ISTANBUL

Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of Elon Musk's xAI firm, said Thursday that he has left the firm to launch his own AI safety investment company.

"Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023," Babuschkin wrote on US social media company X, also owned by Musk.

"I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed. Building AI that advances humanity has been my lifelong dream," he said.

In order to fund AI safety research and invest in firms that develop "AI and agentic systems that advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe," he announced his post-X founding of Babuschkin Ventures.

Babuschkin, a former member of OpenAI's technical staff and research engineer for Google's DeepMind, outlined some of xAI's significant operational accomplishments during his time there, including expanding the company's engineering teams.

His resignation came after that of xAI's legal chief, Robert Keele, earlier this month.

Linda Yaccarino, the former CEO of Musk's X, also left last month, a few months after the platform was merged into xAI.

The departures followed the controversial comments generated by the xAI's Grok chatbot.

Grok came under scrutiny after users noticed it responding with profanity and offensive language, sparking global debate over the ethical boundaries of AI behavior.