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.

Opendoor, the San Francisco-based online home-buying platform, is shutting down its India operations less than two years after expanding its presence in the country. The decision has become a flashpoint in the debate over whether AI is starting to alter the economics of offshore work.

In announcing the decision on Wednesday, CEO Kaz Nejatian cited a push to bring operational work back to the U.S., where Opendoor’s customers are, and a shift toward smaller AI-native teams. The company did not respond to requests for comment on how many employees were affected or how much of the decision was driven by AI efficiency. But the announcement quickly gained traction across Silicon Valley, where founders, investors, and outsourcing experts see it as an early example of how AI is reshaping the economics that made India a global hub for back-office operations.

To understand why they care, it helps to know what’s at stake for India. It has evolved far beyond its roots as a destination for outsourced back-office work. The country is now the world’s largest Global Capability Center market — a term for dedicated offshore units multinationals set up to handle everything from IT and finance to R&D — with more than 2,100 centers employing about 2.36 million people and generating nearly $100 billion in annual revenue.

Opendoor itself had built a large team in India to handle manual workflows across fragmented systems, Nejatian said. The company had nearly 250 employees in India when it opened offices in Chennai and Bengaluru in 2024. But the entire company has been scaling back in recent years. Securities filings show Opendoor employed 1,042 people globally at the end of last year, compared with 1,470 a year earlier. Similarly, its non-U.S. workforce declined to 184 employees at the end of last year, compared with 342 employees at the end of 2024.

Those broader workforce reductions make it difficult to view the India closure solely through the lens of outsourcing. Opendoor has been cutting costs across the business after a difficult period for the U.S. housing market that hit online home-buying companies especially hard. Still, the language Nejatian used to explain the move resonated with investors and outsourcing analysts who see AI reshaping how companies organize operational work.

Some investors viewed the decision as a sign of what AI could mean for India’s vast outsourcing workforce. “As manual work gets replaced by AI, a lot of jobs will be lost in India,” wrote Sheel Mohnot, co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures.

Others viewed Opendoor as evidence of a larger shift in how companies are organized. Keshav Lohia, a venture capitalist at Emergent Ventures, described the decision as a “watershed moment” for AI-driven operations, arguing that advances in AI are beginning to challenge the cost-arbitrage model that made India a popular offshoring destination.

Phil Fersht, chief executive of HFS Research, an advisory firm that tracks the global outsourcing and business services industry, told TechCrunch that the development should not be viewed simply as jobs moving from India to the U.S. The more important shift, he said, is that AI is reducing the amount of operational labor companies require in the first place, allowing firms to run leaner organizations regardless of location.

“This is not an isolated restructuring,” Fersht said. “It is part of a much broader pattern we are starting to see as companies redesign operations around AI, automation, and much leaner workflows.”

Fersht argued that the winners would be companies that combine AI, software and human expertise to deliver outcomes without continually adding headcount, a model he described as “Services-as-Software.” While Opendoor may be one of the first high-profile examples, he said it is unlikely to be the last.

Some investors are already extrapolating beyond individual companies. Varun Rekhi, a venture capitalist at Speedinvest, argued that if AI reduces demand for labor-intensive services, it could eventually pressure one of India’s most important export industries, which is built around supplying talent and expertise to global corporations.

For now, Opendoor remains a complicated case study — a company that has been cutting headcount broadly for years, and whose India exit may say as much about its own struggles as it does about the future of AI and offshore work.