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.

“It’s time for my next chapter,” Yuhai (Tony) Wu, xAI’s co-founder and head of inference, said in a post announcing his resignation: “It’s time for my next chapter. It’s an era filled with full potential: a small team armed with AI can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”

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

Saleh Kazemi, who had a brief stint working on machine learning, posted on Tuesday that 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 – French authorities last week raided X’s 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. 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 more than 1,000 employees, so 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: “This was my last week at xAI. I’m taking a few months to spend time with family and play around with the AI,” engineer Aayush Jaiswal wrote.

February 7: “I left xAI to start something new, and I’m ending my 7+ year career at Twitter, He added that working closely with Elon Musk taught him “obsessive attention to detail, obsessive urgency, and thinking from first principles.”

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

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

February 10: “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,” wrote Jamie Ba, co-founder and head of research/safety.

February 10: Vahid Kazemi, 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: “I left xAI today,” wrote Hang Zhao, who has worked on cross-media efforts including Grok Imagine. 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: “I’ve left xAI. I’m building something new with others who left xAI. We’re hiring :),” posted Roland Gavrilesco, an engineer who left in November to start Nuraline.

February 10: “Do a quick reset and then go back to the limits,” wrote Chance Lee, a member of the founding Macrohard 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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