recently, according to foreign media the information, elon musk's artificial intelligence company xai has officially filed a lawsuit against openai, accusing it of obtaining trade secrets through systematic poaching. the lawsuit documents show that openai is accused of poaching eight of xai's core employees, including former chief financial officer mike liberatore and several engineers, constituting an "organized commercial espionage plan".
xai detailed the list of poached employees in the lawsuit, including engineer xuechen li, who was sued separately last month, and key technical personnel such as former infrastructure director uday raddurraju. the documents specifically point out that these departed employees mastered xai's core algorithms and research and development data, and their collective job-hopping clearly had the intention of transferring technology. it's worth noting that although the documents don't directly mention liberatore, they include screenshots of his email exchanges with xai's lawyers before his departure in july, showing that the executive used vulgar language in response when accused of violating the confidentiality agreement.
this lawsuit reveals the increasingly fierce competition for talent in the ai industry. liberatore's resume shows that he joined openai in september, just three months after his departure from xai, and this rapid job-hopping pattern after a short tenure is seen by xai as evidence of malicious poaching. at present, openai has not made any public comments on the matter, but legal experts point out that if xai can prove systematic technology transfer behavior, it may be able to obtain high compensation.
