A former engineer at Elon Musk’s xAI has filed a lawsuit against the company and its parent company SpaceX, claiming he was fired for raising concerns about AI safety.
Devin Kim, who left xAI in September 2025, filed the lawsuit Tuesday in a California state court. The complaint comes just days before SpaceX is set to join the public markets in what would be the largest IPO in history.
Kim became a prominent voice on AI safety through his work on Grok, xAI’s AI chatbot, according to the lawsuit seen by TechCrunch. He reportedly complained repeatedly about xAI’s failure to prioritize safety in the development of Grok, a product that has been criticized for various safety and behavioral issues. In particular, Mr. Kim was concerned about the possibility that Grock could encourage discrimination and help spread information about weapons of mass destruction.
“Grock, of course, proved Mr. Kim right by dramatizing the online hate and vitriol by modeling himself likening himself to Hitler (‘MechaHitler’),” the lawsuit states. “After Hitler’s fiasco, Mr. Kim sought to reevaluate Grok’s political prejudices and discriminatory tendencies.”
Months after Kim left xAI, Grok made headlines again by using a chatbot to flood X (Musk’s social media platform under the xAI umbrella) with non-consensual sexual images.
The lawsuit also names Kim as a whistleblower concerned about claims that xAI’s disregard for AI safety in areas including internet regulation, consumer protection, unfair business practices, and weapons and explosives regulation was “unlawful.”
xAI and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Kim focused on AI safety even before joining xAI. While working at Scale AI, Kim worked on early Safe AI initiatives, including leading a project to generate training data for AI to train systems to detect harmful content and comply with governance policies. Last week, the nonprofit AI Safety Center, which focuses on AI risks, named Kim its president.
Interestingly, the lawsuit does not implicate Musk himself as the reason for the lack of safety. Rather, Kim’s lawyers explain, Musk instructed xAI to comply with the law and implement appropriate safety and testing processes. Instead, the claim targets Mr. Kim’s boss, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who left the company earlier this year, and said Mr. Ba retaliated against Mr. Kim for ignoring Musk’s instructions and pushing for safeguards “to quell repeated complaints about AI safety and bias.”
In the lawsuit, Mr. Barr is described as someone who was vehemently opposed to AI safety measures, who once told Mr. Kim that “AI is going to kill us all anyway,” but who was instead driven by a mission to make xAI the first to reach superintelligence.
“In or about August 2025, Mr. Bassi attempted to interfere with EU safety regulations during the rollout of Grok Code 1 by misrepresenting aspects of the model to avoid legally required testing,” the complaint reads. “Mr. Barr made it clear that it was better to release an unsafe model than an underperforming model. Ultimately, Mr. Musk had to intervene.”
According to the lawsuit, Mr. Kim was scheduled to announce his findings the week of September 15, 2025, but Mr. Ba called Mr. Kim to a meeting and simply told him to “take a separate path” and did not provide a convincing reason.
TechCrunch has reached out to Ba for comment.
Mr. Kim is seeking compensatory and punitive damages as well as a declaratory judgment that xAI and SpaceX’s actions were illegal.
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