A former xAI engineer has sued Elon Musk’s synthetic intelligence firm, xAI, and its guardian firm, SpaceX, claiming that he was fired for raising concerns relating to the safety of the corporate’s Grok AI chatbot. Notably, the lawsuit comes simply days forward of the extremely anticipated SpaceX IPO, which is predicted to be the biggest public providing in historical past, valuing the corporate at roughly $1.77 trillion.
What’s the xAI worker alleging?
The worker in query, Devin Kim, labored as an engineer at xAI till October 2025 and is now the president of the nonprofit Middle for AI Safety. Kim filed a lawsuit towards SpaceX in a California state courtroom on Tuesday, claiming that the corporate didn’t do sufficient to deal with potential safety dangers related to its Grok AI chatbot.
In his lawsuit, Kim claims that xAI’s failure to prioritise AI safety with Grok “just about assured” that the chatbot would contribute to discrimination, unfold dangerous content material, and even present data associated to weapons of mass destruction, Reuters reported.
“Grok, in fact, proved Mr. Kim proper by participating in spectacular shows of on-line hatred and vitriol, with the mannequin likening itself to Hitler (‘MechaHitler’),” Kim mentioned in his lawsuit, as per TechCrunch. “Following the Hitler debacle, Mr. Kim labored to re-evaluate Grok’s political bias and discriminatory tendencies.”
Notably, after the Hitler controversy, xAI needed to subject a public apology and blamed the error on a “deprecated code” together with the extremist views of customers on X.
Who’s Kim concentrating on?
Kim additionally claims that his efforts to put guardrails on the event of Grok made him a goal for the corporate’s management. The previous xAI engineer alleges that Musk directed xAI to observe the regulation and implement correct safety and testing processes.
Nonetheless, he blames xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba for not solely ignoring Musk’s instructions but additionally retaliating towards him for pushing for stronger safeguards as a way to “silence his repeated complaints about AI safety and biases.”
As per the TechCrunch report, the lawsuit portrays Ba as somebody who aggressively opposed AI safety measures and even, at one level, told Kim that “AI will kill us all anyway.”
Kim additionally alleges that Ba tried to get round EU safety rules in the course of the launch of Grok Code 1 by misrepresenting sure points of the mannequin to keep away from legally required testing.
“Mr. Ba indicated that he would quite launch an unsafe mannequin than a poor-performing one. Mr. Musk in the end needed to intervene,” the grievance learn.
The lawsuit states that Kim was trying to give a presentation on his findings in the course of the week of September 15, 2025, however Ba as an alternative known as him into his workplace and told him they need to “go [their] separate methods.”
Notably, Ba additionally left the startup in February this 12 months and now works as an assistant professor within the Division of Laptop Science on the College of Toronto.
Earlier than becoming a member of xAI, Kim labored on safety initiatives at Scale AI, together with main a venture that produced coaching information for AI to coach methods to detect dangerous content material and adjust to authorities insurance policies.
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