A former engineer at Elon Musk’s xAI who now heads a thinktank focused on AI safety filed a lawsuit claiming he was fired from the SpaceX subsidiary for raising concerns about the risks artificial intelligence poses to humanity.
Devin Kim 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.
The lawsuit comes ahead of SpaceX’s planned initial public offering, the largest ever, on Friday.
“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.
The day Kim’s lawsuit was filed, an official Canadian watchdog said in a report that xAI’s Grok chatbot had violated the country’s privacy laws by launching an image-generation tool that allowed users to create and share non-consensual, sexualized deep fakes.
After the privacy commissioner, Philippe Dufresne, launched a formal investigation in January, xAI announced tweaks to prevent Grok from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing. Britain and Canada are two in a growing list of countries cracking down on explicit content generated by Grok.
The non-profit Center for AI Safety, which focuses on the risks potentially posed by AI, announced last week that it had named Kim as its president.
Musk, the world’s richest person, established xAI in 2023 as what he said would be a safer alternative to OpenAI, which he had helped found more than a decade ago. A jury last month rejected Musk’s lawsuit claiming that OpenAI had strayed from its original mission to benefit humanity.
According to the new lawsuit, Kim was one of the initial hires at xAI in 2024 and was promoted to a key leadership position months after joining the company.
Kim said Musk expected xAI to implement appropriate safety testing and processes. But Kim’s supervisor, the xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, flouted those directives and rejected Kim’s insistence on implementing safety mechanisms, the lawsuit claims.
Kim says Ba abruptly fired him last September just before Kim was set to give a presentation on AI safety to company leadership.
The lawsuit accuses xAI and SpaceX of retaliation and wrongful discharge in violation of California law, and seeks unspecified monetary damages.
SpaceX and Musk’s other ventures have been dogged by alleged safety issues, including hazards posed to company employees, concerns about self-driving technology and lawsuits over its chatbot’s output.
xAI has faced multiple lawsuits and international investigations over its Grok AI product in recent months, after a period when the chatbot generated millions of AI-altered sexualized images earlier this year. Many of these sexualized images were created using photos of women without their consent, according to researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which also estimated that Grok produced about 23,000 sexualized images of children over an 11-day period in December and January.
Musk has denied any knowledge of Grok producing child sexual abuse material, stating in January that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.” The company added restrictions to Grok’s image generation capabilities in earlier January following backlash and threats of regulatory action from multiple countries.
