The Chinese engineer also sold his $7 million xAI shares before exiting
An xAI engineer stole the entire Grok AI codebase and uploaded it to OpenAI before joining the company. The Chinese techie Xuechen Li, later offloaded his xAI shares worth $7 million. The defendant with a passport issued by the People's Republic of China (PRC) is purportedly also a permanent resident of California. The individual is now facing a lawsuit by Elon Musk's firm at the District Court, North District of California. xAI is seeking jury trial on charges ranging from 1) breach of employee confidential information, and 2) misappropriation of trade secrets, to 3) violation of computer data and access fraud act, and 4) fraud.
The complaint filed on Thursday accuses the Chinese national of stealing "cutting edge AI technologies with features superior to those offered by ChatGPT." OpenAI is not listed as a defendant in the case. However, Elon Musk has filed a separate lawsuit against the company and its CEO Sam Altman over their pivot from non-profit which got a countersuit. Musk's firm has also filed another lawsuit on OpenAI and Apple in Texas, accusing them of monopolizing the market with AI chatbots on Apple devices.
Meanwhile reacting to user's comments on the report, Elon Musk on X/Twitter quipped
Not allegedly. He downloaded the entire xAI code repo, the logs prove he did it and he admitted he did it!
Reactions poured in on the internet with netizens taking a dig at Elon Musk dropping memes. Others criticized immigration, H1B Visas and awarding jobs in sensitive departments to foreign nationals. One user remarked,
Guy is probably laughing about the lawsuit, likely living in a luxurious apartment in Shenzhen or Shanghai and almost certainly gave the code to the CCP as well, given he was a Chinese national.
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Cover: Patrick Gawande / Mashable India