Elon Musk said X will release its full codebase as open source in August, a step that would make it the first major social media platform to publicly disclose its production code for independent review.
“Next month, every line of code touching the X system will be open source and third-party audited. Only total transparency deserves trust,” Musk wrote in a post on X on July 24.
The announcement expands on earlier transparency steps at X. In January, the company open-sourced its recommendation algorithm, and in March it released a major update to that algorithm and published the code on GitHub.
The July 24 post said the new release would cover the platform’s full infrastructure, not only its content ranking systems.
RuntimeWire reported that Musk’s post was published at 18:09 UTC and drew thousands of interactions shortly afterward.
BusinessWorld reported that the release would include the platform’s complete code “without any exclusions” and that third-party reviewers would verify that the published code matches the software running in production.
Musk had previewed the plan in a July 15 post, saying, “Once we have completed our review for security vulnerabilities, we will make the entire codebase of X open source, with no exceptions. Moreover, we will invite third party reviewers to examine the system that is running to confirm that the open source code is what is running.”
Questions remain about the terms of the release. Foss Force reported that Musk has not disclosed what license will apply to the code, a detail that will determine whether outside developers can modify and redistribute it.
Whether the release qualifies as full open source or a more limited source-available arrangement will become clear only when the code is published in August, according to Foss Force.
