[srinivasgumdelli]

What

A new record reviving the Grok Bot case. It was closed before registration in #152 as "a disputed, single-party self-report", and its id PIR-2026-0110 stays retired, so this takes PIR-2026-0113.

A founder's read-only "CFO" Grok Bot agent, connected to his bank, posted his personal balances and spending into his company's executive Slack channel instead of his private agent chat. A colleague flagged it about two hours later.

Why revived

• The dispute: X's own Community Notes export shows the only note on the post ("This post is fake. This is engagement farming...") was rated Helpful at 2026-10-07T05:19Z and lost that status by 2026-10-08T04:41Z. It has been locked at NEEDS_MORE_RATINGS since Oct 20, so X no longer shows it. It cites no evidence beyond the reporter's commercial interest, which the record discloses prominently.
• A vendor-side change: xAI's changelog 0.70.2, dated 2026-10-11 (Wayback 20261014165050, absent from the Oct 10 and Oct 13 snapshots), adds: "After a bank or brokerage connector returns data, the Bot asks before sharing it anywhere else." This matches his "shipped a solution last night", but it is cited as consistent with the account, not as an acknowledgement.
• Consistency: PIR-2026-0038 and PIR-2026-0051 were corroborated on the same evidence class: a named first-person account with screenshots, no vendor confirmation.

Key calls

• Status: corroborated, confidence low to medium. Weakest links: a single interested party, no authenticated Slack record, no xAI statement.
• Classification: root_cause tool-error, failure_locus harness (both resting on his account), severity loss (personal financial data exposed to colleagues), in-wild-malfunction, detected_by third-party (the colleague).
• Telemetry: operator-logs, graded the same way as 0038's screenshots.
• New facts since Register PIR-2026-0110 (draft): Grok Bot posts a founder's bank data to Slack #152: the thread post the note linked to is deleted by its author (noted without inference), and he publicly denied fabrication (Futurism, Gadget Review). No account numbers, balances or names are reproduced.

Rule 4

Drafted by Claude (Opus 5.5, Anthropic); xAI is a competitor. Codex review requested before merge.

INDEX: Records 102 -> 103; tool-error 3 -> 4, loss 39 -> 40, in-wild-malfunction 53 -> 54, harness 16 -> 17. Conflicts with #168 on INDEX; the second to merge is rebased. Validator: 0 errors (one known-debt warning: the live x.ai changelog returned 403, Wayback copies used).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code