US judge dismisses Musk’s xAI trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI

The lawsuit originally filed in September focused on broader alleged misappropriation of confidential information.A United States federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s Artificial Intelligence company xAI that accused rival Sam Altman’s OpenAI of stealing trade secrets for chatbots.US District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco said on Monday that xAI failed to show that OpenAI induced former xAI senior engineer Xuechen Li to divulge confidential information related to its Grok chatbot, or that OpenAI engineers knew Li might have disclosed any.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4UK announces social media ban for under-16slist 2 of 4Does the G7 still shape the global economy?list 3 of 4As deal is agreed with US, not all in Iran are convinced that peace is herelist 4 of 4Preview: France kicks off World Cup campaign with tricky match vs Senegalend of listLin dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, saying it would be “futile” to continue. She dismissed an earlier version in February. The lawsuit originally filed last September focused on broader alleged misappropriation of confidential information, including source code, by xAI employees who left for jobs at OpenAI.Monday’s decision is Musk’s second legal loss against OpenAI in four weeks.On May 18, a federal jury ruled against Musk, the world’s richest person, in his $150bn lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Altman of “stealing a charity” by betraying the company’s original mission as a nonprofit to enrich themselves.The xAI business is part of Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI company SpaceX.Lawyers for xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. OpenAI and its lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests.Discussing past workThe amended complaint focused on a presentation that Li gave while OpenAI was recruiting him.Musk’s company said OpenAI wanted secrets related to the July 2025 release of Grok 4, knowing its forthcoming update to ChatGPT “could not compete” on complex reasoning, and because OpenAI was “lagging” in reinforcement learning and post-training techniques that Li understood.