At least nine engineers, including two co-founders, have now publicly announced their departure from xAI in the past week – though two of those exits appear to have occurred a few weeks ago.
Neither xAI nor Elon Musk have publicly commented on the departures.
While attrition is typical at startups, co-founder departures are far less so. More than half of xAI’s founding team has now left, and the fact that several employees followed within days has intensified scrutiny around the company’s stability.
Three of the departing staff members say they will be starting something new alongside other former xAI engineers, although no details are available about the new venture. Others hint at a desire for more autonomy and smaller teams to build frontier tech more rapidly, pointing to the anticipated surge in AI productivity.
Yuhai (Tony) Wu, an xAI co-founder and reasoning lead, said in a post announcing his resignation: “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.”
Shayan Salehian, who worked on product infrastructure and model behavior post-training xAI and previously worked at Twitter/X, said last week he was leaving to “start something new.”
Career update: I left xAI to start something new, closing my 7+ year chapter working at Twitter, X, and xAI with so much gratitude.xAI is truly an extraordinary place. The team is incredibly hardcore and talented, shipping at a pace that shouldn’t be possible. From the Home… pic.twitter.com/HKWOebg9QI— Shayan (@shayan_) February 7, 2026
Valid Kazemi, who had a brief stint working on machine learning, posted Tuesday that he left a few weeks ago, adding: “IMO, all AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it’s boring…So, I’m starting something new.” Roland Gavrilescu, a former xAI engineer, left in November to start Nuraline, a company building “forward-deployed AI agents,” but posted again on Tuesday that he left the firm to build “something new with others that left xAI.”
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The departures come at a moment of …