Former xAI engineer Devin Kim testified Friday before the New York City Council that the company launched models “without” safeguards after he raised concerns that Grok could “assist people with the creation of bombs and bioweapons.”
Kim, who filed a lawsuit this year alleging “he was fired in retaliation for repeatedly warning company leaders about AI safety and other risks associated with Grok,” according to law firm Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight, told a hearing that he started raising the concerns in January 2025.
“I asked for proper bio risk safeguards,” he said. “My supervisor responded that AI safety was useless and that AI would kill us all anyways. We launched models without those safeguards, despite warnings from me and many other trusted employees.
“In August 2025, my supervisor pressured employees to circumvent European safety regulations. In September 2025, he fired me, the same week I was scheduled to present my safety findings to leadership, and most of the safety team resigned after that,” Kim added.
“When a model is unsafe, the first people to know are the employees inside the company. We see it in the evaluations and leadership decisions months before anyone else finds out,” Kim also said.
SpaceX’s senior manager of global government affairs Gabriela Castillo Madrid, when asked earlier about Kim’s firing, said “I’m not aware with that specific case.
“What I will say is safety is at the core of everything we do, and we take safety very seriously. And everybody has an ability to say something when they see something,” she added. “We have even for, before a launch, we everybody receives an email from leadership saying, if you have any reason to believe there’s a safety concern, please let us know and we’ll delay anything that’s happening. So, like I said, we take safety very seriously, and we’ll delay any release of a model.”
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