These keys essentially provided access to Rabbit’s accounts with third-party services like its text-to-speech provider ElevenLabs and — as confirmed by 404 Media — the company’s SendGrid account, which is how it sends emails from its rabbit.tech domain. According to Rabbitude, its access to these API keys — particularly the ElevenLabs API — meant it could access every response ever given by R1 devices. That is Bad with a capital b.
Rabbitude published an article yesterday saying that it gained access to the keys over a month ago but that despite knowing about the breach, Rabbit did nothing to secure the information. Since then, the group says its access to most of the keys has been revoked, suggesting that the company rotated them, but as of earlier today, it still had access to the SendGrid key.
Rabbit hasn’t responded to my request for comment on the security breach, though it offered a general statement yesterday on its Discord server: “Today we were made aware of an alleged data breach. Our security team immediately began investigating it. As of right now, we are not aware of any customer data being leaked or any compromise to our systems. If we learn of any other relevant information, we will provide an update once we have more details.”
Following its much-hyped launch this spring, the Rabbit R1 proved itself to be a disappointment. Battery life was bad, its feature set was bare-bones, and its AI-generated responses often contained errors. The company issued a software update on short order fixing bugs like the battery drain and has continued to release updates since then, but the R1’s core problem of overpromising and massively underdelivering remains unchanged. And a serious security breach like this makes it much harder to win back public trust.