Former xAI engineer claims he was fired for raising safety concerns about Grok, told ‘AI will kill us all anyway’

A former xAI engineer has sued Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, and its parent company, SpaceX, claiming that he was fired for raising concerns regarding the safety of the company’s Grok AI chatbot. Notably, the lawsuit comes just days ahead of the highly anticipated SpaceX IPO, which is expected to be the largest public offering in history, valuing the company at approximately $1.77 trillion.

What is the xAI employee alleging?

The employee in question, Devin Kim, worked as an engineer at xAI until October 2025 and is now the president of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety. Kim filed a lawsuit against SpaceX in a California state court on Tuesday, claiming that the company did not do enough to address potential safety risks associated with its Grok AI chatbot.

In his lawsuit, Kim claims that xAI’s failure to prioritise AI safety with Grok “virtually guaranteed” that the chatbot would contribute to discrimination, spread harmful content, and even provide information related to weapons of mass destruction, Reuters reported.

“Grok, of course, proved Mr. Kim right by engaging in spectacular displays of online hatred and vitriol, with the model likening itself to Hitler (‘MechaHitler’),” Kim said in his lawsuit, as per TechCrunch. “Following the Hitler debacle, Mr. Kim worked to re-evaluate Grok’s political bias and discriminatory tendencies.”

Notably, after the Hitler controversy, xAI had to issue a public apology and blamed the error on a “deprecated code” along with the extremist views of users on X.

Who is Kim targeting?

Kim also claims that his efforts to place guardrails on the development of Grok made him a target for the company’s leadership. The former xAI engineer alleges that Musk directed xAI to follow the law and implement proper safety and testing processes.

However, he blames xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba for not only ignoring Musk’s directions but also retaliating against him for pushing for stronger safeguards in order to “silence his repeated complaints about AI safety and biases.”

As per the TechCrunch report, the lawsuit portrays Ba as someone who aggressively opposed AI safety measures and even, at one point, told Kim that “AI will kill us all anyway.”

Kim also alleges that Ba tried to get around EU safety regulations during the release of Grok Code 1 by misrepresenting certain aspects of the model to avoid legally required testing.

“Mr. Ba indicated that he would rather release an unsafe model than a poor-performing one. Mr. Musk ultimately had to intervene,” the complaint read.

The lawsuit states that Kim was looking to give a presentation on his findings during the week of September 15, 2025, but Ba instead called him into his office and told him they should “go [their] separate ways.”

Notably, Ba also left the startup in February this year and now works as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Before joining xAI, Kim worked on safety initiatives at Scale AI, including leading a project that produced training data for AI to train systems to detect harmful content and comply with government policies.