If you have built a small app with Grok and hit Publish, check who can open it. A security firm probed tens of thousands of Grok app addresses and found that nearly all of the live ones loaded for any visitor, with no sign-in.
Claroc Research counted 35,578 open apps among 37,571 that were online, or 94.7%. Just 1,993 returned the error that an app set to “Only you” or “Invited users” gives. Twenty-four of the open apps belonged to staff of SpaceXSI, the company behind Grok (formerly xAI), and of X.
Work started on 8 November with 43,551 app names collected from the grok.me domain. Each published app gets its own address, and passive DNS services record that name once anyone opens it, so the names can be searched without knowing a link. Claroc’s report withholds hostnames and titles.
Mostly the open apps were harmless: games, calculators and landing pages. Claroc puts roughly one in 10 at sensitive and about 2% at high or critical. It confirmed a hospital group’s staff directory of more than 3,500 people, one patient’s intensive care briefing, a fire department’s live shift board and a contractor timesheet that carried 18 plain-text passwords.
The embarrassing cluster was SpaceXSI’s own. Staff had left open a confidential onboarding plan for a sales hire, a map of 594 target accounts, eight advertiser proposals (one for a US federal agency, marked confidential) and four live boards showing campaign spend. All 24 came down after Claroc reported them. It also spotted internal data from 30 other organisations, 26 of them with over 1,000 staff.
To see what Grok builds by default, Claroc made two apps with invented data. A contact list with no login let a stranger in a private window add an entry that later visitors saw. For a four-person sales list, Grok added Google sign-in unprompted, yet the code admitted any account that signed in: an uninvited Google account browsed the whole customer list and could edit or remove entries.
SpaceXSI told a reporter that apps stay private until the creator shares one, that publishing takes several steps, and that its employees’ accounts start on “Only you”. Claroc answers that in the paid account it used, “Anyone with the link” was already ticked at the access step, and that every owner of the 35,578 open apps had cleared those steps. It wants “Only you” to be everyone’s default. Claroc sells security tools for AI-built apps, so weigh its advice with that in mind; the counts are from its own scan.
Anyone with a published Grok app can open its access setting, choose “Invited users” or “Only you”, and test the address in a private window. Claroc found that unpublishing takes a grok.me app offline within seconds.
