- Sources: SpaceXAI announcement, GitHub xai-org/grok-build, Simon Willison, HN discussion
- Summary: xAI published the source of Grok Build, its Grok 4.5 coding agent and terminal UI, on 2026-07-15 under Apache-2.0 as xai-org/grok-build, a roughly 845k line Rust workspace containing the agent loop, file tools, TUI, and extension system. External contributions are rejected and GitHub issues are disabled. The company says Grok Build can now run fully local-first against user-supplied inference and that it reset usage limits for all users. The release lands days after a wire-capture analysis reported the CLI uploaded entire working directories and
.env secrets to a Google Cloud Storage bucket by default. - Comments: Simon Willison reads the open-sourcing as damage control after the upload report, notes disabled upload code still present in the tree and tool implementations adapted from OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude, and cites xAI claims that retained user data was deleted and retention disabled by default.
- Why it matters: Publishing a frontier vendor's full coding-agent harness lets practitioners audit its behavior and run it without cloud-imposed data collection, directly addressing the trust concerns raised by the upload disclosure.
- Follow-up: Watch whether the upload paths are fully removed, independent confirmation of the data-deletion claim, and third-party forks running against local inference.
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