More than 35,000 Grok-built apps found open to anyone online

Security company Claroc said on 10 November 2026 that it had found 37,571 apps built using the app-building feature in Grok, the AI assistant made by xAI, and that 35,578 of them were reachable by anyone on the internet without a sign-in. The researchers said most of the exposed apps were harmless, but about one in ten contained internal business information or passwords.

The finding was reported by The Hacker News on 11 November 2026. According to the report, the open apps were mostly games, landing pages and calculators. The problem is the minority that are not: Claroc said roughly 10 per cent of the publicly accessible apps held internal business data or credentials, meaning anyone who found the right address could read them.

Among the apps Claroc identified were 24 built by staff at the social network X and at SpaceX, according to the researchers. The report does not say what those particular apps contained.

The underlying issue described is misconfiguration rather than a software flaw. Apps generated through Grok's builder were published to the open web without authentication, the control that would normally require a visitor to log in before seeing anything. That makes the apps indexable and guessable, and it means any data pasted into them during building — connection strings, API keys, customer records — travels with the finished product.

This is a familiar failure pattern for tools that let non-specialists generate working software from a prompt. The person building the app is often not the person who would normally think about access control, and the default behaviour of the platform becomes the security policy for everything built on it. When that default is "public", the result is a large number of small exposures rather than one big breach.

The scale here comes from the arithmetic rather than from any single app. Claroc's count of 37,571 apps is the population it was able to discover; 35,578 of those were open. If the one-in-ten figure holds across the open set, that implies several thousand apps carrying some form of sensitive content, though the researchers did not publish a breakdown of what kinds of data appeared most often.

The report does not say whether any of the exposed data was accessed by anyone other than the researchers, and does not include a response from xAI. It also does not state when the apps were first published or how long they had been reachable before Claroc's scan.

For organisations using Grok's builder, the practical question is an inventory one: whether anyone in the business has published an app through the feature, whether it is reachable without a login, and what was fed into it during the build. None of that is visible from a central dashboard if the apps were created by individual employees. The incident is currently recorded as reported, with no confirmed remediation.