Elon Musk’s xAI has filed a lawsuit accusing former employee Xuechen Li, which the suit describes as a “Chinese national,” of stealing confidential information and trade secrets before resigning to join rival company OpenAI. Musk has been a long-time champion of H-1B visas and bringing in engineers from China and India, claiming they have talent that Americans lack.
Reuters reports that Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has filed a federal lawsuit against former employee Xuechen Li, alleging that he stole proprietary trade secrets before leaving to join competitor OpenAI. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday, claims that Li, a “Chinese national” and Stanford-trained researcher, “willfully and maliciously” copied confidential documents from his xAI-issued laptop onto his personal system on the same day he received approximately $7 million in cash from the company.
According to the lawsuit, the trade secrets allegedly stolen by Li include “cutting-edge AI technologies with features superior to those offered by ChatGPT and other competing products.” xAI claims that these stolen technologies could save OpenAI and other competitors billions of dollars in research and development costs and years of effort.
Li, a Chinese national residing in Mountain View, California, earned his doctorate in computer science from Stanford University and joined xAI in early 2024. As one of the roughly 20 early engineers working on xAI’s proprietary Grok model, Li had extensive access to the company’s confidential information.
The lawsuit alleges that Li took extensive measures to conceal his misconduct, including deleting his browser history and system logs, renaming files, and compressing them before uploading them to his personal system. xAI claims that Li admitted, both in a handwritten document and verbally, to misappropriating the company’s confidential information and attempting to hide his theft.
Three days after allegedly uploading xAI’s data to his personal system and receiving millions in cash from the company in what has been described as a sale of his equity stake, Li resigned from xAI on July 28. The lawsuit claims that prior to his resignation, Li had accepted an offer to join OpenAI with a start date of August 19.
After resigning, Li signed a document stating that he had returned company property, deleted any copies, and would keep information confidential. However, xAI alleges that these statements were false. Musk is asking for a restraining order to prevent Li from working for OpenAI until the trade secret issues have been resolved.
Musk’s rabid support for foreign workers led to the first cracks his association with the MAGA movement, long before his complete betrayal of President Trump.
As Breitbart News previously reported:
Musk is a vehement supporter of the H1-B visa program.
One X user on Friday stated, “Let’s optimize H1-B,” a reference to Musk’s belief that things that should not exist should not be optimized.
“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” Musk raged in response to the X user. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Musk’s comment is a paraphrase of a line from the 2008 comedy film Tropic Thunder.
This is not the first incendiary comment Musk has made during the contentious online debate about the H1-B visa.
He accused many users who are critical of the visa program of racism and said that these “contemptible fools” must be removed from the Republican Party, although he later emphasized that he was specifically referring to the “hateful, unrepentant racists”:
Read more at Reuters here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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