SpaceX went public on Friday and raised around $75 billion – making co-founder and CEO Elon Musk the first trillionaire in history. However, the success is overshadowed by a series of negative news: As Reuters reports, a former xAI engineer has filed a lawsuit against his ex-employer. He claims he was fired because he raised concerns about AI-related security risks.
Former employee makes allegations
According to the lawsuit, Devin Kim is said to have been one of the first employees of the AI startup xAI in 2024. Shortly after joining, he was promoted to an important management position. As The Guardian reports, according to Kim, Elon Musk expected that appropriate security precautions would be taken. However, his boss, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, is said to have ignored these instructions and rejected Kim’s demands for security measures. In September of last year, the engineer was suddenly fired – allegedly shortly before he was supposed to give a lecture on the subject of AI security to company management.
The lawsuit states: “Mr. Kim repeatedly complained that xAI’s failure to prioritize AI safety, particularly with regard to Grok, virtually guaranteed that the company would commit unlawful acts, from inciting discrimination to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” The lawsuit accuses xAI, now owned by SpaceX, of retaliation and wrongful discharge in violation of California law and seeks unspecified damages. Both companies have not responded to requests for comment, according to The Guardian.
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Deepfakes have consequences
On the day the lawsuit was filed, a Canadian regulator also found that Grok’s image generation tool had violated the country’s privacy laws by allowing users to create non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes, according to The Guardian. This function caused a global scandal at the beginning of the year. According to a study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, around three million sexualized images were created in just eleven days, including around 23,000 depictions of children.
Following a formal investigation by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, xAI announced adjustments. Malaysia and Indonesia even blocked the chatbot completely as a result of the mass deepfake generation. The AI function is now no longer available. The scandal is also expected to have consequences in Germany: Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig has presented a bill that would criminalize the creation and distribution of intimate content and the violation of personal rights through deceptively real deepfakes.
Kim continues to advocate for AI safety
As Techcrunch reports, Kim’s commitment to AI security didn’t just start during his time at xAI. While working at Scale AI, where he was employed between 2022 and 2023, he led security initiatives, including a project to create training data to train AI systems to recognize malicious content. Additionally, the nonprofit Center for AI Safety recently named Kim its president.
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