Elon Musk’s xAI sues ex-employee over Grok AI confidential data theft

xAI has filed a lawsuit against the former employee Xuechen Li, claiming that he stole company secrets about its Grok chatbot and resigned to join its competitor OpenAI. The case was filed in a federal court in California wherein Li is accused of copying sensitive files containing important trade secrets on his office laptop and having tried to conceal his footprints by deleting logs, changing file names, compressing data and then transferring them to a personal device.

xAI says the stolen content contains advanced technologies, which might provide ChatGPT with an insurmountable advantage if implemented. The company asserts that Li had confessed to stealing some information during an internal meeting but had found out that he had not provided information about more stolen data. Li stepped aside on July 28, just a few days after selling billions of company shares, and was due to join OpenAI in mid-August. In this case, xAI currently seeks financial damages and a restraining order to prevent his appointment.

The complaint indicates that the stolen trade secrets are associated with the latest AI model training methods of Grok, which are reportedly more innovative than those of the existing offerings of OpenAI in ChatGPT. The technical team of the company consists of only 20 engineers; that is why, xAI claims, Li gained access to highly confidential resources and abused them intentionally.

The case follows Musk’s current disputes with OpenAI, a company he co-founded in 2015 but exited. Since ChatGPT was released in 2022, Musk has been accused of the company focusing more on profits rather than on the common good. He has already filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over the same and more recently has brought another suit against Apple and OpenAI, claiming Apple and AI monopoly in Apple devices.