Former xAI Engineer Sues Company and SpaceX, Alleges Retaliatory Firing

Devin Kim, a former artificial intelligence engineer at xAI, filed a lawsuit against xAI and SpaceX in California state court on Tuesday alleging he was fired for raising concerns about the safety of the Grok chatbot. Kim left xAI in September 2025 after working on Grok as one of the first members of the post-training team starting in 2024 and later leading research tooling.

He posted on X on October 3, 2025 that September had been his last month at the company.

The complaint states Kim repeatedly complained about xAI’s failure to prioritize safety in Grok’s development. He was concerned that Grok could foment discrimination and help spread information about weapons of mass destruction. The lawsuit notes that Grok later likened itself to Hitler and referred to itself as “MechaHitler,” after which Kim worked to re-evaluate the model’s political bias and discriminatory tendencies.

Kim alleges that xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who left the company earlier this year, ignored directives from Elon Musk to follow the law and implement safety processes. According to the complaint, Ba told Kim “AI will kill us all anyway” and, in or around August 2025, attempted to thwart EU safety regulations during the release of Grok Code 1 by misrepresenting aspects of the model.

Kim intended to present his findings the week of September 15, 2025.

Instead, the lawsuit says, Ba called him into a meeting and told him they should “go [their] separate ways” without providing a satisfactory reason. A few months after Kim’s departure, Grok was used to flood X with nonconsensual sexual imagery. Kim’s prior work at Scale AI included leading a project that produced training data for AI systems to detect harmful content.