Senior engineers, including co-founders, exit xAI amid controversy

At least nine engineers, including two of the founders, publicly announced their departures from xAI last week — though two of those exits appear to have occurred a few weeks ago.

Neither xAI nor Elon Musk have commented publicly on the departures.

While attrition is common in startups, co-founder departures are much less common. More than half of xAI’s founding team has now departed, and the fact that several employees followed within days has intensified scrutiny over the company’s stability.

Three of the departing employees say they will start something new alongside other former xAI engineers, though details about the new project are not available. Others point to a desire for more autonomy and smaller teams to build leading-edge technology more quickly, pointing to the expected increase in AI productivity.

Yuhai (Tony) Wu, xAI co-founder and inference leader, He said in another He announced his resignation: “It’s time for my next chapter. This is an era full of possibilities: a small team armed with artificial intelligence that can move mountains and redefine what is possible.”

Shayan Salehian, who worked on product infrastructure and modeling behavior after training xAI and previously worked at Twitter/X, He said last week He was leaving to “start something new.”

Saleh Kazemi, who spent a short period working on machine learning, Published Tuesday Which he left a few weeks ago, adding: “IMO, all the AI ​​labs are building exactly the same thing, and it’s boring…so, I’m starting something new.” Former XAI engineer Roland Gavrilesco left in November to start Nuraline, a company building “the pervasive AI agents of the future,” but he posted again on Tuesday that he was leaving the company to build “something new with others who left XAI.”

The departures come at a moment of great controversy for xAI. The company is facing regulatory scrutiny after Grok created explicit, non-consensual fake images of women and children that were posted on X – Last week, French authorities raided Area X offices as part of the investigation. The company is also headed toward a planned initial public offering later this year, after it was legally acquired by SpaceX last week.

Musk is also facing personal controversy after files released by the Justice Department showed lengthy conversations with convicted rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Musk’s emails appear Discussing a visit to Epstein’s island On two separate occasions, in 2012 and 2013. Epstein was first convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008.

xAI maintains a headcount of More than 1000 employeesSo the departures are unlikely to impact the company’s capabilities in the short term. However, the rapid pace of recent departures has taken on a character of its own online, with users jokingly declaring that they too are “leaving xAI” even though they’ve never worked there — an indication of how quickly the “mass exodus” story on Musk’s X phone is growing.

However, it is difficult to dismiss a co-founder’s exit as a routine process. As Musk continues to advance his AI ambitions, their departure raises broader questions about the governance and long-term stability of xAI. In the world of pioneering AI, where talent is scarce, qualities such as attractive reputation and clarity of mission are important. The most pressing question may not be how many engineers have left, but whether cutting-edge AI can maintain the institutional stability needed to compete with competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

TechCrunch has reached out to xAI for more information.

Timeline for departure announcements:

The following employees publicly announced their departure from xAI on X in recent days:

February 6: Aayush Jaiswal“This was my last week at xAI. I’m taking a few months to spend time with family and play around with the AI,” the engineer wrote.

February 7: Shayan Salehianwho worked on product infrastructure and modeled behavior after training and was previously at He added that working closely with Elon Musk taught him “obsessive attention to detail, obsessive urgency, and thinking from first principles.”

February 9: Simon ChaiMTS (Technical Staff Member) wrote: “Today is my last day at xAI, and I feel very lucky with this opportunity. It has been an amazing journey.”

February 10: Yuhai (Tony) Wu“I’ve resigned. It’s time for my next chapter. It’s an era full of possibilities: a small team armed with AI can move mountains and redefine what’s possible,” the co-founder and Head of Inference wrote.

February 10: Jimmy BaThe co-founder and head of research/safety wrote: “Last day in xAI… We are heading into an era of 100x productivity with the right tools. Iterative self-improvement loops will likely come into play in the next 12 months. It’s time to recalibrate my progression on the big picture. 2026 is going to be crazy and likely the busiest (and most important) year for the future of our species.”

February 10: Wahid Al-KazemiHe, who has a PhD in machine learning, wrote that he left xAI “a few weeks ago,” adding: “IMO, all AI labs are building exactly the same thing, and it’s boring. I think there’s room for more creativity. So, I’m starting something new.”

February 10: Hang Gao“I left xAI today,” he, who has worked on multimedia efforts including Grok Imagine, wrote. He described his time there as “truly rewarding”, citing contributions to Grok Imagine’s releases and praising the team’s “humble craftsmanship and ambitious vision”.

February 10: Roland Gavrilescuthe engineer who left in November to start Nuraline posted: “I’ve left xAI. I’m building something new with others who left xAI. We’re hiring :)”

February 10: Chance Lee, “Do a quick reset and then go back to the limits,” wrote a member of Macrohard’s founding team. (MacroHard is an AI-only software project within XAI, designed to fully automate software development, coding, and operations using Grok-powered multi-agent systems. Its name is a dig at Microsoft.)

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