{"id":69225,"date":"2026-06-10T18:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T18:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/69225\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T18:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T18:16:09","slug":"musks-xai-accused-of-illegally-firing-engineer-who-raised-safety-concerns-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/69225\/","title":{"rendered":"Musk’s xAI accused of illegally firing engineer who raised safety concerns"},"content":{"rendered":"

A former engineer at Elon Musk<\/a>‘s xAI<\/a> who now heads a think tank focused on AI safety filed a lawsuit claiming he was fired from the SpaceX<\/a> subsidiary for raising concerns about the risks artificial intelligence poses to humanity.<\/p>\n

Devin Kim<\/a> claims in the lawsuit filed in California state court on Tuesday that his efforts to place guardrails on the development of the chatbot Grok made him a target for company leadership.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit \u200ccomes ahead of \u2060SpaceX’s planned \u2060initial public offering, the largest ever, on Friday.<\/p>\n

“Mr. Kim repeatedly complained that xAI’s failure to prioritize AI safety, particularly with \u200brespect to Grok, virtually guaranteed that the Company would commit unlawful acts, from fomenting discrimination to proliferating weapons of \u200bmass destruction,” the lawsuit says.<\/p>\n

xAI and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Kim’s lawsuit.<\/p>\n

The nonprofit Center for AI Safety<\/a>, which focuses on the risks potentially posed by AI, announced last week that it had named Kim as its president.<\/p>\n

Musk, the \u2060world’s richest \u200cperson, established xAI in 2023 as what he said would be a safer \u200balternative to OpenAI, \u200bwhich he had helped found more than a decade ago. A jury \u2060last month rejected Musk’s lawsuit claiming that OpenAI had strayed from \u200bits original mission to benefit humanity.<\/p>\n

According to the new lawsuit, Kim was \u200bone of the initial hires at xAI in 2024 and was promoted to a key leadership position months after joining the company.<\/p>\n

Kim said Musk expected xAI to implement appropriate safety testing and processes. But Kim’s supervisor, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, flouted those directives and rejected Kim’s insistence on implementing safety mechanisms, the lawsuit claims.<\/p>\n

Kim says Ba abruptly fired him last September just before Kim was set \u200cto give a presentation on AI safety to company leadership.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit accuses xAI and SpaceX of retaliation and wrongful discharge in violation of California law, and seeks \u200bunspecified monetary damages.<\/p>\n

SpaceX and Musk’s other ventures, including \u2060EV maker Tesla<\/a>, have been dogged by alleged safety issues, from hazards posed to company employees to concerns about self-driving technology.<\/p>\n

In 2023, Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at SpaceX including \u200bcrushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions and one death. Some employees attributed the issues to a lax safety culture and Musk’s belief that SpaceX is on an urgent quest to create a refuge in space from a dying Earth.<\/p>\n

SpaceX did not comment at the time, but in court filings and elsewhere the company has defended its safety record and said it provides extensive safety training.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A former engineer at Elon Musk‘s xAI who now heads a think tank focused on AI safety filed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[35351,35352,140,7856,658,8493,2616,2899],"class_list":["post-69225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-xai","tag-center-for-ai-safety","tag-devin-kim","tag-elon-musk","tag-grok-chatbot","tag-spacex","tag-spacex-ipo","tag-tesla","tag-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}