At least nine engineers, including two co-founders, have publicly announced their departure from xAI in the past week. However, two of them appear to have left the company a few weeks ago.
Neither xAI nor Elon Musk have publicly commented on their departure.
Attrition is common in startups, but co-founders leaving are not that common. The fact that more than half of xAI’s founding team left and was replaced by several employees within days has increased scrutiny of the company’s stability.
Three of the departing staff members say they will start something new with other former xAI engineers, but details about the new venture have not been disclosed. Others point to the expected productivity gains of AI, hinting at the need for more autonomy and smaller teams to develop cutting-edge technology faster.
Yuhai (Tony) Wu, co-founder and head of inference at xAI, said in a post announcing his resignation: “It’s time to move on to the next chapter. A time of possibilities. A small team armed with AI can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”
Shayan Salehian, who worked on xAI’s post-training product infrastructure and model behavior and previously worked at Twitter/X, said last week he was leaving to “start something new.”
Valid Kazemi, who worked on machine learning for a short time, posted on Tuesday that he was leaving a few weeks ago, adding, “IMO, all the AI labs are building the exact same thing and it’s boring… so I’m starting something new.” Former xAI engineer Roland Gavrilescu, who left in November to start Nuraline, a company that builds “forward-deployed AI agents,” posted again on Tuesday that he was leaving to build “something new with another company that left xAI.”
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The departure comes at a moment of significant controversy for xAI. Grok is facing regulatory scrutiny after it created explicit deepfakes of non-consensual women and children that were distributed on X. French authorities raided X’s offices last week as part of the investigation. The company is also moving toward an IPO scheduled for later this year after being legally acquired by SpaceX last week.
Musk has also faced personal controversy, with files released by the Justice Department recording lengthy conversations with convicted rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The emails show Musk discussing two separate visits to Epstein’s island in 2012 and 2013. Epstein was first convicted in 2008 for recruiting children for prostitution.
xAI maintains a workforce of over 1,000 people, so the departures are unlikely to impact the company’s short-term capabilities. Still, the recent pace of departures has taken on a life of its own online, with users jokingly announcing they too are leaving xAI, even though they’ve never worked there. This is a sign that the “mass exodus” narrative is rapidly snowballing around Musk’s X.
Still, it’s hard to dismiss co-founder departures as routine churn. Their departures raise broader questions about xAI’s governance and long-term stability as Musk continues to ramp up his AI ambitions. In frontier AI, where talent is scarce, qualities such as reputation weight and mission clarity are important. The more pressing question may not be how many engineers have left, but whether xAI can maintain the organizational stability needed to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
TechCrunch has reached out to xAI for more information.
Departure announcement timeline:
The following employees have publicly announced their departure from xAI on X in recent days.
February 6th: Engineer Ayush Jaiswal writes, “This was my last week at xAI. I’ll be spending a few months with my family and tinkering with the AI.”
February 7th: Shayan Salehian, who works on post-training product infrastructure and model behavior and was previously at X, writes: “I left xAI to start something new, and I closed out my seven-plus years at Twitter, X, and xAI with tremendous gratitude.” He added that working closely with Elon Musk taught him “obsessive attention to detail, insane urgency, and thinking from first principles.”
February 9: Simon Zhai, MTS (Member of Technical Staff) wrote, “Today is my last day at xAI. I feel very lucky to have this opportunity. It’s been an amazing journey.”
February 10: Co-founder and Head of Theory Yuhai (Tony) Wu writes: “I have resigned. It’s time to move on to the next chapter. This is a time of possibilities. A small team armed with AI can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”
February 10th: Co-founder and Head of Research/Safety Jimmy Ba writes: “Last day at xAI… We are heading into an era of 100x productivity with the right tools. Recursive self-improvement loops could be up and running within the next 12 months. Time to recalibrate my slope in the big picture. 2026 is insane and probably the busiest for our future. (and most important) year.” ”
February 10: Vahid Kazemi, ML PhD, writes that he left xAI “a few weeks ago,” adding, “IMO, all the 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 10th: Hang Gao, who worked on multimodal initiatives including Grok Imagine, wrote, “I quit xAI today.” He called his time there “really rewarding,” citing his contributions to the release of Grok Imagine and praising the team’s “humble craftsmanship and ambitious vision.”
February 10th: Roland Gavrilescu, an engineer who left in November to start Nuraline, posted: “I left xAI. I’m building something new with others who left xAI. We’re hiring :).”
February 10: Macrohard founding team member Chance Lee writes, “We’re going back to the frontier after a bit of a reset.” (Macrohard is an AI-only software venture under xAI that is designed to fully automate software development, coding, and operations using a multi-agent system powered by Grok. Its name is Microsoft.)
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