Musk Admits xAI Used OpenAI Model Outputs to Train Grok
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015, with Musk contributing about $38 million before leaving in 2018. In 2024, he sued OpenAI, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, alleging that the company had abandoned its public-interest mission and seeking the return of $134 billion in benefits to the nonprofit entity. His position in the lawsuit has faced scrutiny because xAI is also a competitor.
On April 30, 2026, the third day of trial in a California federal court, Musk acknowledged under cross-examination that xAI had “partially” distilled outputs from OpenAI models when training Grok. He said the practice was common across the AI industry. Musk also ranked Anthropic as the world’s strongest AI company, ahead of OpenAI, Google and Chinese open-source models, and said xAI had only several hundred employees.
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The history behind this eventSpaceX Starlink Engineer Joins xAI to Lead Grok Model Training
Elon Musk founded xAI in 2023 to compete with OpenAI and other companies through Grok. SpaceX announced its acquisition of xAI on February 2, 2026, without disclosing the deal’s value, while Tesla separately invested $2 billion. The transfer of a Starlink technical leader across Musk’s businesses underscores how model training and data quality have become central priorities following the integration.
On June 9, 2026, several media outlets cited an internal memo saying Jack Garabedian, who joined SpaceX in 2021 and previously worked as a Starlink engineer, had taken charge of xAI’s Human Data team, replacing Diego Pasini. He will manage hundreds of experts who train Grok in fields including finance and science. The people involved and the two companies have not responded.
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