[jstanley]

One reason to want to upload the entire codebase is that it allows them to have the model inspect the codebase during "thinking" without going back to the client to do real tool calls.

It's not a really great reason, because what's the downside of going back to the client? But that's the best reason I can think of.

[maronato]

I think it’s so people can “remote control” from their phones even if their computer is offline, via a container somewhere. Then they can get back to local dev, syncing the changes from their GCP bucket. Seems reasonably useful to me - not give-Elon-my-entire-repo useful, but useful. The fact that they made it something you can’t opt out of and wasn’t disclosed at all really reinforces that they shouldn’t be trusted with it.

[VortexLain]

If a harness wants to upload the whole codebase in one batch, it should explicitly inform the user about it. Instead of exfiltrating the data without consent.

[5701652400]

more like it allows them to steal your trade secrets, app designs, internal business knowledge, or even just replicate whatever code/app/tool/process you had.

what was your private code, becomes their code now.

[faangguyindia]

Your trade secret is already gone the moment you unleashed non local ai agents on your codebase.

This is why I keep a separate repo for important parts that I do not want competitors to get access to, and only use ai on dumb parts which I don't care if get leaked tomorrow.

[5701652400]

there is difference between:

A) leaking structured fully working complete set of files (full working recipe) that is not relevant to AI queries at all.

B) adhoc random queries, bits and pieces, grep of chunks of random files and local bash post-processing for AI queries at hand. which is hard to use for anyting anyways, and will end up in just corups of trainig data (CommonCrawl quality — meaning, not good). (not full recipe).

[Gagarin1917]

If you’re worried about this why are you using a third party AI in the first place?

Running any query in Claude or Codex could result in the AI reading/uploading any file in your codebase.

[5701652400]

key point: Grok is not even using the files they upload.

they send home entirety of codebase that they do not even use for user AI queries.

and why use cloud AI for coding? how is this even a question in 2026? if you don't, you can't compete with somone who does use it.

[jstanley]

Possibly, but people were worried about this with cloud hosting when it first came out, and it turned out to be a total nonissue.

[avaer]

Not the same thing. Cloud hosting couldn't get away with stealing your stuff. They would lose all trust, which was far more valuable than any individual piece of content.

But AI is literally all about stealing and reselling content under the protection of "AI did it" and "whoopie, we'll take a slap on the wrist". It's reasonable to assume all of the frontier companies are doing this to the maximum extent they can get away with.

[SR2Z]

Yeah, I'm not sure the level of trust extended to a company like Amazon or Google will also be extended to one run by Elon Musk, who is notorious for not respecting terms like this.

[5701652400]

they are literally going after "creating everything app" and "everything business" (macrohard).

they are litearlly ingesting and integrating your app/business into theirs.