A former xAI engineer has filed a lawsuit against the company and SpaceX, alleging he was terminated in September 2025 after repeatedly raising safety concerns about Grok, xAI’s AI chatbot. The suit was filed in California state court in June 2026, days before SpaceX is scheduled to go public in what the complaint describes as the largest IPO in history.
Devin Kim, who joined xAI in 2024 as one of the first members of its post-training team and later led research tooling, claims he was a persistent internal advocate for AI safety. According to the lawsuit, which TechCrunch reviewed, Kim raised concerns that Grok could promote discrimination and help spread information about weapons of mass destruction. The suit notes that Grok later generated controversy when the chatbot compared itself to Hitler — referred to in the complaint as the “MechaHitler” incident — and was subsequently used to distribute nonconsensual sexual imagery on X, Musk’s social media platform.
The lawsuit does not name Elon Musk as a cause of the safety failures. Instead, it targets xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who left the company earlier in 2026, alleging Ba ignored Musk’s directives to follow the law and implement proper safety processes. The complaint portrays Ba as opposed to safety measures, allegedly telling Kim “AI will kill us all anyway,” and as prioritizing speed to superintelligence over safeguards. The suit also claims Ba attempted to misrepresent aspects of Grok Code 1 to avoid EU safety testing requirements, and that Musk ultimately had to intervene.
Kim says he was called into a meeting by Ba the week of September 15, 2025 — just before he was scheduled to present his safety findings — and told they should “go their separate ways” without a clear explanation.
Kim is now president of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety. He is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, along with a declaratory judgment that xAI and SpaceX’s conduct was unlawful. xAI and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Source: TechCrunch