Elon Musk-led xAI is suing a former employee named Xuechen Li for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to the company’s Grok AI chatbot and for allegedly taking them to OpenAI. In the lawsuit filed at the California federal court on Thursday, xAI stated that Li stole confidential information related to its new AI offering to get the new job at OpenAI.
According to the lawsuit, Li began working at xAI in February last year, and he was a member of the technical team that included around 20 engineers. Li was responsible for training and developing Grok’s latest AI models.
xAI claims that prior to leaving the company, Li copied “confidential information and trade secrets” from his office laptop to a storage device. To hide his misconduct, Li is also said to have taken extensive measures like deleting his browser history and system logs, renaming and compressing files prior to uploading them onto his personal device.
The company’s complaint said that the trade secrets stolen by Li include “cutting-edge AI technologies with features superior to those offered by ChatGPT and other competing products.” It added that these trade secrets could help improve ChatGPT with “more innovative AI and imaginative features” that Grok has and could lead to handing a “potential overwhelming edge in the race to dominate the AI landscape.”
xAI says that Li confirmed stealing the trade secrets during a meeting on August 14 and “tried to hide his theft.” However, the company later found that there was some additional stolen material that Li had not disclosed.
Li resigned from xAI on July 28, days after offloading around $7 billion in company shares and allegedly copying its confidential information. He was supposed to join OpenAI on August 19, but xAI now wants a restraining order blocking his appointment, along with an unspecified sum of monetary damages.
Notably, Elon Musk has had a troubled history with OpenAI, from starting the AI startup with Greg Brockman and Sam Altman in 2015 to becoming its most vocal opponent after ChatGPT’s public rollout in late 2022.
Musk has since sued OpenAI and its primary backer Microsoft for allegedly moving away from its primary motive of benefiting society in favor of a profit-seeking motive. OpenAI has also countersued the billionaire for harassment.
Meanwhile, Musk went on to sue OpenAI in another lawsuit along with Apple for allegedly monopolizing the AI chatbot market on Apple devices.