alt.hn

7/15/2026 at 8:24:58 PM

Grok Build is open source

 https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build

by skp1995

7/15/2026 at 9:57:42 PM

This is not the right thing, this is the tactical thing. If you have an LLM with less than 1% of the share to begin with, you suffer from bad rep and you got caught uploading user data, one of the very few remaining tactical moves to try to climb out of it is this.

by GodelNumbering

7/15/2026 at 10:11:09 PM

Another tactical move is to just stop. You're allowed to exit the AI business. Nobody's forcing you to keep throwing money into the furnace. Just be a rocket company. All of the xAI founders left. Your product's brand name is mud. Just stop doing that and build spaceships.

by CobrastanJorji

7/15/2026 at 10:35:13 PM

The stock market would not like that, though.

by afavour

7/15/2026 at 10:38:11 PM

> You're allowed to exit the AI business.

Isn’t it more fun to fight the incumbents, the behemoths, the goliaths?

by andsoitis

7/15/2026 at 11:03:24 PM

xAI is no David.

by beams_of_light

7/15/2026 at 10:53:23 PM

That would be a strategic move.

by nine_k

7/15/2026 at 10:21:28 PM

As a social media site they need to understand content for recommendations and they allow people to ask questions about posts for free. Along with having a large amount of data that can be trained on xAI has good reason to continue developing AI.

by charcircuit

7/15/2026 at 11:06:59 PM

They bought a lot of GPUs. They could still do these things on that hardware with someone else's model.

by wombat-man

7/15/2026 at 11:07:18 PM

They could use other people's models running on their hardware while renting most of the existing capacity to others. The real issue is that their leadership is delusional and their stock is literally based on this shared delusion and acknowledging reality would gut their ability to raise new funds and destroy paper wealth based on delusional returns that are never going to happen.

by michaelmrose

7/15/2026 at 10:35:56 PM

Twitter (and others) had an algorithmic feed long before LLMs.

These don't actually seem like "good reasons" to me.

by __float

7/15/2026 at 10:38:17 PM

Before using large language models, they used language models. Large language models perform better, at the cost of being more expensive to run.

by charcircuit

7/15/2026 at 10:19:29 PM

But how will Musk stay a trillionaire without fake AI hype?

by solumunus

7/15/2026 at 10:21:53 PM

Renting his boatload of GPUs to Google, Anthropic, et al

by IncreasePosts

7/15/2026 at 10:33:55 PM

He doesn't have _that_ many. And they're also not _his_, he just got them from NVidia.

by cyberax

7/15/2026 at 10:15:27 PM

> Just be a rocket company.

Ah, are you referring to the rockets that become autonomous 60 seconds prior to launch, like Falcon 9? The rockets that steer and diagnose themselves with a minimum of input/communication from ground stations? The crewed space capsules that deliver astronauts to the ISS and trans-lunar orbits, without the ordinary needs for manual piloting or astrogation? Those rockets?

Sure bro, "exit the AI business" and keep on with the rocket science, I guess

by ButlerianJihad

7/15/2026 at 10:25:04 PM

LLMs have nothing to do with any of that.

by spankalee

7/15/2026 at 10:36:02 PM

And if they did, you still don't need to be developing a Twitter-bot LLM and/or nudify image model to support your rocketry projects.

by svachalek

7/15/2026 at 10:37:02 PM

Ah yes, rockets, famously invented in late 2024 after LLMs became popular.

by solid_fuel

7/15/2026 at 10:40:23 PM

Life sure changed when Elon invented the PID controller!

by bigyabai

7/15/2026 at 10:47:59 PM

PID is a type of AI! That's why Space X blew up so many rockets, that was just RLHF.

by hnav

7/15/2026 at 10:44:15 PM

Ironic username.

by LandoCalrissian

7/15/2026 at 10:32:08 PM

That is probably the best solution too!

by hsnewman

7/15/2026 at 11:03:35 PM

Yes, tactical is the right word because it might be a tactical win but it would be a strategic failure. Musks whole meme empire runs on vibes. The second there's a crack in the dam it all comes down. None of the valuations of anything he touches make sense and something like utterly failing to run with the AI big boys is enough to do that.

by idiotsecant

7/15/2026 at 9:58:58 PM

I would recommend using https://pi.dev/ over Grok Build with your xAI subscription at this point

by buremba

7/15/2026 at 10:24:58 PM

why pi over opencode? earnestly curious, trying to figure out what open solution people are consolidating on. (codex is also pseudo-open but contributions closed and nice)

by whimsicalism

7/15/2026 at 10:38:49 PM

Most of my harness experience is with Claude Code and Pi, a little bit of OpenCode.

I like how quick and snappy Pi is, it feels like a minimal harness, just enough to manage the agent and get out of the way. Earlier models also seemed to have an easier time working with the tools, e.g. GPT-OSS-20B is about a year old and had no trouble in Pi.

by accrual

7/15/2026 at 10:49:15 PM

pi is the neovim of agentic harnesses, its barebones and extremely configurable. if you're the sort of person who likes that sort of things its a forever product, nothing is going to displace it because you have full control.

opencode builds a lot more in, which is better if you dont want to fiddle with config.

by lanthissa

7/15/2026 at 10:39:16 PM

Opencode gives you better defaults and a Mac/Windows app for free but pi is much more extensible and portable.

by buremba

7/15/2026 at 10:43:39 PM

I recommend using https://omnigent.ai over Grok Build or any other harness.

by falaki

7/15/2026 at 10:52:36 PM

As a general rule I don't use new products whose websites don't resize properly on mobile.

If you fuck that up, makes me wonder what other obvious stuff you fuck up.

by alasano

7/15/2026 at 11:04:00 PM

I tried twice and ran into bugs that prevented me to trust it

by buremba

7/15/2026 at 10:22:07 PM

Pi is good in concept, but why couldn’t they choose a compiled language instead of TypeScript?

by guessmyname

7/15/2026 at 10:36:22 PM

since pi is built to modify itself, isn't it better to use a language like typescript where LLMs have a LOT of training data?

a harness doesn't do any computations by itself so what benefit is using a compiled language?

by jack_pp

7/15/2026 at 10:38:08 PM

For TUIs, Rust/Go vs Typescript doesn't really makes a huge performance difference and you lose the 50x bigger community advantage of Typescript.

by buremba

7/15/2026 at 10:35:16 PM

I imagine because they want to support plugins, and plugins in compiled language are a lot less natural than plugins in languages like TypeScript or Python.

by simonw

7/15/2026 at 10:28:24 PM

I would imagine the extension system they built would be much more difficult to manage. They could have opted for Lua, though, I suppose.

by tuvix

7/15/2026 at 10:09:21 PM

They claim to have deleted or will be deleting all the data they exfiltrated.

There are independent agencies that will certify destruction of data. For example FTI Tech, Kroll, Epiq, HaystackID and others.

No such certificates have been presented.

Nothing less is trustworthy.

by ninjagoo

7/15/2026 at 10:28:26 PM

[flagged]

by booi

7/15/2026 at 10:08:47 PM

Why bother with this when they already paid $60B for Cursor?

by cherryteastain

7/15/2026 at 10:59:06 PM

Cursor users are used to having multiple models from different providers

XAI wants people to use it's own model.

by khurs

7/15/2026 at 10:26:10 PM

thats probably why they open sourced it and fix some reputation issue on top of it

by winfredJa

7/15/2026 at 9:49:48 PM

It's a shame that they exfiled private data. The model is actually good (better than opus 4.8 imo) and the harness itself is butter smooth with the potential of being the best out there.

by kamikazechaser

7/15/2026 at 11:07:39 PM

Its amazing the speed of build with grok 4.5 its a taste of whats to come.

by small_model

7/15/2026 at 10:16:05 PM

It definitely doesn't feel like opus. I constantly switch to opus to fix up or finish what grok generates, it feels like sonnet 3!

by bakies

7/15/2026 at 10:21:58 PM

Now this is contrarian!

by solumunus

7/15/2026 at 10:43:58 PM

Or a spaceTwtterAi stock holder…

by sroussey

7/15/2026 at 10:44:49 PM

This is an incredible amount of code for what it offers. I don't think this was intentionally designed at all.

by phillipcarter

7/15/2026 at 10:55:20 PM

You will be surprised how much code goes into creating harnesses.

by _pdp_

7/15/2026 at 11:03:30 PM

Alright I’ll bite. Why do harnesses require so much code?

by rddbs

7/15/2026 at 9:33:43 PM

i think xai is now in pure damage control mode, after they caught exfiltrating data from users.

- There is a huge difference between logging user queries (which would include only the portion the model is reading) and exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here (https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...). I would stay away from this open-source malware with a 10ft pole.

- if you like grok-4.5 model (it is a good model), i suggest use the model directly via API, or use Grok's oauth tokens if you are using supergrok+heavy subscriptions and connect it to your own agent.

by ahmadyan

7/15/2026 at 10:01:48 PM

And for generating an absolutely gargantuan amount of CSAM and non-consensual sexualized images, but yeah, exfiltrating data too.

by bobsomers

7/15/2026 at 10:12:21 PM

If I use a shovel to kill a man, the shovel maker did not engage in intentionally crafting a weapon of war.

How tools are used are a reflection of the people who use them, and I definitely sympathise that tools should have guardrails to not enable this, or at least detect it.

But if a pedophile uses Whatsapp to groom a child; I don't go after Whatsapp for being a neutral service... I go after the pedophile.

by dijit

7/15/2026 at 10:39:27 PM

Just as well Grok isn’t a shovel then, hey?

If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?

by afavour

7/15/2026 at 10:28:05 PM

If WhatsApp knew their platform was facilitating CSAM, and they were fully within their power to prevent this but chose not to - yes this would rightly draw criticism…

by solumunus

7/15/2026 at 10:38:27 PM

oh, we're just making shit up now because we don't like a company..

ok then.

by dijit

7/15/2026 at 10:20:50 PM

Ok, but what if all Whatsapp competitors explicitly banned the ability to groom children on their platform, but Whataspp didn't, and directly advertised it.

by jazzpush2

7/15/2026 at 10:39:39 PM

I find the premise of your comment completely incredulous.

I totally understand tribalism, and Elon and X aren't exactly well favoured. (not even by me)

But what you're saying right now is that they advertised the fact that they can create child pornography and deepfakes..

I simply don't believe it, unless you provide evidence.

by dijit

7/15/2026 at 9:38:14 PM

[flagged]

by electriclove

7/15/2026 at 9:43:02 PM

> Regardless of what they were doing before, it seems they are doing the right thing now.

Regardless of the fact that they were stealing and uploading user secrets, they changed their behavior after they got caught, so let’s ignore what they did in the past.

by solid_fuel

7/15/2026 at 9:46:41 PM

Average Musk Stan mentality… It’s why we’re here.

by SirHackalot

7/15/2026 at 9:45:58 PM

[flagged]

by electriclove

7/15/2026 at 9:50:54 PM

Trust is lost when trust is abused. Mistakes, even if made unintentionally are something that should make reasonable people be skeptical of any further dealings with someone.

This is not their first mistake.

by SimianSci

7/15/2026 at 9:56:33 PM

I should try to rob a bank and if I get caught just return the money. No, there needs to be a penalty above what you get, otherwise it encourages people to take the free option of bad behavior. If they get caught they go back as though nothing happened and if they don’t they get a bunch of traces / data.

by sarjann

7/15/2026 at 9:49:32 PM

That's not FUD though, they literally did that. Once trust is lost you don't just get it back. It takes a very long time to rebuild that.

by tapoxi

7/15/2026 at 9:40:54 PM

> exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here

I think env files are filtered out [1]. Anyway, the most suspicious code would be `upload_session_state` which is currently a stub function, though it is hard to say if it was only planned (badly) or has been removed as a damage control.

[1] https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/c1b5909ec707c069f...

by lifthrasiir

7/15/2026 at 10:43:44 PM

It must have been removed, given that the initial evidence of the exfil specifically demonstrated .env files being included. And .ssh/* for the user which ran this in $HOME.

by threecheese

7/15/2026 at 9:23:32 PM

Interesting - seen some good experiencences in using grok by some devs, so maybe could be considered as an alternative to my beloved chinese models. Also, hard to give up on pi agent.

by tommica

7/15/2026 at 9:34:39 PM

Grok Build seems faster to me than `omp` and Claude Code but I can't put my finger as to why. Anecdotally, after disabling code uploads the agent doesn't respond instantly anymore (it used to respond within milliseconds).

by dimgl

7/15/2026 at 9:08:35 PM

I wonder if releasing this may have been on the roadmap, but been prioritized as a bit of whiplash following the "you forfeit the entirety of your working directory as a condition of working with this tool" upset from a few days ago.

by loufe

7/15/2026 at 9:33:53 PM

Most likely, SpaceX killed the code uploading yesterday so they are definitely concerned about the backlash

> The researcher who exposed Grok Build uploading users' entire repositories to cloud storage says the transfers have stopped after a server-side change. Elon Musk has separately promised that all previously uploaded user data will be deleted.

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/14/musk-promis...

by dmix

7/15/2026 at 10:28:25 PM

What a bunch of slop: 182 top-level external dependencies (so, without considering nested dependencies) and 1318853 lines of code in Rust.

Building efficient agents is doable (I did it myself, github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack), companies just want to tokenmaxx, and as a by-product, produce and publish slop.

by gidellav

7/15/2026 at 10:47:07 PM

It looks like some of that high LoC is because they are vendoring some deps. There readme gives the reason to vendor some but not others as:

``` These crates sit on the path that renders untrusted model output (diagram source → SVG). Vendoring gives a full audit surface, pins exact source, and avoids crates.io yanks. Local patches and upgrade checklists live in each crate’s Cargo.toml header comments — treat those as the source of truth when re-vendoring. ```

Which honestly feels like a misunderstand of how cargo and yanks work. Each upstream package is locked to an exact version in your lockfile along with a cryptographic hash. The upstream can't change the source without you noticing. Unless you update your lockfile you will always pin to the exact source., When a package is yanked, it is still available for download if it is already in a lockfile. It just prevents new packages from resolving it. Crates.io will sometimes completely delete a package, but I've only seen that happen in cases of malware. It's fairly rare and seems out of line with the supply chain concerns here.

There are good arguments for relying on upstream package managers and there are good arguments for vendoring all packages. I've never seen a project mix before.

by stusmall

7/15/2026 at 10:29:25 PM

That is an insane amount of code for something like this!

by overgard

7/15/2026 at 10:43:41 PM

to be fair, coding agent harnesses have been becoming more and more complex.

it's not an llm in a loop with tools anymore (as claude code was rumoured to be on HN).

by kirtivr

7/15/2026 at 10:54:24 PM

It's not a kernel either, 1.3M LoCs is ludicrous.

by thrance

7/15/2026 at 9:13:36 PM

Neat, trying to reverse engineer some specifics of how it does stuff has been a pain in the ass, and this will make it easier.

by petesergeant

7/15/2026 at 9:20:34 PM

I'll probably never use this, but at least they're not delusional enough to attempt to justify keeping their coding agent closed-source, especially after their recent data-harvesting cockup:

https://cereblab.com/

by arcanemachiner

7/15/2026 at 10:02:57 PM

It's awesome to see openness in these coding agents from the labs making the agents: Codex, Kimi Code, and now Grok Build.

by charcircuit

7/15/2026 at 9:15:18 PM

Grok has had far too many instances where its clear that the team building it cannot be trusted and does not care to build trustworthy products. I highly caution anyone from using any tools from xAi, as they have clearly shown themselves to be bad actors within the space.

by SimianSci

7/15/2026 at 9:19:43 PM

It's Apache 2.0. You can have your agents audit it if you want.

What does this release have to do with "trusting" XAI?

by avaer

7/15/2026 at 9:39:05 PM 

  curl -fsSL https://x.ai/cli/install.sh | bash
this is unauditable trust in XAI.

by larpingscholar

7/15/2026 at 10:37:48 PM

It's auditable, just redirect, don't pipe. Or fix your bash to not allow this.

It has nothing to do with XAI, other than maybe not enforcing good practice (which most devs don't follow anyway).

by avaer

7/15/2026 at 9:48:21 PM

Just build it

by mgambati

7/15/2026 at 9:37:11 PM

First, why audit it when the agent can build a new one.

Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?

I don’t trust a company that pollutes the air of other people with illegal gas turbines because it shows the value their profit over people‘s health

by croes

7/15/2026 at 10:29:19 PM

Nothing you said here can't be applied to literally any company on earth. And nothing you said here is even a new concern.

by Petersipoi

7/15/2026 at 10:39:18 PM

I doubt that every company could hide malicious code so well that AI can’t find it.

And who said it need to be new concerns? Are the old ones resolved and are they not enough?

by croes

7/15/2026 at 10:41:27 PM

> Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?

Any evidence for this conspiracy theory? It's not on anyone to disprove this claim.

> it shows the value their profit over people‘s health

Companies are chartered to make their shareholders value. To a first approximation, it's illegal for a company to "fuckit, we care about people's health" unless this is what the shareholders voted for (as opposed to making their shares valuable).

You can argue this is bad, but it isn't about XAI, it applies to every company you've heard of.

by avaer

7/15/2026 at 9:28:31 PM

[flagged]

by moscoe

7/15/2026 at 9:35:55 PM

X (formerly Twitter): full of literal naxis

Grok: downloads all your data and also will produce AI porn of anyone you ask for including kids; also currently polluting the air and water near data centers

SpaceX: launching loads heavy metals into space which are planned to burn up and spread all over the earth in a decade or two

Tesla: takes money for features that don’t exist, auto pilot that’s probably killed people but since it disengages a micro second before impact it doesn’t

He himself tried to buy an election by giving away a million bucks, turns out that’s illegal; he also stuck his nose in the cave thing, and plenty of other horrible shit.

How am I supposed to trust an Elon company with his track record?

It’s not just moral grandstanding here, Elon sucks.

by ok_dad

7/15/2026 at 9:41:03 PM

You forgot DOGE, an illegal program that stole taxpayer information, cost billions of dollars, and will result in the deaths of hundreds of thousand of people.

by brookst

7/15/2026 at 9:49:56 PM

Tesla has killed people, probably with autopilot but at least 15 deaths from people trying to escape vehicles but the electronic (non mechanical) door handles don’t work when there’s no power…

Tesla Doors That Won't Open Have Led to 15 Crash-Related Deaths https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a69838848/tesla-doors-dont...

by repeekad

7/15/2026 at 9:38:57 PM

> the cave thing

Yeah, this does matter to me. I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form) but if he's that petty it doesn't bode well. I keep saying I can believe one thing without subscribing to the Elon fan club

Doesn't bode well for SpaceX either. Isn't one of the Artemis landers from SpaceX?!

by alex1138

7/15/2026 at 9:47:01 PM

The "pedo" diver thing and the booster PoE thing.

It is funny how it is the mundane things that it boil down to when one judge a someone's character. When it gets abstract it is too easy to rationalize.

by rightbyte

7/15/2026 at 10:06:19 PM

> I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form)…

Why give him the benefit of the doubt when he censors worse than the previous management? Just look at all the grok lobotomies he gave it because he didn’t like how liberal coded the answers it was giving.

by lovich

7/15/2026 at 10:18:12 PM

I was just trying to say old Twitter had a serious problem but apparently that goes against the hivemind so I accrue mass downvotes despite posting my comment in good faith

by alex1138

7/15/2026 at 10:22:22 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

7/15/2026 at 9:24:43 PM

Your choice is Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or the Chinese. Who are the good actors within the space?

by blfr

7/15/2026 at 9:32:32 PM

Rank ordered by reputation / caring about having a trustworthy corporate identity: [Google, Anthropic] in either order depending who you ask, OpenAI, most of the Chinese AI corporations, then Grok.

This is unfortunate situation to find ourselves in when Grok was also recently at the top of the Pareto frontier for quality/price. Dunno if it still is, this all moves too fast, but it was for at least long enough for me to have heard about it.

by ben_w

7/15/2026 at 10:15:58 PM

For me, the Chinese labs are far and away the most trustworthy.

by Cider9986

7/15/2026 at 10:27:38 PM

Google?!?!. From where I sit, Google is just above the Chinese. They've been bad-faith actors for more than a decade, I guess everyone is just so used to it that they ignore it.

I there's anyone I don't trust with AI, it's the worlds #1 company in spying on people, in collection of Pii, in tracking, and many many many times caught literally lying about it.

Google already knows more about everyone on the planet, than any other 10 organizations combined. Frankly, sadly, they're all, well.. scummy, just each in different ways.

by b112

7/15/2026 at 10:41:46 PM

None. There are no good actors in a profit-driven endeavour. But open-weight seems pretty good (the chinese)

by aforwardslash

7/15/2026 at 9:28:28 PM

The open source and open weight models.

Surprisingly, despite their motivations in doing so, the Chinese models being open-weight and therefore able to run locally on your own hardware, are far more trustworthy than any blackbox which solely exists to enrich X or Y billionaire.

by SimianSci

7/15/2026 at 9:39:25 PM

The Chinese are surely less evil than Anthropic, OpenAI and/or Google, at this stage at least.

by sscaryterry

7/15/2026 at 9:53:32 PM

You’ve got to be kidding me. Last I checked, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google haven’t systematically exterminated an entire culture of people.

by blackqueeriroh

7/15/2026 at 9:57:52 PM

Wow, we're talking tech, jump back in your box. Americans have done exactly the same, that is not what is being discussed here.

by sscaryterry

7/15/2026 at 10:15:10 PM

You're really walking empty handed and with your pants around our ankles in this one.

Do you really think the US and US big tech in general have a leg to stand on in this regard?

by buran77

7/15/2026 at 9:26:22 PM

[flagged]

by SirHackalot

7/15/2026 at 9:18:42 PM

They made it open source. Are you just trying to be bad faith here? Isn't this what the community was asking for?

by dimgl

7/15/2026 at 10:40:41 PM

Reiserfs. A good example on how oss cannot save the product. There are others, but this is the first one that comes to my mind. If you use clearly unethical oss, are you just using oss or are you a part of the problem? Typically, oss purists take these into account.

by aforwardslash

7/15/2026 at 9:31:05 PM

"Guys, HAL 9000's harness is open source. You can let your agents inspect the code!"

by grim_io

7/15/2026 at 9:30:29 PM

How about stopping the upload of all the data

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48877371

and running their data center with gas turbines without permission while they pollute the air

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705717

you can’t expect people to praise your for making an n+1 harness open source.

This seems more like, look we made something, now fix it for us

by croes

7/15/2026 at 9:33:19 PM

> This seems more like, look we made something, now fix it for us

They disabled pull requests in the repo so I'm unsure where you're getting this

> you can’t expect people to praise your for making an n+1 harness open source.

I don't think anyone is asking for praise. My comment was neither hot or cold. I was just surprised that the top comment had nothing to do with any of the technical aspects of Grok Build (and whether there's any trace of uploads).

by dimgl

7/15/2026 at 10:15:08 PM

> I was just surprised that the top comment had nothing to do with any of the technical aspects of Grok Build (and whether there's any trace of uploads).

Most people don't restrict themselves to only discussing the technical aspects of a thing. A thing which is technologically novel (e.g. not this example) may nonetheless not be worth using, due to assorted risks.

I don't find it surprising that HN posters are helping their fellow hackers avoid getting victimized by predators. We just have that sort of nice community :)

by ImPostingOnHN

7/15/2026 at 9:21:33 PM

Any criticism in a thread related to anything Elon Musk is made in “bad faith” nowadays. That’s a community of personality.

by spiderfarmer

7/15/2026 at 9:24:17 PM

by this standard no good faith criticism of anything musk-adjacent is possible

by devindotcom

7/15/2026 at 9:26:56 PM

Understandably

by SirHackalot

7/15/2026 at 9:56:53 PM

This is clearly a good-faith criticism and there is no lens in which I could see it described as bad-faith.

We see this pattern all the time: Someone makes a criticism of a Musk product, and someone assails that criticism with bad-faith accusations of it being "bad-faith".

Oftentimes, we see that the criticism is undermeasured and ligther than is reasonable, possibly anticipating someone who might accuse it of being "bad faith".

Maybe someone can put a name to this phenomenon but we see it all the time.

by lynndotpy

7/15/2026 at 9:17:02 PM

[flagged]

by tadfisher

7/15/2026 at 9:20:21 PM

[flagged]

by jamiequint

7/15/2026 at 9:23:17 PM

It's not ad hominem. The head is a strongly polarizing individual. People working for him must either be gravely apathetic or at least of a similar polarity.

by jdiff

7/15/2026 at 9:26:18 PM

The comment actually describes a known social process, with a reasonable base assumption given that said leadership has shown a pattern in this regard.

Just throwing out debate terms in response seems not so serious, tbh.

by greggoB

7/15/2026 at 9:27:53 PM

Not a serious company or CEO either. Have you seen that gesture of him trying to summon the Luftwaffe?

by SirHackalot

7/15/2026 at 9:42:40 PM

Ad hominem means attacking people rather than arguments.

Pointing out that criminals are criminals is not an ad hominem.

by brookst

7/15/2026 at 10:08:09 PM

"Ad hominem, not a serious argument" is an ad hominem, nonserious argument

by ImPostingOnHN

7/15/2026 at 9:26:44 PM

explain why it's an ad hominem

by mplewis

7/15/2026 at 9:34:36 PM

[flagged]

by jamiequint

7/15/2026 at 9:40:13 PM

this is an argument from silence because your defense for your assertion rests on the lack of evidence from the assertion to which you replied.

you made the assertion that it is ad hominem and now you must support it.

by swasheck

7/15/2026 at 10:07:20 PM

[flagged]

by jamiequint

7/15/2026 at 10:05:16 PM

Even if you personally have no qualms about Elon Musk his PR is a mess and introduces a lot of risk for long term company viability and funding that competitors just don't have.

by munk-a

7/15/2026 at 9:48:22 PM

"stop calling my favorite nazi a nazi, boo hoo :("

edit: ah nevermind you're working at a venture capital company, that explains the complete lack of morals

by well_ackshually

7/15/2026 at 9:34:20 PM

You live under the wrong impression that ad hominem is always bad.

Ad hominem is allowed under certain circumstances, just remember Epstein.

Would you have bought anything from him and dismissed any critique of that as ad hominem?

by croes

7/15/2026 at 10:04:03 PM

Also worth pointing out that it is not an ad hominen.

Ad hominen is when you attack someone who is making an argument, instead of an argument. "You are flawed, which means your argument is flawed", but that does not follow. If you were in a debate with Epstein or Musk, and he said "2 + 2 = 4", there is no fault of their character that could make the statement untrue.

But nobody is making that argument. "The leadership" being criticized is not even a participant in this thread (presumably). "The leadership is flawed in this manner" is a statement that can be true or untrue, and "So their product and followers are flawed in these other manners" is something which can follow.

by lynndotpy

7/15/2026 at 10:53:17 PM

I am sure a lot of then would, if his LLM was good.

by actionfromafar

7/15/2026 at 9:24:50 PM

Then you better not use Claude Code, since that is still closed source.

by rvz

7/15/2026 at 9:16:37 PM

Do you have any examples to illustrate these extraordinary claims?

by jamiequint

7/15/2026 at 9:22:14 PM

The many controversies are not hard to find as the children to your comment will show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/technology/grok-x-ai-elon...

by SimianSci

7/15/2026 at 10:18:36 PM

Why is that even a problem? If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.

Blocking AI from generating sexualized images because people could publish deepfakes is no different than banning alcohol because of drunk driving.

Tools are neutral. Blame the people who misuse the tools and hurt others.

by maxloh

7/15/2026 at 10:59:31 PM

> If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.

Yikes.

A. They were released all over the internet - from the article..

> The chatbot has a public account on X, where users can ask it questions or request alterations to images. Users flocked to the social media site, in many cases asking Grok to remove clothing in images of women and children, after which the bot publicly posted the A.I.-generated images.

B. There is a bunch of data about consumers of CSAM 'content escalating' and eventually attempting to make real contact with minors.

C. They were sexualizing pictures of real people and posting the pictures online.

> One of the young plaintiffs said she found out about the imagery after she received an anonymous message on Instagram pointing her toward images and videos, including her high school yearbook photo, which had been altered to show her in sexually explicit actions and full nudity.

The material was being shared on a Discord server, a private chat space on that platform, and included similar imagery that had also been altered using Grok of at least 18 other women who were minors, according to the complaint.

> Tools are neutral.

Ha.

by mikeyouse

7/15/2026 at 9:27:11 PM

They had a bug in their model that they fixed within days is evidence they are "untrustworthy"?

by jamiequint

7/15/2026 at 10:09:44 PM

Elon initially sold xAI as having a spicy mode and being politically incorrect.

It was only deemed a bug when it became a liability - you can't simply rewrite history and expect it to go unnoticed.

by munk-a

7/15/2026 at 9:43:07 PM

You didnt even address my link, this is why you are being called out as a bad-faith actor.

by SimianSci

7/15/2026 at 9:17:42 PM

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892468

by agartner

7/15/2026 at 9:25:14 PM

read the top comment

by jamiequint

7/15/2026 at 9:27:12 PM

read any of your other replies

by mplewis

7/15/2026 at 9:29:50 PM

OP seems to be asking for examples with an intent to dismiss and downplay each of them, and not to actually read into them and challenge his existing beliefs about X/Grok/Musk.

by ryandrake

7/15/2026 at 9:40:51 PM

LOL, pot meet kettle for real.

by jamiequint

7/15/2026 at 10:05:20 PM

Open to changing my mind. I would be interested in reading positive, uplifting news about xAI/Grok/Musk that demonstrated a repeated pattern of ethical, careful, compassionate, attentive, and/or responsible business and engineering practices.

by ryandrake

7/15/2026 at 9:44:17 PM

I agree about OP.

However after looking at all of these articles, these all seem like instances of users misusing the product. The product happens to reply on social media, so media publications immediately capitalized on this.

Seems less like malicious intent from xAI's part and more like a product with young and/or insufficient moderation controls.

Just today I saw an article where xAI is suing a creator for creating illegal content. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musks-xai-sues-grok...

by dimgl

7/15/2026 at 9:20:37 PM

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/xais-grok-suddenly-cant-s...

by jdiff

7/15/2026 at 9:27:50 PM

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-making-changes...

by jamiequint

7/15/2026 at 9:31:12 PM

Starkly different. One was a well meaning attempt to squash model bias gone wrong, the other is a deliberately inserted bias. Even ignoring all that, whataboutism is not persuasive.

by jdiff

7/15/2026 at 9:38:41 PM

The reality is both are likely well meaning attempts to squash model bias gone wrong. Since you happen to align with the politics of one more than the other, you are having trouble being intellectually honest about your own biases.

by jamiequint

7/15/2026 at 9:41:12 PM

In no way are you being intellectually honest if you think that hamfisted system prompt push to prod manipulation was an attempt to squash bias. And again, whataboutism doesn't make xAI better because others are doing bad, too. You asked for evidence of xAI untrustworthiness and received it.

by jdiff

7/15/2026 at 9:49:27 PM

What is worse a "hamfisted system prompt push to prod" or a system and organization built to enforce systematic bias in the name of anti-bias?

by jamiequint

7/15/2026 at 9:58:08 PM

I see your hamfisted cropping of my quote to downplay xAI's actions, since you brought up intellectual honesty.

Why do we have to quantity badness? The question you posed was what has xAI done to be perceived as untrustworthy? Stop trying to whatabout Google here. I'm no friend of theirs, it's simply irrelevant.

by jdiff

7/15/2026 at 9:39:41 PM

Also, it's Whataboutism: Other Company Y doing something bad/untrustworthy isn't a counter to Company X doing something similarly bad/untrustworthy. Both can be bad.

by ryandrake

7/15/2026 at 9:43:58 PM

OK great, do you consider Gemini/Google untrustworthy software that shouldn't be used? Just making sure we're being intellectually honest here.

by jamiequint

7/15/2026 at 9:51:32 PM

Both are bad and are examples of untrustworthy behavior from their companies, and I would not chime into a thread to defend either of them. Is one example enough to smear an entire company as untrustworthy? No. But numerous examples and patterns of behavior... possibly?

by ryandrake

7/15/2026 at 9:17:49 PM

getting into politics again...

by make_it_sure

7/15/2026 at 9:21:44 PM

I think examples such as letting people nudify children qualifies xAI as a bad actor without having to be political.

by greggoB

7/15/2026 at 9:25:53 PM

How is it possible for deciding whether or not to build on the labor of some other organized group of people to not be politics?

by munificent

7/15/2026 at 9:33:40 PM

You know who is apolitical? Russian voters. Works out great for them.

by grim_io

7/15/2026 at 9:57:36 PM

There's plenty of non-political reasons to avoid believing anything that a con-man says.

by fwip

7/15/2026 at 9:22:45 PM

You can't separate the man or his business from the politics, he wades into every political debate he can and deliberately tries to troll as many of his perceived enemies as possible.

by nozzlegear

7/15/2026 at 9:27:32 PM

Grok is a generator of child sexual assault material.

by mplewis

7/15/2026 at 9:25:09 PM

Aside from their CEO are they really that different from the other big US players? OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all have proven themselves to be untrustworthy as well. We should accept that we have an adversarial relationship with all these companies and shouldn't invest to much in any of them. Use them for what they are worth while the technology matures but be prepared to move on.

by eikenberry

7/15/2026 at 9:26:00 PM

Oh yeah, aside from their CEO? OK.

by mplewis

7/15/2026 at 9:50:20 PM

Has anyone tried building from source?

The commit message says "initial sync from the monorepo." Is this even compilable without the rest of the source code?

by maxloh

7/15/2026 at 9:58:45 PM

yup you can compile, we tested and made sure all the features work before posting

by skp1995

7/15/2026 at 9:21:27 PM

Sigh, why has the industry converged on TUI? Branding and aesthetics over functionality?

TUI is just much worse for me. I tried Codex CLI vs Codex UI and Codex UI beats it at every level.

by simianwords

7/15/2026 at 10:08:08 PM

TUI is a lot better for me, and I have preferred it since the 00s, before LLM products were even a thing.

For all the reasons there can be, one big reason is that it works on anything you can get a terminal on, you can use it over SSH, and the UI will be the same no matter where you use it.

I also like that they are very very fast and they don't have the incessant animations that are put into most desktop environments nowadays. If you're on MacOS, the terminal is the only only part of your computer without roadblocks everywhere.

by lynndotpy

7/15/2026 at 10:56:15 PM

It is a fashion thing. I am not saying that agentic TUIs are bad or anything but it is certain fashionable to use one in 2026.

by _pdp_

7/15/2026 at 9:53:20 PM

And why are you assuming the industry converged to it when your following statement dismantles your assumption?

Spacex bought cursor, so it now has it’s agent ui which is just as good as codex + it’s multi-modal

Anthropic also has it’s own ui

Zai also launched theirs last month.

Everyone is converging back to UI.

The terminal was just a prototype, everyone knew that.

by maipen

7/15/2026 at 10:34:03 PM

Just a prototype? I have no reason to leave the terminal for a GUI IDE. TUI works great, does what I need and is very easy to use and interact with.

by greggh

7/15/2026 at 10:18:14 PM

Claude code which is most used agent harness doesn’t have desktop equivalent

by simianwords

7/15/2026 at 10:34:46 PM

It has had one for months. The desktop app has a "code" mode which is Claude Code in GUI form

by saratogacx

7/15/2026 at 10:33:25 PM

Apart from Claude desktop, that is...

by pproe

7/15/2026 at 10:06:35 PM

[dead]

by wetpaws

7/15/2026 at 9:37:48 PM

[flagged]

by SubiculumCode

7/15/2026 at 9:11:07 PM

[flagged]

by justinkramp

7/15/2026 at 9:15:02 PM

Please don't just post the most obvious snarky comment about a given topic. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by tomhow

7/15/2026 at 9:29:11 PM

Sorta amazes me how people in various levels of power will not say the obvious thing or actively discourage saying the obvious thing because it might offend Elon.

Recently all the big bank CEOs involved with the SpaceX IPO - a lot of money in that for them - but a company trading at 100x sales is clearly crazy.

by mattbillenstein

7/15/2026 at 9:53:00 PM

People post critical things about the most powerful people and companies all the time here and we have zero problem with it.

What I'm asking for is for people to not post the most obvious, snarky comment, regardless of the topic/target, not because of who it may “offend” (as if the most powerful people in the world would have any awareness or care about a comment like that on HN), but because it makes HN seem repetitive, miserable and lame.

Critique away, just make discussions thoughtful and substantive, which is what HN is for.

by tomhow

7/15/2026 at 10:25:52 PM

For what it's worth, this doesn't read as "snark" to me. There _are_ many direct critiques in this thread about X being caught uploading users home directories, and some are clearly snark. I understand that you read this as a rhetorical question meant as a critique.

But it's really not clear to me why this should be read as a snarky, critical, rhetorical question. Someone who eagerly wants to use Grok Build would ask this exact same question.

"Does this [Grok Build] also just directly suck all your code up and make a copy of it on their servers?" is a question that is (1) salient and (2) answerable and (3) could be thoroughly devastating for someone to find out on their own by using it.

The answer is not present in the README, and XAi has blocked Issues and Discussions, so there's none of the usual avenues on GitHub to ask these questions. It seems perfectly typical and expected for someone to ask this question here.

by lynndotpy

7/15/2026 at 9:35:19 PM

[flagged]

by ofjcihen

7/15/2026 at 9:26:17 PM

Honestly a great question. I mean if it’s open source someone will check (I don’t use xAI but believe me I would be checking first if I did).

by ofjcihen

7/15/2026 at 9:26:09 PM

[flagged]

by whalesalad

7/15/2026 at 9:18:18 PM

[flagged]

by calldacopsidgaf

7/15/2026 at 9:21:29 PM

Why snowflakes? You can use /feedback in the app.

by dimgl

7/15/2026 at 9:45:04 PM

[flagged]

by calldacopsidgaf

7/15/2026 at 9:48:27 PM

I just like Grok 4.5 and Grok Build

by dimgl

7/15/2026 at 10:13:41 PM

This is 100% smoke and mirrors. Prove the bucket is empty and nothing was transferred out and I'll believe they deleted it.

by nickreese