Elon Musk defends xAI after co‑founder exits and safety team dismantling

Elon Musk has pushed back against criticism after multiple high‑profile departures and reports that xAI’s internal safety organisation was dismantled. About half of xAI’s original 12 co‑founders have left, including Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba, amid a company restructuring and merger with SpaceX that values the group at roughly $1.25 trillion. Former employees told The Verge the safety team is effectively a “dead org” and that Grok — xAI’s chatbot — is being steered toward “unfiltered” and NSFW content, with engineers encouraged to push features to production quickly, sometimes bypassing standard testing. Musk responded on X saying “everyone’s job is safety,” arguing that separate safety departments can be ineffective and pointing to Tesla and SpaceX as examples. Internal tensions and frequent hirings and departures have led some ex‑staff to start their own AI firms (one named Nuraline). xAI’s Memphis Colossus supercluster currently hosts 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs and is being expanded to 200,000 GPUs to train Grok 3, which Musk says will surpass competitors. The controversy raises questions about xAI’s safety culture, product priorities, and whether the company is prioritising speed and content permissiveness to catch up with rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.