Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has accused rival OpenAI of stealing its trade secrets in a new lawsuit, the latest in Musk’s legal assault on his former business partner, Sam Altman.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in California federal court, alleged that OpenAI was engaged in a “deeply troubling pattern” of hiring away former xAI employees to gain access to trade secrets related to its AI chatbot Grok. The company says OpenAI is pursuing unfair advantages in the race to develop AI technology.
“OpenAI is targeting those individuals with knowledge of xAI’s key technologies and business plans, including xAI’s source code and its operational advantages in launching data centers, then inducing those employees to breach their confidentiality and other obligations to xAI through unlawful means,” the lawsuit states.
Musk and xAI have launched numerous lawsuits against OpenAI in recent years as part of a longstanding feud between Altman and Musk. The relationship between the two has grown increasingly hostile as Altman and OpenAI’s power in the tech industry has grown, with Musk previously attempting to block the AI startup’s plans to convert to a for-profit enterprise.
xAI’s latest complaint claims it discovered the alleged campaign to undermine the company while investigating allegations of trade secret theft against former engineer Xuechen Li, whom it has individually accused of taking confidential information to the ChatGPT maker in a separate lawsuit. Li has not yet responded to the allegations.
OpenAI rejected xAI’s allegations and characterized the suit as part of Musk’s attacks against the company.
“This new lawsuit is the latest chapter in Mr Musk’s ongoing harassment. We have no tolerance for any breaches of confidentiality, nor any interest in trade secrets from other labs,” an OpenAI spokesperson said.
According to the complaint, OpenAI hired away former company engineer Jimmy Fraiture and an unnamed senior finance executive in addition to Li in order to obtain xAI trade secrets.
The lawsuit also included a screenshot of an email sent in July by Alex Spiro, Musk and xAI’s lawyer, to a former xAI executive accusing them of breaching their confidentiality obligations. The former employee, whose name is redacted in the screenshot, responded to Spiro with a one-line email that said “suck my dick”.
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Before becoming OpenAI’s legal nemesis, Musk co-founded the company with Altman in 2015, then departed in 2018 after a failed bid for control. Musk has accused Altman of breaking a “founding agreement” that OpenAI would work for the betterment of humanity, claiming that his pivot to partner with Microsoft and seek profits negates its principles. OpenAI and Altman have said that Musk previously supported a for-profit model and is retaliating out of jealousy.
Musk, who is mired in a multitude of lawsuits both as a plaintiff and defendant, also sued OpenAI and Apple last month over accusations of anti-competitive behavior and Apple favoring ChatGPT in its app store. The suit claimed that his rivals engaged in “a conspiracy to monopolize the markets for smartphones and generative AI chatbots”.
Altman posted on X, Musk’s social network, in response: “This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like.”
xAI’s new lawsuit is part of a high-stakes competition in Silicon Valley to hire AI-related talent and gain market share in the burgeoning, multibillion-dollar industry. Companies such as Meta have thrown vast sums of money at AI researchers and executives in hopes that it will give them a competitive advantage in the race to build increasingly advanced AI models.
