Elon Musk announced that the entire X codebase will become open source once xAI completes an internal review for security vulnerabilities. He even said that they will publish the entire code without hiding anything.
He also asked third parties to confirm that what is being published actually matches what is currently going on.
Once we have completed our review for security vulnerabilities, we will make the entire codebase of 𝕏 open source, with no exceptions.
Furthermore, we will invite third party reviewers to examine the system that is running to confirm that the open source code is what is running.…
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2026
Asking third-party reviewers to check the code could be a move to address common complaints against corporate open source releases where the published code is different from what actually runs.
Of course, Elon Musk has made many promises about open source like this in the past, for the X code base and for Grok models.
X's push for transparency goes back much further than Grok. In March 2023, shortly after acquiring the platform, Elon had X publish a partial version of its suggestion algorithm on GitHub, the platform's first real step towards opening up its code base.
Then there's Grok 1. In March 2024, xAI tweeted that it would open source Grok. Six days later, the company ported the base model to Apache 2.0.
In August 2025, xAI released Grok 2.5, its flagship for 2024, at Hugging Face (referred to there as “Grok 2”). Elon said at the time that Grok 3 “will be open sourced in about 6 months.”
Six months passed somewhere in February 2026, with no sign of Grok 3 in Hugging Face.
code snippet from the “For You” feed's ranking algorithm
use crate::schema::{events::Event, tweet_events::TweetEvent}; use anyhow::{Context, Result}; use prost::Message; use thrift::protocol::{TBinaryInputProtocol, TSerializable}; use xai_thunder_proto::InNetworkEvent; /// Deserialize a Thrift binary message into TweetEvent pub fn deserialize_tweet_event(payload: &[u8]) -> Result { let mut cursor = std::io::Cursor::new(payload); let mut protocol = TBinaryInputProtocol::new(&mut cursor, true); TweetEvent::read_from_in_protocol(&mut protocol).context("Failed to deserialize TweetEvent") } /// Deserialize a Thrift binary message into Event pub fn deserialize_event(payload: &[u8]) -> Result { let mut cursor = std::io::Cursor::new(payload); let mut protocol = TBinaryInputProtocol::new(&mut cursor, true); Event::read_from_in_protocol(&mut protocol).context("Failed to deserialize Event") } /// Deserialize a proto binary message into InNetworkEvent pub fn deserialize_tweet_event_v2(payload: &[u8]) -> Result { InNetworkEvent::decode(payload).context("Failed to deserialize InNetworkEvent") }
Then, in January 2026, the code behind the “For You” feed ranking algorithm was also made open source, ending up in a separate repository.
Let's see what happens now, after Elon Musk's latest promise.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
