Musk's xAI sues engineer for allegedly taking secrets to OpenAI

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musks-xai-sues-engineer-allegedly-taking-secrets-openai-2025-08-29/

https://archive.is/x91iQ

Aug 29 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI has sued a former engineer at the company for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to its Grok chatbot and taking them to rival OpenAI.

Musk's company said in the complaint filed on Thursday in California federal court that Xuechen Li stole confidential information related to "cutting-edge AI technologies with features superior to those offered by ChatGPT" to bring to his new job at OpenAI earlier this month.

Li, representatives of OpenAI and attorneys and spokespersons for xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday. OpenAI is not a defendant.

The complaint underscores the rivalry between Musk's company and OpenAI and a fierce battle among tech companies for AI talent.

Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, has separately sued the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, for allegedly deviating from its original mission to benefit humanity. OpenAI countersued Musk in April for harassment.

Musk's xAI filed another lawsuit against OpenAI and Apple (AAPL.O) in Texas on Monday for allegedly monopolizing the market for AI chatbots on Apple devices.

The new lawsuit said Li began working as an engineer for xAI last year, where he helped train and develop Grok. The company said Li took its trade secrets in July, shortly after accepting a job from OpenAI and selling $7 million in xAI stock.

Musk's startup said that the secrets could allow OpenAI to bolster ChatGPT with xAI's "more innovative AI and imaginative features."

The lawsuit said Li admitted to stealing company files and "covering his tracks" during a meeting on August 14, and that the company later found additional stolen material on his devices that he had not disclosed.

Musk's AI company asked the court for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a restraining order blocking Li's move to OpenAI.

 

[Necrosan]

I hope this is finally what wakes him up into becoming anti-H1B. But I doubt it.
He's been posting a lot about the anti-immigration protests in the UK, so I want to be optimistic.

He is very schizo in a way that boggles my mind, he clearly, to some extent, cares about free speech and natives not getting shafted but also wants to import infinity pajeets.

I feel like he'd do ok with a personal wrangler. Someone who whispers in his ear constantly things like: *make your own payment processor mr. Musk*

 

[Wood]

these corporate AI operations are fucking gay and deserve this kind of debasement. AI itself is an inevitable new frontier and will bring about many changes (yes, I mean the current deep learning algo form and not true self-consciousness like a sci-fi story). but this iteration of AI, this VC bubble jockey shit where everyone is rushing to create a new startup and market their shitty LLM, is repellently retarded and will go exactly the same way as the dot-com bubble in the 90s. these AI corporations are not worth shit, they produce nothing, they have no real product. all they have is a chatbot that magically generates money through data scraping and token sales.

IMO it's not that negative. The dot-com bubble advanced tech in the end and will the LLMs. Sure, the market will clear out after a while and show what's profitable.

if OpenAI's servers went nuclear and melted into slag tonight, it wouldn't matter. their current model will be obsolete before the year is over thanks to the body of computer scientists working on this shit and not the bug men like Sam Altman or Elon who are just business fags whose hearts will probably explode from the immense amounts of cocaine they're consuming daily. all but a few empires will collapse and nobody will grieve or remember them.

Don't think so. In the 90s some of these tech companies did start in actual garages lol but it's not possible with the amount of compute you need right now. It's only a few corps competing and I actually consider Musk's the least bad one lol

 

[█████████]

He is very schizo in a way that boggles my mind, he clearly, to some extent, cares about free speech and natives not getting shafted but also wants to import infinity pajeets.

I feel like he'd do ok with a personal wrangler. Someone who whispers in his ear constantly things like: *make your own payment processor mr. Musk*

Doesn't he have a drug addiction? I wouldn't be surprised if that even further scrambles his brain.
I agree, but I feel like his head is too far up his own ass for him to agree to have a personal wrangler.
I really hope a jeet commits a crime against his company next.
He already did make PayPal, though I don't know if he still has any power over it. I think him making another payment processor is unlikely because of that.

 

[deleuzeon]

Doesn't he have a drug addiction? I wouldn't be surprised if that even further scrambles his brain.

Yeah, he does ketamine and when people have asked whether it's responsible to be running multiple public companies while doing ketamine he points to how successful they've been in the market and says obviously I should keep doing it. Because nobody's ever had their mental encumbrance from addiction pile up more and more over time, right?

 

[Absolutego]

I hate AI, I can’t wait for this bubble to burst

It's going to take a few major security breaches from AI-generated code to hit the news before Silicon Valley takes the hint.
Both those Tea-related "bitch about your dating life" breaches were vibe-coded, but it needs to be something actually damaging and not just funny/FAFO on the part of its users.

 

[Henry Rollins]

EVERY INDIAN THAT MAKES HIS WAY INTO CHINA IS A THREAT, THEYLL USE THEIR COLLECTIVE GENIUS AGAINST US!

 

[HansKlokBier]

Funny that Deepseek is oblerating any AI from NA, and in the EU they are asking permission to use ur facebook data for AI, like they where not stealing ur data years ago, GTFO

 

[No Batty Boys in Jamaica]

He is very schizo in a way that boggles my mind, he clearly, to some extent, cares about free speech and natives not getting shafted but also wants to import infinity pajeets.

I feel like he'd do ok with a personal wrangler. Someone who whispers in his ear constantly things like: *make your own payment processor mr. Musk*

It was supposed to be Peter Thiel, but the whole faggot thing led to irreconcilable differences.
Not reading the room with Pajeets is evidence that Elon has chosen the Howard Hughes path of madness. It’s going to be very funny to watch the descent.

 

[VeteranOfTheRetardWars]

I was going to make a joke about ninjas but then I realized that would the wrong type of Asian.

 

[Unexpected Genitals]

Local dickless retard gets what he deserves.

 

[ZazietheBeast]

IMO it's not that negative. The dot-com bubble advanced tech in the end and will the LLMs. Sure, the market will clear out after a while and show what's profitable.


Don't think so. In the 90s some of these tech companies did start in actual garages lol but it's not possible with the amount of compute you need right now. It's only a few corps competing and I actually consider Musk's the least bad one lol

Not to mention not that many techbros nowadays have the same level of creativity of techbros in the 80s and 90s. Consider we managed to get people in space with old DOS computers with the processing power in megabytes.

 

[Made In Wales]

Ironic that, since ditching Trump, Musk has had a multitude of issues like these.

Hmm... karma perhaps?

 

[poopshoes]

I don't have a hateboner for this faggot like most but he really is one dumb son of a bitch and I hope he loses everything.

 

[Sleepingdogs]

A cosmopolitan globalist like Elon will never be a loyal nationalist. The parasitic relationship he has with our country will only last so long as it benefits him. If the U.S. keeps going down the populist rabbit hole and we get an actual unrepentant isolationist, Musk will hop over to China in a heartbeat. Anyone that sucks up to these technocrats for any other reason than to ride their coattails and fleece money from people are idiots.

 

[Headdot Reddot]

Come on buddy, don't be too harsh. They also kill our families on the road and pollute our lands. Don't sell em short.

And the rape. Can't forget about that, its what their great at.

It should be considered a corporate absolute. You hire a chink? You hire a spy.

Good thing the President just authorized allowing 600,000 Chinese students into our Universities and research colleges.

Because nobody's ever had their mental encumbrance from addiction pile up more and more over time, right?

Like alcohol longterm hardcore drug use has no negative health effects and helps a genius ignore all criticism. Brilliant move by Apartheid Clyde.

 

[Maverick Vile]

None of this would have happened if he hired a white boy from middle America. I understand not wanting to hire white coastals with their problem glasses and desire to be paid large sums of money while eating sushi from the company-paid catering service, but plenty of people that didn't get a degree in California are just as competent coders, if not better. But you won't even look at their application because "they weren't forced to do violin" or "had sleepovers," or whatever thinly-veiled bullshit you come up with for fucking over white Americans.

Suffer, faggot.

me chinese

me play joke

Me steal your entire company's trade secrets and sell them to the competition because I'm a CCP plant and you were fucking retarded to put me in a position where I had access to privileged information, you absolute goddamned idiot.

And I'll bet they put peepee in his coke, too.

 

[JayseeDenton]

He is very schizo in a way that boggles my mind, he clearly, to some extent, cares about free speech and natives not getting shafted but also wants to import infinity pajeets.

I feel like he'd do ok with a personal wrangler. Someone who whispers in his ear constantly things like: *make your own payment processor mr. Musk*

I've noticed this as well. He's in some kind of quantum superstate position between being ultra based and ultra pozzed.

 

[apex_redditor]

A Chinaman taking it to OpenAI rather than China is potentially a much better situation for Musk, since it's within legal reach.

it also went to China, no doubt

 

[JayseeDenton]

Then comes my question. If the Chinks can steal it, the Pajeet CECAs can steal it way more easily. Why don't the CECAs have that technology? Or maybe they do but I don't know of them.

More often than not, it is really a case of corporations unhappy that the Chinks they hired decided to take their (meaning Chinks) designs and creations back home. If you think corporations own everything an inventor or engineer comes up with then of course you'd think it is theft.

But that would explain why China came up with Oppo while the CECAs came up with shit like Reliance Jio.

Correct me if I am wrong, it seems that the actual engineers doing the heavylifting coming up with AI and gadgets in tech corporations, most of them are yellowskins while the shitskins run those corporations as figureheads and do presentations.

While I think it is unfair to call former engineers who took their own creations back home or to other companies, you should hire engineers who are of your own kind.

This mentality is why everyone hates working with non whites.

 

[Nice Stick]

Funnily enough, the Mexican cartels are the most true-to-life representation of Arasaka. They kidnap doctors, surgeons and even telco engineers to help them build their own WiFi and 5G antennas, then they either let them go (while keeping close tabs on them) or kill them, so that their networks are 100% impenetrable.

Many Mexican medicine students are trying their damnedest to study abroad (Colombia, Brazil, Argentina) precisely because they want to avoid getting kidnapped by the cartels and having to do forced labor for them.

It's not just mexico. The cartels mostly control New Mexico, west Texas, parts of Arizona, and parts of SoCal all the way up to Grants Pass OR.