Elon Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI has filed a lawsuit against former engineer Xuechen Li for allegedly leaking trade secrets. Li was a key member involved in the development of xAI's chatbot "Grok" and is reported to have recently moved to OpenAI.
According to a report by Reuters on the 29th (local time), xAI claimed in a lawsuit submitted to a U.S. federal court in California that Li sold about $7 million worth of its shares last month and improperly transferred company secrets. The investigation revealed that Li disposed of $2.2 million worth of remaining shares shortly after July 25 and copied internal information to a personal storage device, attempting to erase traces by renaming files, compressing and uploading them, and deleting browser history.
The company warned that if this information were to end up at OpenAI, it could be used to add "more innovative and imaginative features" to ChatGPT.
Separately, Musk's xAI filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI in a Texas federal court earlier this month. In the filing, xAI claimed that "the agreement between Apple and OpenAI has established ChatGPT as the default and only primary integrated generative AI on the iPhone, granting OpenAI exclusive access rights."
Apple and OpenAI entered into an agreement last year to integrate ChatGPT into Siri, writing, and camera functionalities. In response, an OpenAI spokesperson countered, "This lawsuit aligns with the pattern of harassment that Musk has continued."