Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture xAI urged a California federal judge Tuesday to reconsider her tentative decision to dismiss its lawsuit accusing OpenAI of orchestrating a worker exodus to siphon off trade secrets.
At a tense hearing, xAI’s counsel argued that while individual allegations against former employees may appear fragmented, taken together they form a compelling picture — what she repeatedly called the “whole gestalt” — sufficient to sustain claims against the ChatGPT maker.
Judge Signals Skepticism
The dispute centers on the XAI OpenAI IP Theft Suit, filed in September by xAI Corp., the company behind the large language model Grok. The lawsuit alleges OpenAI embarked on a targeted hiring campaign aimed at xAI employees with access to sensitive infrastructure and proprietary code.
Those workers, according to the complaint, were involved in building xAI’s data centers and developing Grok.
Ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin indicated in a notice that she was inclined to grant OpenAI’s motion to dismiss, writing that xAI appeared to have fallen short of alleging sufficient facts showing OpenAI poached employees or misappropriated source code.
