The competition between AI companies is reaching unprecedented heights, with many poaching top talent from rivals to benefit. In the process, some employees often tend to steal trade secrets to get a better offer from a rival. Elon Musk’s xAI has caught another of its ex-employees stealing confidential information related to Grok AI and sharing it with OpenAI, the firm led by Sam Altman.
Elon Musk’s xAI has filed a lawsuit against a former employee, Xuechen Li, in a California federal court. The lawsuit alleges that Li stole confidential trade secrets related to the company’s AI chatbot, Grok, and planned to use them to aid OpenAI. Neither Musk nor OpenAI is yet made a statement regarding the lawsuit.
xAI files lawsuit against ex-employee
According to the lawsuit, Li, who was a member of the technical team responsible for developing Grok’s latest models, copied confidential information from his work laptop to a personal storage device just before his resignation on July 28.
The lawsuit claims that Li took measures to hide his actions, including deleting his browser history, clearing system logs, and compressing and renaming files before uploading them.
The stolen information is described in the court filing as “cutting-edge AI technologies with features superior to those offered by ChatGPT.” xAI argues that these trade secrets could give OpenAI a significant competitive advantage in the race for AI dominance.
xAI is seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent Li from beginning his scheduled new role at OpenAI on August 19. In addition to the restraining order, xAI is also pursuing monetary damages.
Musk-OpenAI feud keeps growing
The lawsuit, once again, highlights the fierce competition for talent and technological breakthroughs in the AI industry. It also sparks the public feud between Musk and OpenAI, a company he co-founded before getting hold of X (formerly Twitter).
Musk had expressed his view that OpenAI, which is now backed by Microsoft, has strayed from its original mission of developing AI for the benefit of humanity. Recently, Musk accused OpenAI of gaining an unfair competitive advantage on the Apple App Store by forming a partnership with Apple. A social media feud followed between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Musk for a couple of days.
