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.

 

[Otterly]

one of the smartest scientists I’ve ever met, I asked him for some career advice, and he said (among other things, which I utterly failed to accomplish or do)
‘Never work for a lab that is full of Chinese. They will work you like a slave and steal your work. When you’ve got your own lab, never hire Chinese, they will steal your work.’
So Elon, you can support H1b all you like but the scale of Chinese scientific and industrial espionage is beyond your ken.

 

[ZipDisk]

Hong Kong chinks all smell amazing, mainlanders smell like burning garbage.
I had a boss from Hong Kong and she was STILL pissed about the handover in 2007.
She spoke about growing up there and it may as well have been the fucking moon compared to how Americans live, she essentially went from being a princess to "Pack a bag bitch, the flag turns red tomorrow".
Her accent was fucking AMAZING, and I miss working for her. She paid well, no chinking.

Deleuzeon, the kidnapping is part of the job. It's not all dull machetes, you have to keep the fear alive.


Elon WANTS to be racist, but he has too much money to build the honest hate of pajeet.

Whenever Zuck gets fucked out of a few billion I want to be happy, but that dude has his SHTF bunker in Hawaii. Everything else is just fucking PVP for him.

I've never understood the peepee in coke thing. Like yeah, yellow men are duplicitous bastards, but why piss in coca cola, is it just to complete the rhyming couplet?

He had documentation --- in private, that he wouldn't share with others.

On one hand, total chink logic. On the other hand, never train your replacement.

 

[No. 7 cat]

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.

The Chicoms have many faults, but if some plutocrat billionaire faggot forgets his place in the order of things, he's put back in that place.

 

[Hey Johnny Bravo]

>hire Chinese citizens despite the open program of Chinese government to steal tech and IPs
>shocked when it happens to you
Never hire Chinese nationals. Simple as.

 

[Carbiter]

Hire Chinese employees and you get the Chinese treatment, i wonder what his Indian employees doing behind his back?

Shitting

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

Can we please start legally forcing disinvestment and space between our business world and the ccp owned one? As well as society as a whole. Higher education as well! No reason why ccp owned chinese companies need to be buying land and infrastructure outside their country.. and CERTAINLY no reason why we should be letting them do it. Enemies buy our things and land. Steal our tech and secrets.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Just nationalize all the Chinese property and behead all the Chinese nationals on American soil.

 

[not william stenchever]

The Japanese are the jews of the Orient.

High precision machining, rampant sexual degeneracy... I think the Japanese may be the Germans of the orient.

 

[make_it_so]

Can we please start legally forcing disinvestment and space between our business world and the CCP owned one? As well as society as a whole. No reason why CCP owned chinese companies need to be buying land and infrastructure outside their country.. and CERTAINLY no reason why we should be letting them do it. Enemies buy our things and land. Steal our tech and secrets.

Because Corporate America will bitch and throw a hysterical fit about no longer having cheap imports or cheap foreign labor or having access to a billion plus potential consumers (I say "potential" because ultimately the Chinese almost always buy their own shit rather than foreign brands) and that they'll have a quarter or two where line no go up.

But on the other hand, it's long past time to remind those greedy fucks where their national loyalties are supposed to lie.

 

[not william stenchever]

But on the other hand, it's long past time to remind those greedy fucks where they're national loyalties are supposed to lie.

Corporations are people at the moment and should be punished so as appropriate.

 

[The greater a'tuin]

View attachment 7852457
Will you say that one more time, Mr Musk?

[Curb Your Enthusiasm theme intensifies]

 

[FrigginWeeb]

Shit like this makes me wonder how much of the "chinese/indian tech community" is just people playing a game of telephone with code and ideas from one company to another to another, creating shittier and shitter copies of various products. Like all the copycat products in China.

 

[not william stenchever]

Or the Cotton Gin. Instead of taking a legion of niggers to clean and separate cotton, you just need a few to operate the machine. Suddenly one man becomes a fucking army. AI is literally the industrial revolution for Code Jockeys.

The cotton gin caused an order of magnitude increase in the number of slaves. Solve one bottleneck in slave based production, suddenly you realize you can clean cotton much more efficiently. Now the gin is sitting idle because there isn't enough cotton for it to clean -> more slaves to grow more cotton. It's not a one to one comparison but the benefit AI of assisted coding used by competent people is going to be drowned out by the shit stained horror of AI assisted curry coding.

 

[Sprocket]

the jews of the orient strike again

Off topic, but if you grab an oriental guy and spin him around a few times, does he become disoriental?

 

[John Titor]

Cheating through school, scamming old people, bulk generating web articles that generate $0.005 in ad revenue, flooding store pages with shitty books and tshirts, spam applying to american jobs. Very popular in certain cultures

And increasing your electric bill even if you aren't directly using it.

https://www.newsweek.com/map-data-centers-us-electricity-bills-2120645

 

[JayseeDenton]

Shit like this makes me wonder how much of the "chinese/indian tech community" is just people playing a game of telephone with code and ideas from one company to another to another, creating shittier and shitter copies of various products. Like all the copycat products in China.

This is all asian "research" has ever been. It's in their DNA. My Japanese friend tried to explain to me that it stems from growing rice which has one specific way to do it no matter the time of year. I don't know about that but the results speak for themselves.


In the past 1500 years there has not been one single product, tool, weapon, system, cultural work, or idea of any kind coming out of asia that can't be reduced to "take laowhai thing and throw slave labor at it to make one aspect of it 5% better while all the other aspects are 20% worse and you have no clue how it actually works".

These are largely brands and models, but it extends to the very method civilizations are run.
>West kick our ass with gun?
>China make lots of gun!
>Oh no now west kicking our ass with better kind of gun!
>Make a billion of that gun!
>Oh no airplane!!

>US has a lot of productivity from cities?
>China makes a trillion cities.
>Oh no now west make internet not need so many cities!?!
>Put a billion wumao on internet!

>West do lot manufacturing?
>Now we make thing!
>Oh no west make computer not need so much thing?!?!
>MAKA COMPOOTA!

>Russia do communism?
>Do super communism but china china!

They literally can't create a wave, only ride it. They're in a constant state of mastering what the west was doing 50 years ago just in time for it to be outdated.

 

[Eternal Spirit of Darknes]

among other things

I'm curious about the other advice, could you share?

 

[KiwiSoldat]

They literally can't create a wave, only ride it. They're in a constant state of mastering what the west was doing 50 years ago just in time for it to be outdated.

It's honestly impressive how they can't even improve the product they are copying. They have a solid foundation, but still manages to fuck it up.

Just seeing the examples you brought up makes you want to nuke these chinks, 2 bombs did the trick on Japan, how many to teach China a lesson?

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

This is all asian "research" has ever been. It's in their DNA. My Japanese friend tried to explain to me that it stems from growing rice which has one specific way to do it no matter the time of year. I don't know about that but the results speak for themselves.

I don't drink Tenderness Whisky, I only drink Nigga Whisky from the Hood.

 

[Homo neanderthalensis]

A Tesla owner was burned alive in his Cybertruck after the stainless-steel beast erupted in a 5,000-degree inferno so intense it caused his bones to disintegrate.
Joshua Moon, 37, bought the futuristic pickup in April 2025. Few months later on Sept. 3, the truck veered off-road, slammed into a culvert and burst into flames near Pensacola, Florida, right after Moon tweeted "FUCK YOU IN THE FUCKING FACE" to Elon Musk.
The raging fire trapped Moon inside the vehicle as the batteries powering the $100,000 SUV went into catastrophic failure. The blaze was so hot Moon’s skeletal system literally fractured from the heat.