A U.S. court again sided with Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, in a lawsuit battle with Elon Musk, Tesla CEO.
According to Reuters on the 15th (local time), the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed xAI's trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI.
Elon Musk has argued that Li Xuechen, a senior engineer who left the artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI he led to join OpenAI, leaked secrets related to the AI model Grok chatbot, and that OpenAI induced it. He has also claimed that the leaked secrets were his company's cutting-edge AI technology with capabilities superior to those offered by OpenAI's ChatGPT.
In response, OpenAI's legal team countered, "OpenAI neither needs nor wants other people's trade secrets. Especially not xAI's secrets, given that it is failing in the market and losing talent."
Li worked at xAI in 2024 and participated in developing Grok, then joined OpenAI in 2025. To make the move, Li gave a presentation to OpenAI, and xAI claimed Li would have been instructed during this process to leak confidential information.
On this point, Judge Rita Lin explained that asking a job candidate about previous work is routine and cannot be interpreted as pressure to leak confidential information. She also ruled that proceeding with the case would be meaningless because there is no evidence OpenAI induced the leak.
On the 9th as well, Musk and Altman fought a legal battle. Musk filed a suit demanding the dismissal of CEO Altman and the return of his unjust gains, saying he suffered damages when OpenAI broke its promise to operate as a nonprofit and converted to a for-profit corporation, but he lost because the statute of limitations had expired.