{"id":106141,"date":"2025-08-29T19:56:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T19:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/106141\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T19:56:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T19:56:08","slug":"musks-xai-sues-engineer-for-allegedly-taking-secrets-to-openai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/106141\/","title":{"rendered":"Musk’s xAI sues engineer for allegedly taking secrets to OpenAI"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (L), and Tesla CEO Elon Musk<\/p>\n

Reuters<\/p>\n

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\u00a0OpenAI.<\/p>\n

Musk’s company\u00a0said in the complaint<\/a>\u00a0filed 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\u00a0OpenAI\u00a0earlier this month.<\/p>\n

Li, representatives of\u00a0OpenAI\u00a0and attorneys and spokespersons for xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.\u00a0OpenAI\u00a0is not a defendant.<\/p>\n

The complaint underscores the rivalry between Musk’s company and\u00a0OpenAI\u00a0and a\u00a0fierce battle\u00a0among tech companies for AI talent.<\/p>\n

Musk, an\u00a0OpenAI\u00a0co-founder, has\u00a0separately sued\u00a0the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, for allegedly deviating from its original mission to benefit humanity.\u00a0OpenAI\u00a0countersued Musk\u00a0in April for harassment.<\/p>\n

Musk’s xAI\u00a0filed another lawsuit\u00a0against\u00a0OpenAI\u00a0and Apple<\/a>\u00a0in Texas on Monday for allegedly monopolizing the market for AI chatbots on Apple devices.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0OpenAI\u00a0and selling $7 million in xAI stock.<\/p>\n

Musk’s startup said that the secrets could allow\u00a0OpenAI\u00a0to bolster ChatGPT with xAI’s “more innovative AI and imaginative features.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Musk’s AI company asked the court for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a restraining order blocking Li’s move to\u00a0OpenAI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (L), and Tesla CEO Elon Musk Reuters Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106142,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,7175,276,277,161,49,48,250,7741,2747,61],"class_list":["post-106141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-apple-inc","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-business-news","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-elon-musk","tag-lawsuits","tag-sam-altman","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}