An employee at xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, leaked a private key on GitHub that could have allowed access to private large language models (LLMs) tailored for internal data from companies like SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter.
The leak was discovered by Philippe Caturegli, Chief Hacking Officer at Seralys, and GitGuardian, a company specializing in detecting and remedying exposed secrets in code repositories.
The exposed API key had access to numerous unreleased models of Grok, xAI's AI chatbot, including ones fine-tuned on SpaceX and Tesla data sets.
The inadvertent exposure of internal LLMs raises concerns about data security and highlights weaknesses in key management practices and internal monitoring at xAI.