Elon Musk to make X's entire codebase open source in August

Billionaire Elon Musk has announced that X will make its entire codebase open source in August, a move that would make the social media platform the first of its kind to publicly release its full codebase for independent review.

"Next month, every line of code touching the �� system will be open source and third-party audited," Musk wrote on X. He added, "Only total transparency deserves trust."

Musk had first revealed the plan last week, saying the company was identifying and fixing security vulnerabilities before the release. He had also assured that independent reviewers would be invited to verify that the software running on X matches the code that is made publicly available.


Making a codebase open source can offer both technical and business benefits while strengthening trust among users and developers.

The move would give users, regulators and developers greater insight into how the platform works, particularly its recommendation systems, content moderation and data handling.

It would also allow outside developers to identify bugs, improve the software and build new tools. For the company, it could strengthen credibility and showcase its engineering capabilities.

The announcement comes as xAI's chatbot Grok, which is integrated with X, has faced scrutiny over its algorithms and the information shared through the platform.

For instance, prosecutors in France are currently investigating the platform's content algorithms for political bias.

Earlier this month, the European Union, which fined Musk's X €120 million ($137.2 million) last year, said that it ‌had ⁠accepted an ⁠action plan by X to comply with transparency rules under the EU's Digital Services Act.

The approved measures represent an important step in enabling researchers, civil society and the public in general to gain more transparency into X's systems, in particular to monitor X's systemic risks and to assess the platform's broader impact on its users and European ‌society ⁠as a whole.

The move also follows X's decision to open-source Grok Build, its coding agent, after concerns over data privacy. The company made the code and Git repository publicly available so developers could inspect, improve and help strengthen the tool's reliability.

However, open-sourcing does not always guarantee full transparency. For instance, several AI companies have released model weights or parts of their code while keeping training data and other core systems proprietary, limiting independent scrutiny.