Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has sued a former employee, alleging he stole trade secrets about its Grok chatbot before joining rival OpenAI.
The complaint, filed Thursday in federal court in California, accuses engineer Xuechen Li of copying confidential files from his company laptop to personal devices before resigning on July 28.
The complaint alleges that Li, who joined the company in February 2023 to help develop Grok’s models, attempted to conceal his actions by deleting logs, renaming files, and compressing them before transferring the data.
The company said the stolen material included “cutting-edge AI technologies with features superior to those offered by ChatGPT and other competing products.” It alleges the information could give competitors an advantage while saving them “billions in R&D dollars and years of engineering effort.”
According to xAI, Li admitted to stealing trade secrets during a meeting on August 14. The company later discovered additional stolen materials that Li had not disclosed.
xAI is seeking a temporary restraining order requiring Li to return all company data, surrender his devices and online storage accounts, and bar him from starting work at OpenAI. The company is also pursuing monetary damages.
The case comes as competition for AI talent intensifies, with companies offering compensation packages in the hundreds of millions to secure top researchers. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before breaking with its leadership, has recently sued OpenAI, Microsoft, and Apple over what he calls monopolistic control of the AI market.
OpenAI has not commented on the allegations.
