A co-founder of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI, Igor Babuschkin, has left the company to start an investment firm dedicated to AI safety research.

“Today was my last day at xAI,” Babuschkin said in a post on X on Wednesday. His new venture, Babuschkin Ventures, will fund AI safety research and startups developing the technology.

Musk launched xAI in 2023 to compete with Big Tech rivals, criticising them for excessive censorship and weak safety standards. Babuschkin, a former researcher at Google’s DeepMind and OpenAI, played a key role in the startup’s early operations. He said he built “many of the foundational tools” for launching and managing model training jobs, later overseeing engineering for infrastructure, product, and applied AI projects.

His departure comes just weeks after xAI’s head of legal, Robert Keele, also left the company, and amid intensifying competition in the AI sector. Industry leaders such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are investing heavily to train and deploy increasingly advanced systems.

Babuschkin’s exit is the latest in a series of leadership changes linked to Musk’s ventures. Last month, Linda Yaccarino resigned as CEO of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, months after it was folded into xAI. Musk is also contending with high-profile executive departures at Tesla.

xAI, which aims to build “maximally truthful” AI systems, has released its Grok chatbot integrated into X and has been working to scale its infrastructure. The company has positioned itself as a challenger to the AI offerings of Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind.

Babuschkin did not disclose funding plans or partners for Babuschkin Ventures but said the firm’s mission would be to advance research ensuring AI systems are “safe, reliable, and aligned with human values.”