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Marko Elez, a 25-year-old worker at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted entry to delicate databases on the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the Department of Homeland Security. So it ought to fill all Americans with a deep sense of confidence to be taught that Mr. Elez over the weekend inadvertently revealed a non-public key that allowed anybody to work together straight with greater than 4 dozen giant language fashions (LLMs) developed by Musk’s synthetic intelligence firm xAI.
Image: Shutterstock, @sdx15.
On July 13, Mr. Elez dedicated a code script to GitHub referred to as “agent.py” that included a non-public utility programming interface (API) key for xAI. The inclusion of the personal key was first flagged by GitGuardian, an organization that makes a speciality of detecting and remediating uncovered secrets and techniques in public and proprietary environments. GitGuardian’s methods continually scan GitHub and different code repositories for uncovered API keys, and hearth off automated alerts to affected customers.
Philippe Caturegli, “chief hacking officer” on the safety consultancy Seralys, stated the uncovered API key allowed entry to at the very least 52 completely different LLMs utilized by xAI. The most up-to-date LLM within the checklist was referred to as “grok-4-0709” and was created on July 9, 2025.
Grok, the generative AI chatbot developed by xAI and built-in into Twitter/X, depends on these and different LLMs (a question to Grok earlier than publication reveals Grok presently makes use of Grok-3, which was launched in Feburary 2025). Earlier at this time, xAI introduced that the Department of Defense will start utilizing Grok as a part of a contract price as much as $200 million. The contract award got here lower than per week after Grok started spewing antisemitic rants and invoking Adolf Hitler.
Mr. Elez didn’t reply to a request for remark. The code repository containing the personal xAI key was eliminated shortly after Caturegli notified Elez through e mail. However, Caturegli stated the uncovered API key nonetheless works and has not but been revoked.
“If a developer can’t keep an API key private, it raises questions about how they’re handling far more sensitive government information behind closed doors,” Caturegli advised KrebsOnSecurity.
Prior to becoming a member of DOGE, Marko Elez labored for a lot of Musk’s firms. His DOGE profession started on the Department of the Treasury, and a authorized battle over DOGE’s entry to Treasury databases confirmed Elez was sending unencrypted private data in violation of the company’s insurance policies.
While nonetheless at Treasury, Elez resigned after The Wall Street Journal linked him to social media posts that advocated racism and eugenics. When Vice President J.D. Vance lobbied for Elez to be rehired, President Trump agreed and Musk reinstated him.
Since his re-hiring as a DOGE worker, Elez has been granted entry to databases at one federal company after one other. TechCrunch reported in February 2025 that he was working on the Social Security Administration. In March, Business Insider discovered Elez was a part of a DOGE detachment assigned to the Department of Labor.
Marko Elez, in a photograph from a social media profile.
In April, The New York Times reported that Elez held positions on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureaus, in addition to the Department of Homeland Security. The Washington Post later reported that Elez, whereas serving as a DOGE advisor on the Department of Justice, had gained entry to the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s Courts and Appeals System (EACS).
Elez isn’t the primary DOGE employee to publish inside API keys for xAI: In May, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how one other DOGE worker leaked a non-public xAI key on GitHub for 2 months, exposing LLMs that had been customized made for working with inside information from Musk’s firms, together with SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter/X.
Caturegli stated it’s troublesome to belief somebody with entry to confidential authorities methods once they can’t even handle the fundamentals of operational safety.
“One leak is a mistake,” he stated. “But when the same type of sensitive key gets exposed again and again, it’s not just bad luck, it’s a sign of deeper negligence and a broken security culture.”