xAI laid off 500 employees (one-third of its 1,500-person data annotation team) on September 13, 2025. Internal emails announced an immediate "strategic pivot" away from general annotators toward specialist AI tutors. The layoffs followed the abrupt departures of CFO Mike Liberatore in July 2025 and co-founder Igor Babuschkin in August 2025.
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OpenAI and Anthropic researchers publicly called xAI's safety culture "reckless" and "completely irresponsible." xAI launched Grok 4 without safety testing documentation. SaferAI ranked xAI poorly for "very weak" risk management. A former employee stated "safety is a dead org at xAI."
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xAI — AI Ethics: OPPOSED OpenAI and Anthropic researchers publicly called xAI's safety culture "reckless" and "completely irresponsible." xAI launched Grok 4 without safety testing documentation. SaferA… https://reciepts.tech/stance/1140
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See all →X automatically enabled a setting allowing xAI to train Grok on users' posts without consent, affecting 60+ million EU users. Ireland's DPC opened a formal inquiry in April 2025. X agreed to delete EU user data collected between May 7–August 1, 2024, after regulators in eight countries took formal action. X's January 2026 terms expanded "Content" to include Grok prompts and outputs.