An employee at Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI leaked a private key on GitHub that for the past two months could have allowed anyone to query private xAI large language models (LLMs) which appear to have been custom made for working with internal data from Musk’s companies, including SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter/X, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Image: Shutterstock, @sdx15.

Philippe Caturegli, “chief hacking officer” at the security consultancy Seralys, was the first to publicize the leak of credentials for an x.ai application programming interface (API) exposed in the GitHub code repository of a technical staff member at xAI.

Caturegli’s post on LinkedIn caught the attention of researchers at GitGuardian, a company that specializes in detecting and remediating exposed secrets in public and proprietary environments. GitGuardian’s systems constantly scan GitHub and other code repositories for exposed API keys, and fire off automated alerts to affected users.

GitGuardian’s Eric Fourrier told KrebsOnSecurity the exposed API key had access to several unreleased models of Grok, the AI chatbot developed by xAI. In total, GitGuardian found the key had access to at least 60 fine-tuned and private LLMs.

“The credentials can be used to access the X.ai API with the identity of the user,” GitGuardian wrote in an email explaining their findings to xAI. “The associated account not only has access to public Grok models (grok-2-1212, etc) but also to what appears to be unreleased (grok-2.5V), development (research-grok-2p5v-1018), and private models (tweet-rejector, grok-spacex-2024-11-04).”

Fourrier found GitGuardian had alerted the xAI employee about the exposed API key nearly two months ago — on March 2. But as of April 30, when GitGuardian directly alerted xAI’s security team to the exposure, the key was still valid and usable. xAI told GitGuardian to report the matter through its bug bounty program at HackerOne, but just a few hours later the repository containing the API key was removed from GitHub.

“It looks like some of these internal LLMs were fine-tuned on SpaceX data, and some were fine-tuned with Tesla data,” Fourrier said. “I definitely don’t think a Grok model that’s fine-tuned on SpaceX data is intended to be exposed publicly.”

xAI did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did the 28-year-old xAI technical staff member whose key was exposed.

Carole Winqwist, chief marketing officer at GitGuardian, said giving potentially hostile users free access to private LLMs is a recipe for disaster.

“If you’re an attacker and you have direct access to the model and the back end interface for things like Grok, it’s definitely something you can use for further attacking,” she said. “An attacker could it use for prompt injection, to tweak the (LLM) model to serve their purposes, or try to implant code into the supply chain.”

The inadvertent exposure of internal LLMs for xAI comes as Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been feeding sensitive government records into artificial intelligence tools. In February, The Washington Post reported DOGE officials were feeding data from across the Education Department into AI tools to probe the agency’s programs and spending.

The Post said DOGE plans to replicate this process across many departments and agencies, accessing the back-end software at different parts of the government and then using AI technology to extract and sift through information about spending on employees and programs.

“Feeding sensitive data into AI software puts it into the possession of a system’s operator, increasing the chances it will be leaked or swept up in cyberattacks,” Post reporters wrote.

Wired reported in March that DOGE has deployed a proprietary chatbot called GSAi to 1,500 federal workers at the General Services Administration, part of an effort to automate tasks previously done by humans as DOGE continues its purge of the federal workforce.

A Reuters report last month said Trump administration officials told some U.S. government employees that DOGE is using AI to surveil at least one federal agency’s communications for hostility to President Trump and his agenda. Reuters wrote that the DOGE team has heavily deployed Musk’s Grok AI chatbot as part of their work slashing the federal government, although Reuters said it could not establish exactly how Grok was being used.

Caturegli said while there is no indication that federal government or user data could be accessed through the exposed x.ai API key, these private models are likely trained on proprietary data and may unintentionally expose details related to internal development efforts at xAI, Twitter, or SpaceX.

“The fact that this key was publicly exposed for two months and granted access to internal models is concerning,” Caturegli said. “This kind of long-lived credential exposure highlights weak key management and insufficient internal monitoring, raising questions about safeguards around developer access and broader operational security.”

A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleged last week that denizens of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) siphoned gigabytes of data from the agency’s sensitive case files in early March. The whistleblower said accounts created for DOGE at the NLRB downloaded three code repositories from GitHub. Further investigation into one of those code bundles shows it is remarkably similar to a program published in January 2025 by Marko Elez, a 25-year-old DOGE employee who has worked at a number of Musk’s companies.

A screenshot shared by NLRB whistleblower Daniel Berulis shows three downloads from GitHub.

According to a whistleblower complaint filed last week by Daniel J. Berulis, a 38-year-old security architect at the NLRB, officials from DOGE met with NLRB leaders on March 3 and demanded the creation of several all-powerful “tenant admin” accounts that were to be exempted from network logging activity that would otherwise keep a detailed record of all actions taken by those accounts.

Berulis said the new DOGE accounts had unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter information contained in NLRB databases. The new accounts also could restrict log visibility, delay retention, route logs elsewhere, or even remove them entirely — top-tier user privileges that neither Berulis nor his boss possessed.

Berulis said he discovered one of the DOGE accounts had downloaded three external code libraries from GitHub that neither NLRB nor its contractors ever used. A “readme” file in one of the code bundles explained it was created to rotate connections through a large pool of cloud Internet addresses that serve “as a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing.” Brute force attacks involve automated login attempts that try many credential combinations in rapid sequence.

A search on that description in Google brings up a code repository at GitHub for a user with the account name “Ge0rg3” who published a program roughly four years ago called “requests-ip-rotator,” described as a library that will allow the user “to bypass IP-based rate-limits for sites and services.”

The README file from the GitHub user Ge0rg3’s page for requests-ip-rotator includes the exact wording of a program the whistleblower said was downloaded by one of the DOGE users. Marko Elez created an offshoot of this program in January 2025.

“A Python library to utilize AWS API Gateway’s large IP pool as a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing,” the description reads.

Ge0rg3’s code is “open source,” in that anyone can copy it and reuse it non-commercially. As it happens, there is a newer version of this project that was derived or “forked” from Ge0rg3’s code — called “async-ip-rotator” — and it was committed to GitHub in January 2025 by DOGE captain Marko Elez.

The whistleblower stated that one of the GitHub files downloaded by the DOGE employees who transferred sensitive files from an NLRB case database was an archive whose README file read: “Python library to utilize AWS API Gateway’s large IP pool as a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing.” Elez’s code pictured here was forked in January 2025 from a code library that shares the same description.

A key DOGE staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central payments system, Elez has worked for a number of Musk companies, including X, SpaceX, and xAI. Elez was among the first DOGE employees to face public scrutiny, after The Wall Street Journal linked him to social media posts that advocated racism and eugenics.

Elez resigned after that brief scandal, but was rehired after President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance expressed support for him. Politico reports Elez is now a Labor Department aide detailed to multiple agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services.

“During Elez’s initial stint at Treasury, he violated the agency’s information security policies by sending a spreadsheet containing names and payments information to officials at the General Services Administration,” Politico wrote, citing court filings.

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from both the NLRB and DOGE, and will update this story if either responds.

The NLRB has been effectively hobbled since President Trump fired three board members, leaving the agency without the quorum it needs to function. Both Amazon and Musk’s SpaceX have been suing the NLRB over complaints the agency filed in disputes about workers’ rights and union organizing, arguing that the NLRB’s very existence is unconstitutional. On March 5, a U.S. appeals court unanimously rejected Musk’s claim that the NLRB’s structure somehow violates the Constitution.

Berulis’s complaint alleges the DOGE accounts at NLRB downloaded more than 10 gigabytes of data from the agency’s case files, a database that includes reams of sensitive records including information about employees who want to form unions and proprietary business documents. Berulis said he went public after higher-ups at the agency told him not to report the matter to the US-CERT, as they’d previously agreed.

Berulis told KrebsOnSecurity he worried the unauthorized data transfer by DOGE could unfairly advantage defendants in a number of ongoing labor disputes before the agency.

“If any company got the case data that would be an unfair advantage,” Berulis said. “They could identify and fire employees and union organizers without saying why.”

Marko Elez, in a photo from a social media profile.

Berulis said the other two GitHub archives that DOGE employees downloaded to NLRB systems included Integuru, a software framework designed to reverse engineer application programming interfaces (APIs) that websites use to fetch data; and a “headless” browser called Browserless, which is made for automating web-based tasks that require a pool of browsers, such as web scraping and automated testing.

On February 6, someone posted a lengthy and detailed critique of Elez’s code on the GitHub “issues” page for async-ip-rotator, calling it “insecure, unscalable and a fundamental engineering failure.”

“If this were a side project, it would just be bad code,” the reviewer wrote. “But if this is representative of how you build production systems, then there are much larger concerns. This implementation is fundamentally broken, and if anything similar to this is deployed in an environment handling sensitive data, it should be audited immediately.”

Further reading: Berulis’s complaint (PDF).

Update 7:06 p.m. ET: Elez’s code repo was deleted after this story was published. An archived version of it is here.