Though I'm in the camp "people should really know to sandbox by now and be careful", I'd say we should also be mindful of how far from everyone has deep knowledge of the systems and tools they use. This behaviour of a tool is just malicious. You have to take into account the human factor, of how people likely end up using a system. And in this case, the consequences of exfiltrating so many secrets this way are really quite unacceptable.
Not to mention the very wide push to "Use AI NOW, for EVERYTHING!" in marketing ans many companies, with hardly any though given to safety or where does all the data end up.
Not gonna argue about the utility of AI, but isn't the statement "AI is not here to help people" completely meaningless? AI itself is not "here" for anything; the problem is big tech doing big tech shit as always, not the current technology they're doing it with.
AI is created by big tech stealing other people's data. Yes, this has everything to do with AI - stealing data is a foundational feature of the technology.
True, but it isn't here to not help people, either.
It's a spanner. Who wields the spanner, makes all the difference.
We've spent the last couple of decades, cultivating a huge crop of ultimate scumbag billionaires, with almost comically exaggerated sociopathy, and that has filtered down to almost every level of society. They are treated as gods, these days (they certainly think of themselves that way).
It still shocks me (but really shouldn't), on a daily basis, to encounter regular folks, interacting in stores and restaurants, or driving on roads, that mirror the values systems exemplified by our billionaires. Our politicians act that way, and one of their biggest selling points, is normalizing sociopathy (not just the US, either).
The first clue should have been when all the Silicon Valley CEO’s lined up to kiss the ring after the second Trump victory. Remember it wasn’t that long before that “woke” tech companies were derided and accused by the same factions they suddenly found themselves in good standing with. There were entire pushes regarding section 230, etc. to go against social media companies, constant complaints about “Facebook” jails and shadow banning. Now they’re all buddy buddy.
Anyway, ghouls like Thiel are now a well known name among populist left and right as an enemy, so maybe some good may come from this.
(an aside but the majority of the US population didn't elect Trump. He is in office because of the electoral college. Might seem like a distinction without a difference but I think it matters when we're implying personal culpability)
I never thought about it in that extreme, but just today the google results ai gave me conflicting information from one search to another. Maybe I should start.
P.S. the conflicting information was Keith Richard's age. One search said he was 37 Dec 18 1981, the other said he was 37 in 1980.
This wasn't the LLM, it was Grok CLI preemptively uploading the entire CWD, regardless of where that CWD is, to its own server.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect every user (including those just starting out with the tools - maybe experimenting, maybe younger/less experienced in general) to think that the tool they're running for the very first time is going to automatically exfiltrate all of their data.
It's a pretty serious fuck-up. This guy tweeted about it, who knows how many didn't even notice. It should have been opt-in, it should give user an indication that it's about to do this, etc.
The grok-cli is on github[0] there is nothing that I can see in the code that is activily looping ~/ and uploading everything.
My two guesses would be one the LLM decided it needed these files for the task or two the user simple asked grok to do it so they could post the tool calls on twitter.
That is not the Grok CLI being discussed. That's an open source, third party CLI. https://x.ai/cli is the official Grok CLI being discussed, and it is not open source.
I think there are arguments on both sides. People should look for guidance on how to use complex tools, but we know people will not.
Whose fault is it if someone drives a car without learning how to and injures themselves? On the other hand if the manufacturer has promoted it as one you can drive without learning how to, then whose fault is it?
A lot of users are fine with everything being uploaded. Most people's primary computing device is now a phone that backs up everything to cloud and using apps that are thin front ends over cloud services.
If your immediate reaction to a new piece of software siphoning up someone’s entire system full of highly personal data is, “you’re holding it wrong”, it might help to take a beat and remember that software was developed by a multi-trillion dollar company’s entire business model revolves around siphoning up as much highly personal data as possible
The point is more that you should not blame the user (why didn't you set up sandbox instead of directly using the tool of big corp) if a tool does something unexpected. If your Dropbox client would suddenly just upload your home directory instead of it's folder you configured you'd also not blame the user that they use Dropbox, you'd blame Dropbox for not doing their job correctly or being user hostile.
Agreed. You can still encourage people to use defense in depth without actively blaming them for not having the deepest moat imaginable. Software creators still have some responsibility
Maybe possibly with --dangerously-skip-permissions. I've been using auto mode and enjoy how it blocks every tool use that could've allowed something potentially sensitive into context. Burns extra tokens though.
But Claude Code, arguably one of the most famous ones, is not. And recently got some heat about sending meta data that wasn't so obvious. Just as a counter-example.
My first thought would be their server side extentions, code excecutoon sandboxes and document RAG search, being on by default? Probably should be an opt-in instead of an opt-out.
Is the Grok CLI a 2 terabyte install? Did Elon dropship you an 8U rack of B200s?
No?
Well the model weights, the GPUs, and the context obviously all have to be in the same place, so “sending your project to them” is literally the only thing that could possibly happen, unless you think agents work by fucking magic.
This is the biggest case of PEBKAC in history, maybe ever.
This is the kind of confusion that Charles Babbage could not rightly comprehend, except at those politicians at least had the excuse that computers had only been invented five minutes prior.
If you decide that your entire home directory is the project, as the OP did by setting the repo_path to ~/, then, well… I mean, if you ask me, I don’t recommend it, but it’s your computer and your free will.
It's fascinating how many people in this conversation think that LLMs need to have all of the files in your $CWD on the model provider's servers to be able to do anything.
This sort of stuff is precisely why running local models has to be the future. It's absolutely insane that we just send our code to the cloud like this, and we basically have to trust these companies with it.
https://gist.github.com/cereblab/dc9a40bc26120f4540e4e09b75ffb547
Elon did this horrible thing, so I made grok build available for omp with it's own endpoint; Without sending your private repos and secret keys to them.
-
oh-my-pi-plugin-grok-build
Standalone oh-my-pi extension for the xAI Grok Build subscription provider. It adds OAuth login, authoritative model discovery, and OpenAI Responses streaming with the request identity expected by Grok Build.
Install (No-spywares):
omp plugin install oh-my-pi-plugin-grok-build
-
https://github.com/metaphorics/oh-my-pi-plugin-grok-build
Star me if you like it or if you hate spywares, lol.
It needs to be baked into the OS.
At that point, HN users start screeching about it, so it's lose/lose, really.
I don’t like piling on especially with security vulnerabilities, but man how many red flags do you need to ignore?
They won’t stop abusing us until we stop using their products.
I don't use AI at all in my daily life.
Work however will demand you use it.
AI is not here to help people.
True, but it isn't here to not help people, either.
It's a spanner. Who wields the spanner, makes all the difference.
We've spent the last couple of decades, cultivating a huge crop of ultimate scumbag billionaires, with almost comically exaggerated sociopathy, and that has filtered down to almost every level of society. They are treated as gods, these days (they certainly think of themselves that way).
It still shocks me (but really shouldn't), on a daily basis, to encounter regular folks, interacting in stores and restaurants, or driving on roads, that mirror the values systems exemplified by our billionaires. Our politicians act that way, and one of their biggest selling points, is normalizing sociopathy (not just the US, either).
I didn't really need a second clue.
...it was quite the sting because I bought a Tesla car only 2 weeks prior to that.
Anyway, ghouls like Thiel are now a well known name among populist left and right as an enemy, so maybe some good may come from this.
Not necessarily speaking of the present. This seems to be the general sentiment.
(an aside but the majority of the US population didn't elect Trump. He is in office because of the electoral college. Might seem like a distinction without a difference but I think it matters when we're implying personal culpability)
P.S. the conflicting information was Keith Richard's age. One search said he was 37 Dec 18 1981, the other said he was 37 in 1980.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect every user (including those just starting out with the tools - maybe experimenting, maybe younger/less experienced in general) to think that the tool they're running for the very first time is going to automatically exfiltrate all of their data.
It's a pretty serious fuck-up. This guy tweeted about it, who knows how many didn't even notice. It should have been opt-in, it should give user an indication that it's about to do this, etc.
My two guesses would be one the LLM decided it needed these files for the task or two the user simple asked grok to do it so they could post the tool calls on twitter.
[0] https://github.com/superagent-ai/grok-cli
Whose fault is it if someone drives a car without learning how to and injures themselves? On the other hand if the manufacturer has promoted it as one you can drive without learning how to, then whose fault is it?
A lot of users are fine with everything being uploaded. Most people's primary computing device is now a phone that backs up everything to cloud and using apps that are thin front ends over cloud services.
It’s kind of wild to watch in real time, instead of over the decades it took society for SA.
Do Anthropic users consider themselves clever enough to not make the same mistakes as Microsoft?
Posting a complaint about Elon on Elon's platform and tagging him is ballsy. He tends to limit visibility of accounts who do that.
Not sure which weirdness happened here
If someone wants to contribute the Grok CLI I'm happy to support it.
This is why it is important to use open source harnesses instead of shady closed ones.
No?
Well the model weights, the GPUs, and the context obviously all have to be in the same place, so “sending your project to them” is literally the only thing that could possibly happen, unless you think agents work by fucking magic.
This is the biggest case of PEBKAC in history, maybe ever.
This is the kind of confusion that Charles Babbage could not rightly comprehend, except at those politicians at least had the excuse that computers had only been invented five minutes prior.
Only a buffoon would be confused by the straightforward logic.
https://ibb.co/ycs6K4c9