A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, accusing rival OpenAI of stealing trade secrets related to its Grok chatbot, marking the billionaire’s second courtroom loss against OpenAI in less than a month.U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, ruled that xAI failed to demonstrate that OpenAI improperly obtained confidential information from former xAI engineer Xuechen Li during a recruitment process, according to a series of court filings added to the docket Monday.Lin dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning the claims cannot be refiled, concluding that further amendments would be “futile.”
The lawsuit, originally filed in September, accused OpenAI of misappropriating confidential information from departing xAI employees. After Lin dismissed an earlier version of the complaint in February, xAI narrowed its allegations to focus on a presentation Li gave while OpenAI was attempting to recruit him.
According to xAI, OpenAI sought information about the development of Grok 4, arguing that OpenAI’s forthcoming ChatGPT updates were struggling to compete with Grok’s capabilities in advanced reasoning and reinforcement learning techniques.
