimates 650 to 800 held private data.
A Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA) service-center scorecard listed 22 technicians, their output, and bonus standing. Medical exam results for 3,784 workers at a Peruvian construction firm sat open, along with a 108-person staff list from a ship engineering firm’s Navy logistics contract and loading procedures for a Norwegian-Finnish defense group’s explosives building in the US. Beyond SpaceXSI and X, Claroc counted 30 identifiable organizations with internal data in open apps, 26 employing more than 1,000 people and six in the Fortune 500.
SpaceXSI and X employees had published 24 of the apps, which exposed the plan for onboarding an enterprise sales hire and a map of 594 sales accounts. Claroc reported two of them to SpaceXSI on Sunday and the other 22 on Monday, then flagged Elon Musk in a post on X when no one replied. The apps stayed reachable through Monday night. SpaceXSI started pulling them within hours of reporters’ questions, and each showed an “app not found” error when the story ran. Almost everything else stayed online.
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Grok Build publishes each app at its own web address, such as the made-up calm-river-stone-fox.grok.me, and the random words that make the link hard to guess form the front of that address. When anyone opens a new address, their computer asks the domain name system, or DNS, where to find it. Passive DNS services log those lookups in commercial databases that customers can search, so the address becomes findable. Claroc listed 43,601 grok.me addresses. Google avoids the problem by placing the random part of its document links after the domain, where DNS never sees it.
Other builders, including Lovable and Replit, also publish each app at its own address, but Asaf Aprozper, Claroc’s co-founder and chief technology officer, says Grok held the most sensitive corporate data he found. ChatGPT’s builder, by contrast, kept new apps set to “Only me” until Claroc changed the setting.
A Cursor spokesperson, speaking for the coding company SpaceX bought for $60 billion in stock in August, after absorbing xAI earlier this year, said apps stay private until their creator shares them. The spokesperson then stopped answering follow-up questions. Claroc disputes that account. In its paid account, the publish screen preselected “Anyone with the link,” with invited users or only the creator as the narrower choices. SpaceXSI told a reporter that employee accounts default to “Only you” — yet its own staff left 24 apps open.
Grok’s app builder started in July as a beta for SuperGrok Heavy subscribers and opened to every plan on August 19. SpaceXSI says creators decide who can open their apps, from only themselves to the whole internet. Nothing went live until a creator hit publish.
To see what protections Grok adds on its own, Claroc built two test apps with made-up data. In the first, a contact list with no login, a stranger added an entry that the next visitor saw. In the second, a customer list for a four-person sales team, a Google account nobody had invited signed in, then read, changed, and deleted records. Claroc tested only its own apps, so it cannot say whether any exposed app let visitors edit data.
In July, a security researcher reported that the terminal version sent far more code than its tasks required to a Google Cloud bucket the company controls, including 5.1 gigabytes for a job that needed 192 kilobytes. The uploads stopped soon after, and Musk posted that the company would delete everything uploaded before then. The company went by SpaceXAI at the time. Musk announced a rename to SpaceXSI in October.
