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2025-09-01 12:00
The technological company XAI belonging to Elon Musk sued its former engineer from China and accused him of stealing commercial secrets and handing them over to a new employer, Opeli, standing behind the GPT cottage. In the background there is also a transaction of the sale of Muska shares for a few million dollars and the growing competition for the greatest talents in the artificial intelligence industry.
It seems that we are dealing with another espionage scandal among large corporations. Methods straight from films about Bond, to gain a competitive advantage, have been used by various companies for years. You can remind you of the Opel case (currently Stellantis), who was then belonging to General Motors, which in the 90s of the last century accused Volkswagen of industrial espionage or the situation with a former employee of Lockheed Martin, who was to transfer Boeing in 2003 to 25,000 confidential documents.
F1 fans probably remember, as in 2007 a spy scandal broke out, when Mike Coughlan from McLaren, received from Nigel Stepney from Ferrari complete technical documentation of the Ferrari car, covering about 780 pages of confidential data. The case was enrolled as the largest scandal in the history of F1 related to the violation of the Team's technical secrets, and McLaren was punished with a record fine of $ 100 million and excluded from the classification of constructors of the 2007 season.
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We now have another installment of the fight between the largest companies in the artificial intelligence industry. According to Reuters belonging to Elon Musk, Xai sued his former engineer, Xuechen Li and accused him of the alleged theft of trade secrets related to Chatbot Grok, regarding “modern artificial technologies of artificial intelligence technologies about functions exceeding those offered by chatgpt” and transferring them to the competitive OPENAI company.
The company XAI claims that Li copied key files from the company laptop regarding their artificial intelligence model, and then moved them to private devices. According to the claim filed in court, Li wanted to hide theft by changing the file name, data compression and deleting browsing history.
What's more, Xuechen Li suddenly left Xai three days after the sale of his employee shares (XAI received as part of the remuneration) with a total value of about $ 7 million (in two tranches 23 and 25 July), accepting the job at Opennai with the date of starting work on August 19.
According to Bloomberg, during the confrontation, Li confessed in writing in the presence of a lawyer that he stole the data and tried to erase traces. Later, it turned out that his devices found more stolen files, which he did not inform during the confrontation. The theft in XAI was discovered on August 11 during a routine review of security software logos. Muska asked the court for compensation and the order to suspend Li to OpenAI.
The lawsuit emphasized the importance of the stolen data in the “race for dominance on the artificial intelligence market”, claiming that this technology will be worth hundreds of billion dollars this year and will exceed a trillion of dollars to the end of the decade. This is another dirty edition of the struggle to gain an advantage in the artificial intellectual industry, after the finish line was to offer astronomical salaries for OpenAi engineers to convince them to move to a company controlled by Marek Zuckerberg.
According to the claim, which Bloomberg reached, from China, Xuechen Li obtained a doctorate in computer science in 2024 at the US at Stanford University. In February of the same year, he joined XAI, as a member of the pioneering group of about 20 engineers, who began to develop and train Grok, a model of artificial intelligence, which is a response to the OPENAI GPT chat, which was launched in 2022.
Michał Kubicki
