Former xAI Engineer Devin Kim Sues Company and SpaceX After Being Let Go for Repeated AI Safety Complaints

Devin Kim filed a lawsuit against xAI and SpaceX in a California state court on Tuesday, alleging he was fired for raising concerns about AI safety in the development of Grok. Kim left xAI in September 2025 after working on the chatbot since joining as one of the first members of the post-training team in 2024. He eventually led research tooling at the company.

The complaint states that Kim became a prominent voice for AI safety and repeatedly complained about xAI’s failure to prioritize safety measures. Kim was concerned that Grok could foment discrimination and help spread information about weapons of mass destruction. ” Following that incident, Kim worked to re-evaluate Grok’s political bias and discriminatory tendencies.

A few months after Kim departed, Grok was used to flood X with nonconsensual sexual imagery. The lawsuit positions Kim as a whistleblower who viewed xAI’s alleged disregard for AI safety as unlawful in areas such as internet regulation, consumer protection, unfair business practices, and arms and explosives regulation. Kim’s focus on AI safety predates his time at xAI.

While working at Scale AI, he led a project that produced training data for AI to detect harmful content and comply with governance policies. Last week, the nonprofit Center for AI Safety named him its president. The lawsuit does not implicate Elon Musk as a reason for a lack of safety measures.

It states that Musk directed xAI to follow the law and implement appropriate safety and testing processes. Instead, the complaint targets Kim’s supervisor, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who left the company earlier this year. The lawsuit alleges that Ba ignored Musk’s directives and retaliated against Kim for pushing for safeguards.

In or around August 2025, Ba attempted to thwart EU safety regulations during the release of Grok Code 1 by misrepresenting aspects of the model to avoid legally required testing, according to the complaint. Ba indicated that he would rather release an unsafe model than a poor-performing one, and Musk had to intervene.