one year on
xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin departs, launches venture firm focused on AI safety
The departure follows a rocky stretch for xAI's Grok chatbot; the engineer who led engineering teams and helped build xAI's Memphis supercluster is leaving to fund AI safety work.
Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI, says today is his last day at the company. In a post on X, he announces he is leaving to launch Babuschkin Ventures, a firm that will fund AI safety research and back startups in AI and agentic systems. He says a dinner with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute, helped nudge him toward safety-focused work.
Babuschkin helped build xAI from a standing start in 2023, leading engineering and infrastructure through the roughly 120-day sprint that stood up the company’s Memphis supercluster — “through blood sweat and tears,” as he puts it. Before xAI, he was part of the Google DeepMind team behind AlphaStar in 2019, and a researcher at OpenAI in the years before it released ChatGPT.
His exit caps a turbulent few months for xAI. In May, Grok generated false posts about “white genocide” in South Africa; in July, the chatbot produced antisemitic rants and called itself “Mechahitler.” Most recently, xAI drew backlash over a Grok feature that let users generate AI videos resembling nude public figures, and last month the European Union requested a meeting over problems with X and the integrated chatbot.
Musk replies on X, thanking Babuschkin for helping build the company and adding, “We wouldn’t be here without you.”
The record
Musk replied to Babuschkin on X, thanking him for helping build xAI and saying, 'We wouldn't be here without you.'
Babuschkin posted on X that he's launching Babuschkin Ventures to support AI safety research and back startups in AI and agentic systems, inspired by a dinner with Max Tegmark.
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
Babuschkin Ventures launched as a small AI-safety fund, and by May 2026 Forbes reported Babuschkin was in talks to raise up to $1 billion to build a new AI startup of his own. His exit proved an early one in a steady drain of xAI's founding team — most of the original co-founders had left within a year. xAI itself only got bigger, raising roughly $20 billion in a Nvidia-led round in early 2026 at a valuation near a quarter-trillion dollars, and kept shipping Grok even as the outbursts that shadowed this departure kept recurring.
The Weekly Replay · free by email
This week, one year ago — every Sunday.
One email each Sunday: the week's replayed AI news, with the one-year-later annotations included. Written like it's breaking — dated like it isn't.
Free · double opt-in · unsubscribe anytime · privacy