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Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

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Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#81

There are a distressing number of people in this thread who think that the agent should just be expected to do this. Yes, it is good to be paranoid, but also, the agent should never do this. Indicates horrific engineering practices at xAI.

Technology where the entire selling point is stochasticity should be expected to do anything (everything) eventually surely?

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#82

There are a distressing number of people in this thread who think that the agent should just be expected to do this. Yes, it is good to be paranoid, but also, the agent should never do this. Indicates horrific engineering practices at xAI.

Engineering? What's that? Modern development best practice is to have the AI make some changes, then have another AI review the changes, and finally "ship it".

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#83
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not seeing the information about it having been run at $HOME, where are you seeing that?

The `repo_path` field.

Ah. I've never used Grok so I was assuming that meant there was actually a repository on the user's home directory, something I know is pretty common.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#84
I feel like a lot of people here are understating this issue.

This is a stupid stupid thing to "allow," for every party involved here.

You're a stupid programmer if you're letting these things touch your files.

You're a stupid company if you're letting Grok run wild.

We're a stupid industry if we're not warning everybody about how ridiculous this all is.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#86
post #68

I use a separate user for all development tasks, its home folder contains all repositories I work on, and nothing else, and that is all the IDE and the AI assistants have access to. Create the user once, start the IDE from a shell using that user, and that's it. In Linux it's a pretty seamless experience. It's simple sandboxing based solely on unix file permissions. Albeit weak, I find the isolation sufficient. Until…

That makes so much sense, in the end an Agent is a user.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#87
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.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#88

So many of the replies are saying that they should've restricted access using .md files and whatnot. Is really any guarantee that they even follow those? It seems like even if you ask pretty please don't touch those files, there's a chance they will. So many people have just willingly installed spyware on their computers and big tech calls this the next big thing.

That's the whole reason I refuse to install Google Drive or Dropbox's desktop applications. I only use the web interface so I know exactly what gets uploaded and when. I assume that anything running on my computer gets access to everything.

Sounds like a very wise decision to me. I found found out on my phone that the google photos application uploaded everything in my gallery to their servers without asking me, regardless that I had explicitly disabled all backup to my google accounts on the settings of the phone. I only figured it out when they sent me emails saying that my storage was full.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#89
post #71

Important to clarify that this was not the Grok agent deciding to read the files. I don't think the LLM had anything to do with this decision at all. It looks like the Grok tool starts a session by deterministically kicking off a full upload of the user's current repository (and maybe their directory if not version tracked? Not clear if this user had previously run "git init" in their home directory) to Grok's server…

Also decent embeddings models could run locally and just trickle through the user folder if that was so necessary.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#90

why do people give these LLMs full access to everything and then complain when it does somethign stupid? that is what sandboxes are for.

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
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