Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign was based on a warning that automation and AI would hollow out the labor market and concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. At the time, ideas like Universal Basic Income felt fringe. Now Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Bernie Sanders are all saying versions of the same thing. 

An entrepreneur at heart, Yang has found a new way to put money back into the hands of the people — one phone bill at a time. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks to Yang about his startup Noble Mobile, which pays you to use your phone less, ways to combat the “attention economy,” and what startups can do when the government won’t move. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

A former engineer at Elon Musk’s xAI has filed suit against the company and its parent SpaceX claiming he was fired for raising concerns about AI safety.

Devin Kim, who left xAI in September 2025, filed the suit in a California state court on Tuesday. The complaint comes days before SpaceX is set to join the public markets in what’s shaping up to be the largest IPO in history.

According to the lawsuit, which TechCrunch has viewed, Kim became a prominent voice for AI safety while working on Grok, xAI’s AI chatbot. He allegedly complained repeatedly about xAI’s failure to prioritize safety in Grok’s development, a product that has since come under fire for a range of safety and behavioral issues. In particular, Kim was concerned with the possibility that Grok could foment discrimination and help spread information about weapons of mass destruction.

“Grok, of course, proved Mr. Kim right by engaging in spectacular displays of online hatred and vitriol, with the model likening itself to Hitler (‘MechaHitler’),” the lawsuit reads. “Following the Hitler debacle, Mr. Kim worked to re-evaluate Grok’s political bias and discriminatory tendencies.”

A few months after Kim departed xAI, Grok made headlines again when the chatbot was used to flood X — Musk’s social media platform that also falls under the xAI umbrella — with nonconsensual sexual imagery.

The lawsuit also positions Kim as a whistleblower who was concerned about xAI’s alleged disregard for AI safety as “unlawful” in areas such as internet regulation, consumer protection and unfair business practices, and arms and explosives regulation, among others. 

xAI and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

Kim’s focus on AI safety predates his time at xAI. While working at Scale AI, Kim worked on early safety AI initiatives, like leading a project that produced training data for AI to train systems to detect harmful content and comply with governance policies. Last week, the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, which focuses on AI risks, named Kim as its president.

Interestingly, the lawsuit doesn’t implicate Musk himself as a reason for a lack of safety. Rather, Kim’s lawyers describe Musk as having directed xAI to follow the law and implement appropriate safety and testing processes. Instead the claim targets Kim’s supervisor, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba — who left the company earlier this year — saying that Ba ignored Musk’s directives and retaliated against Kim for pushing for safeguards, in an effort to “silence his repeated complaints about AI safety and biases.”

The lawsuit portrays Ba as someone who vehemently opposed AI safety measures, allegedly telling Kim at one point “AI will kill us all anyway,” and who was instead driven by a mission to make xAI the first to reach superintelligence. 

“In one instance in or around August 2025, Mr. Ba attempted to thwart EU safety regulations during the release of Grok Code 1, misrepresenting aspects of the model in order to avoid legally required testing,” the complaint says. “Mr. Ba indicated that he would rather release an unsafe model than a poor-performing one. Mr. Musk ultimately had to intervene.”

According to the lawsuit, Kim intended to give a presentation of his findings the week of September 15, 2025, but Ba called him into a meeting and told him they should “go [their] separate ways” without providing a satisfactory reason. 

TechCrunch has reached out to Ba for comment. 

Kim is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, as well as a declaratory judgment that xAI and SpaceX’s conduct was unlawful.

If founders and other business leaders weren’t already envious of Dario Amodei, who sits atop one of the world’s fastest-growing AI companies — currently valued by private market investors at roughly the trillion-dollar mark little more than five years after it was founded — they’re going to be seriously envious now.

In a new sit-down with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, he reveals he has just one direct report; that’s his chief of staff. Everyone else on Anthropic’s executive team reports to his sister, co-founder and President Daniela Amodei, who handles day-to-day operations.

Anyone who has managed a large team knows that the people side of the job has a way of consuming everything else. Amodei’s arrangement frees him to focus almost entirely on strategy, culture, research direction, and sweeping essays on the future of civilization (with footnotes). “It’s incredibly freeing,” he tells Chang.

It’s a highly unusual structure. OpenAI’s Sam Altman reportedly has around half a dozen direct reports, which is far more standard, while Nvidia’s Jensen Huang — another extreme outlier — has many dozens.