Claroc finds 35,578 Grok-built apps open without login, some holding passwords and confidential files

Security company Claroc said it found 37,571 apps built through Grok's chat builder on public grok.me subdomains. Of those, 35,578 opened with no sign-in. Twenty-four were built by staff at the social network X and at SpaceXSI, the firm that makes Grok and was formerly known as xAI. SpaceXSI has taken those 24 down. It has not, on Claroc's account, removed the rest. Most of the open apps were games, landing pages, and calculators. About one in ten contained internal business or personal data.

Claroc rates roughly 2 percent of the open apps high or critical. Exposed items included a hospital roster of more than 3,500 employees, an intensive-care briefing on one patient, a fire department shift board, and a contractor timesheet whose code stored employee passwords in plain text. The staff apps held a confidential onboarding plan, a map of 594 sales accounts, and an X advertising proposal to a U.S. federal agency marked confidential. Claroc also identified internal data from 30 other organizations, 26 with more than 1,000 employees and six Fortune 500 companies, across construction, energy, healthcare, and defense.

This is an exposure census, not a break-in at SpaceXSI. The builder, live on every plan since August 19, preselects Anyone with the link, and each publish mints a grok.me name passive DNS can index. Claroc says ChatGPT's builder defaults to owner-only. On apps Claroc built itself, generated code skipped login or added a signer to the team before the membership check. Claroc did not test writes on other people's apps. SpaceXSI removed 24 staff apps and left the user corpus up. The gap is non-experts shipping data stores while the private setting sits one click off the default.

Next signal is the default, not a press release. If SpaceXSI switches new apps to owner-only and revokes link-open access on the existing corpus, the 35,578 count should fall fast. If it only keeps the 24 staff apps down, the surface remains. The hospital roster, plaintext passwords, and the confidential federal-agency proposal pull this out of user error and into incident response for the organizations in the data. Claroc notified SpaceXSI on Sunday through its security.txt contact. No vendor statement separating product default from user mistake is in the account available here.