Everyone’s job is safety: Elon Musk fires back at xAI exodus concerns
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Elon Musk is being criticized for ignoring safety measures after former employees reported that he dismantled the internal safety department at his xAI startup, responsible for the Grok chatbot. Only 12 of xAI’s original cofounders remain employed at the company after several of them left for various reasons, including to start their own companies and complaints of creative stagnation. Is xAI sacrificing safety to compete with OpenAI? One source who spoke to The Verge claimed that xAI’s safety team has been effectively dissolved, saying “Safety is a dead org at xAI.” According to reports, there’s been a push for “unfiltered” content, leading to a focus on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) capabilities for the Grok AI. Former staffers allege that Musk views safety measures as a form of “censorship.” They claim that engineers are encouraged to “push to production” immediately, sometimes bypassing traditional testing phases. This culture has reportedly led to internal friction between leadership, causing them to clash often over product priorities in large group chats on the X platform. Musk argued on X that “everyone’s job is safety.” Using Tesla and SpaceX as examples, he said that neither company has a massive, independent safety department, yet they produce the safest cars and rockets in the world. To Musk, separate safety departments are often “fake” and exist only to “assuage the concerns of outsiders” without having any real power to improve the product. In Musk’s ongoing legal battle with OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, he has frequently criticized OpenAI for becoming a closed-source for-profit company that prioritizes profit over safety, but he is being accused of doing the same by removing the internal checks and balances that prevent AI from generating harmful or biased content. Frequent hiring at xAI Following the recent announcement of a merger between xAI…
Filed under: News - @ February 14, 2026 11:16 pm