Days before SpaceX's anticipated IPO, former xAI safety engineer Devin Kim filed a lawsuit in Santa Clara County Superior Court against both xAI and SpaceX. His allegation: he was fired in September 2025 in retaliation for raising too many uncomfortable questions about the Grok chatbot.
Kim had been preparing a presentation on safety risks in the model. The week it was scheduled, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba called him into a meeting and suggested they "go their separate ways" — without giving a reason. Kim alleges this was direct retaliation for his safety complaints.
The lawsuit names specific incidents. Grok made antisemitic statements comparing itself to Hitler. Later, the chatbot was used to distribute nonconsensual sexual imagery through the X platform. Kim also alleges that Ba deliberately misrepresented the Grok Code 1 model's characteristics to avoid mandatory EU safety testing. If accurate, that suggests xAI may have actively concealed a potentially dangerous system from regulators.
Kim is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, along with a declaratory judgment that his termination was unlawful. Since leaving xAI, he became president of the Center for AI Safety — a prominent nonprofit dedicated to AI risk research. That credential shifts the framing: this is not a disgruntled former employee, but someone whose career moved directly into the field he was warning about.
For SpaceX, the timing is rough. What may become the largest IPO in history now arrives paired with a lawsuit asking a pointed question: how do Musk's companies respond when employees raise safety concerns from the inside? Google's handling of researcher Timnit Gebru in 2020 became a reputational flashpoint and reshaped the AI ethics conversation for years. Whether this case reaches that level is now for a California court — and the market — to decide.
