A former engineer at Elon Musk’s xAI, now leading an AI safety think tank, has filed a lawsuit alleging he was dismissed from the SpaceX-affiliated company after raising concerns about the risks artificial intelligence could pose to humanity.
Devin Kim says in a United States state court filing on Tuesday that his push for stronger safeguards around the Grok chatbot led to him being singled out by company leadership.
The lawsuit comes just ahead of SpaceX’s planned initial public offering on Friday, which is expected to be one of the largest in history.
“Mr Kim repeatedly complained that xAI’s failure to prioritize AI safety, particularly with respect to Grok, virtually guaranteed that the Company would commit unlawful acts, from fomenting discrimination to proliferating weapons of mass destruction,” the lawsuit says.
xAI and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Kim’s lawsuit.
On the same day the lawsuit was filed, a Canadian privacy watchdog released a report saying xAI’s Grok chatbot had breached the country’s privacy laws by enabling an image-generation feature that could be used to create and share non-consensual sexualised deepfakes.
Following a formal investigation launched in January by privacy commissioner Philippe Dufresne, xAI introduced changes aimed at preventing Grok from editing images of real people into revealing content.
Canada and the UK are among a growing number of countries tightening scrutiny of explicit AI-generated material produced by systems like Grok.
Meanwhile, the non-profit Center for AI Safety, which focuses on mitigating risks from artificial intelligence, announced last week that it had appointed Kim as its president.
Musk founded xAI in 2023, describing it as a safer alternative to OpenAI, which he co-founded more than a decade earlier. Last month, a jury dismissed Musk’s lawsuit alleging that OpenAI had abandoned its founding mission to serve humanity.
According to the new lawsuit, Kim was among xAI’s early hires in 2024 and was later promoted to a senior leadership role within months of joining the company.
