The following employees have publicly announced their departures from xAI on X in recent days: February 6: Ayush Jaiswal, engineer, wrote: “This was my last week at xAI. Will be taking a few months to spend time with family & tinker with AI.” February 7: Shayan Salehian, who worked on product infrastructure and model behavior post-training and was previously at X, wrote: “I left xAI to start something new, closing my 7+ year chapter working at Twitter, X, and xAI with so much gratitude.” He added that working closely with Elon Musk taught him “obsessive attention to detail, maniacal urgency, and to think from first principles.” February 9: Simon Zhai, MTS (member of technical staff), wrote: “Today is my last day at xAI, feeling very fortunate about the opportunity. It has been an amazing journey.” February 9: Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, co-founder and reasoning lead, wrote: “I resigned from xAI today. It’s time for my next chapter. It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.” February 10: Jimmy Ba, co-founder and research/safety lead, wrote: “Last day at xAI. We are heading to an age of 100x productivity with the right tools. Recursive self improvement loops likely go live in the next 12 months. It’s time to recalibrate my gradient on the big picture. 2026 is gonna be insane and likely the busiest (and most consequential) year for the future of our species.” February 10: Vahid Kazemi, an ML PhD, wrote that he had left xAI “a few weeks ago,” adding: “IMO, all 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 10: Hang Gao, who worked on multimodal efforts, including Grok Imagine, wrote: “I left xAI today.” He described his time there as “truly rewarding,” citing contributions to Grok Imagine’s releases and praising the team’s “humble craftsmanship and ambitious vision.” February 10: Roland Gavrilescu, the engineer who left in November to start Nuraline, posted: “I left xAI. Building something new with others that left xAI. We’re hiring :)” February 10: Chace Lee, a member of the Macrohard founding team, wrote: “Taking a brief reset, then back to the frontier.” (Macrohard is an AI-only software venture under xAI designed to fully automate software development, coding, and operations using Grok-powered, multi-agent systems. Its name is a dig at Microsoft.) February 11: Andrew Ma, who had been at xAI since X was called Twitter, worked on app and recommendation model improvements, including “the X video feed, search bar, user modeling, starter-packs and the home feed model.” He wrote: “I’m excited about the future- not sure what I’ll be doing yet (my DMs are open), but there is a world to be changed and no time to waste. Go team, stay focused, be energized, I can’t wait to see you all on the moon and beyond, believe me when I say there is no one that I trust more on the entire planet to get there, there is a world to win.” February 12: Radhakrishnan (Rad) Venkataramani, who worked on reasoning and reinforcement learning systems for Grok, wrote: “The last 8 months in RL systems/SWE-RL team pushing our coding model to be SOTA and toward recursive self improvement, will always be the most memorable of my lifetime…We’re at an inflection point where intelligence begins accelerating itself, and from here the trajectory only goes vertical.” This article was originally published February 11 and has been updated to include additional employee departures. Got a sensitive tip or confidential documents? We’re reporting on the inner workings of the AI industry — from the companies shaping its future to the people impacted by their decisions. Reach out to Rebecca Bellan at rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com, Russell Brandom at russell.brandom@techcrunch.com, or Tim Fernholz at tim.fernholz@techcrunch.com. For secure communication, you can contact them via Signal at rebeccabellan.491, russellbrandom.49, or tim_fernholz.21. Topics