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

At least nine engineers, including two co-founders, have now publicly announced their departure from xAI in the past week – though two of those exits appear to have occurred a few weeks ago. 

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

While attrition is typical at startups, co-founder departures are far less so. More than half of xAI’s founding team has now left, and the fact that several employees followed within days has intensified scrutiny around the company’s stability.

Three of the departing staff members say they will be starting something new alongside other former xAI engineers, although no details are available about the new venture. Others hint at a desire for more autonomy and smaller teams to build frontier tech more rapidly, pointing to the anticipated surge in AI productivity.

Yuhai (Tony) Wu, an xAI co-founder and reasoning lead, said in a post announcing his resignation: “It’s time for my next chapter. It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”

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

Valid Kazemi, who had a brief stint working on machine learning, posted Tuesday that he left a few weeks ago, adding: “IMO, all AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it’s boring…So, I’m starting something new.” Roland Gavrilescu, a former xAI engineer, left in November to start Nuraline, a company building “forward-deployed AI agents,” but posted again on Tuesday that he left the firm to build “something new with others that left xAI.”

The departures come at a moment of significant controversy for xAI. The company is facing regulatory scrutiny after Grok created nonconsensual explicit deepfakes of women and children which were disseminated on X – French authorities last week raided X offices as part of an investigation. The company is also moving towards a planned IPO later this year, after being legally acquired by SpaceX last week.

Musk is also facing personal controversy after files published by the Justice Department show extended conversations with convicted rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The emails show Musk 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 over 1,000 employees, so the departures are unlikely to affect the companies short-term capabilities. Still, the rapid pace of the recent departures has taken on a life of their own online, with users jokingly announcing they too are “leaving xAI” despite never having worked there — a sign of how quickly the narrative of a “mass exodus” has snowballed on Musk’s X.

Still, co-founder exits are harder to dismiss as routine churn. As Musk continues to consolidate his AI ambitions, their departures raise broader questions about governance and long-term stability at xAI. In frontier AI, where talent is scarce, qualities like reputational gravity and mission clarity matter. The more pressing question may not be how many engineers have left, but whether xAI can maintain the institutional steadiness needed to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. 

TechCrunch has reached out to xAI for more information.

Timeline of departure announcements:

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

February 6:  Ayush Jaiswal, engineer, wrote: “This was my last week at xAI. Will be taking a few months to spend time with family & tinker with AI.”

February 7: Shayan Salehian, who worked on product infrastructure and model behavior post-training and was previously at X, wrote: “I left xAI to start something new, closing my 7+ year chapter working at Twitter, X, and xAI with so much gratitude.” He added that working closely with Elon Musk taught him “obsessive attention to detail, maniacal urgency, and to think from first principles.”

February 9: Simon Zhai, MTS (member of technical staff), wrote: “Today is my last day at xAI, feeling very fortunate about the opportunity. It has been an amazing journey.”

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

February 10: Jimmy Ba, co-founder and research/safety lead, wrote: “Last day at xAI… We are heading to an age of 100x productivity with the right tools. Recursive self improvement loops likely go live in the next 12 months. It’s time to recalibrate my gradient on the big picture. 2026 is gonna be insane and likely the busiest (and most consequential) year for the future of our species.”

February 10: Vahid Kazemi, an ML PhD, wrote that he had left xAI “a few weeks ago,” adding: “IMO, all AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it’s boring. I think there’s room for more creativity. So, I’m starting something new.”

February 10: Hang Gao, who worked on multimodal efforts including Grok Imagine, wrote: “I left xAI today.” 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 Gavrilescu, the engineer who left in November to start Nuraline, posted: “I left xAI. Building something new with others that left xAI. We’re hiring :)”

February 10: Chance Lee, a member of the Macrohard founding team, wrote: “Taking a brief reset then back to the frontier.” (Macrohard is an AI-only software venture under 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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