Background
xAI alleges that OpenAI engaged in willful misappropriation of xAI confidential information and trade secrets by targeting and recruiting key xAI employees and using them, directly or indirectly, to obtain sensitive technical and operational information. The First Amended Complaint pleads a federal claim under the Defend Trade Secrets Act and a California unfair competition claim, framed around alleged acquisition and attempted use of code, training and infrastructure materials, and data-centre operational know how.
AI Interaction
The pleadings describe xAI’s claimed trade secret scope in AI terms, including model weights, training data, tuning methods, and related know how. xAI alleges that a former engineer stored a copy of xAI’s codebase in personal cloud storage and had a personal ChatGPT account connected as a ‘Source’, which under the cited terms could ‘[s]ee and download’ files, and that this created a means for access via ChatGPT. xAI also alleges exfiltration of training and infrastructure code used to train and deploy Grok models, access to experimental folders reflecting future research directions, and removal of an internal all hands recording containing nonpublic plans and targets.
Notes
Last filing shown in your docket note is 20 January 2026, reply in support of motion to dismiss [#66].