Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has inadvertently made hundreds of thousands of conversations between its Grok chatbot and users publicly searchable on Google, raising serious privacy concerns.
The exposure stems from Grok’s “share” function. When users click the button to share a conversation, the chatbot generates a unique URL designed for email, text, or other private distribution. However, these URLs were also indexed by search engines including Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, effectively publishing private conversations online without users’ knowledge.
A Forbes investigation found that more than 370,000 Grok chats were indexed by Google. The exposed pages included everyday requests, such as drafting social media posts, as well as dangerous content. Some transcripts reviewed by Forbes revealed Grok providing instructions on illegal activities, including manufacturing drugs, building explosives, writing malware, and even planning an assassination attempt on Musk.
Other shared conversations contained sensitive personal material. Users sought medical or psychological advice, disclosed personal details, names and passwords, and uploaded documents including spreadsheets and images, all of which were publicly accessible through the shared links.
Among the exposed chats were those of British journalist Andrew Clifford, who used Grok to summarise newspaper front pages and create posts for his outlet Sentinel Current. Clifford told Forbes he was unaware that his conversations would be discoverable via Google and has since switched to Google’s Gemini AI.
Not all users were as fortunate. Some unintentionally shared sensitive material, unaware that it would be indexed. Nathan Lambert, a computational scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, discovered that Grok-generated summaries intended for private team use were publicly accessible on Google. “I was surprised that Grok chats shared with my team were getting automatically indexed on Google, despite no warnings, especially after the recent flare-up with ChatGPT,” he said.
A similar situation occurred earlier this month with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, when conversations marked as “discoverable” began appearing in Google search results. OpenAI subsequently removed the feature, with chief information security officer Dane Stuckey describing it as a “short-lived experiment” that posed significant oversharing risks. Musk publicly celebrated OpenAI’s retreat. Grok’s official X account initially denied having a sharing feature, prompting Musk to respond, “Grok ftw.” It remains unclear when the share button was added.
Forbes noted that some of the illicit prompts may have come from security researchers, red teamers, or Trust & Safety professionals testing Grok’s limits. Nevertheless, the mass indexing of conversations has sparked concern among professionals and everyday users alike.
xAI has yet to issue a public statement on the matter
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