xAI employee allegedly forced to delete X post mentioning Grok 3, resigns instead

Earlier today, an xAI employee, Benjamin De Kraker, took to X to claim that they were allegedly forced to delete a post wherein they mentioned Grok 3 in a list of the best AI bots for code. In the post, Kraker did explicitly state that it’s his “opinion” and went on to place ChatGPT o1-pro, o1, and o3-mini ahead of xAI’s upcoming Grok 3 model.

However, he did mention “(expected, tbd)” besides Grok 3, indicating that they still aren’t quite sure about the ranking. Here’s a screenshot of the post for reference (in case it gets taken down):

According to Kraker, after he made the post, xAI reached out to him and said he “either had to delete the post quoted below, or face being fired.” Instead of complying, Kraker chose to resign, calling the demand “absurd and ridiculous.”  Here’s the full post Kraker made:

I resigned from xAI tonight.

It makes me very sad, but was the right thing to do — and here’s why.

xAI told me I either had to delete the post quoted below, or face being fired.

After reviewing everything and thinking a lot, I’ve decided that I’m not going to delete the post — which is very clearly a harmless personal opinion. Why did they tell me to remove this opinion? Well, according to them, the reason is that I acknowledged that Grok 3… exists.

I wish I was joking. I’m not. That’s the reason — the fact that I wrote “Grok 3 (TBD)” is grounds for being fired. But wait, hasn’t Grok 3 been officially acknowledged by xAI? Yes. Yes it has. I’ll post below the official xAI blog post talking about Grok 3, along with many public Elon posts and video where it is repeatedly acknowledged.

To be clear, the post they wanted me to remove is 100% just my personal opinion. I do not know where Grok 3 will stack up against other SOTA models. Hopefully it does well, I don’t know. That’s why it says “opinion” and “to be determined.” It will probably be pretty good at some things and imperfect at others. I didn’t think this was a particularly wild opinion.

Again, their official demand said that even writing “Grok 3 – TBD” is somehow “confidential information.” This is absolutely absurd, since it’s repeatedly been acknowledged by the company and its famous CEO. Are they mad that my clearly-labeled opinion didn’t guess that the still-unreleased Grok 3 will be higher? Maybe. Probably. Again, maybe it is at the top, I genuinely don’t know. That’s why it says “to be determined.”

The specific feature of Grok I spent the majority of my time working on with a really hard-working team is very cool and I hope it works extremely well for everyone. I won’t say what it is because that would be **actual** confidential information. (Maybe after it comes out.) I still hope Elon and xAI win. Yet…… It’s very disappointing to me that a company and leaders who supposedly champion free speech and openness would try to fire a low-level employee over a clearly-labeled opinion that contains absolutely nothing controversial, but here we are.

The entire situation has been very strange. I thought about just deleting the damn thing…. But you know, once you start caving and giving up holding mild personal opinions, the slope becomes very slippery. I’ll keep my speech and dignity and get another job, or build one. Catch ya on the flip side.

Reactions online were split. Some users, like Shiraz Akmal, suggested Kraker might have breached confidentiality by discussing unreleased projects. Kraker pushed back, pointing out that xAI had already publicly acknowledged Grok 3 in official blog posts. In fact, even Elon Musk has mentioned Grok 3 several times on X in the past. So it’s clearly no secret that the company’s working on its successor to Grok 2. I’ve added a handful of Musk’s posts mentioning Grok 3 below:

Others speculated the company took issue with his phrasing. Berk Sozer claimed xAI likely wanted Kraker to declare Grok 3 as “the best model ever” or even “AGI,” adding that the company “made up a reason” to suppress criticism. Kraker replied, “That’s possible and also ridiculous.”

Notably, Kraker clarified that his ranking wasn’t a critique of Grok 3’s quality. “Beating Claude 3.5 at code would make it very good,” he wrote, hinting at the model’s potential.

When pressed about whether xAI had the right to enforce such rules, Kraker conceded they did. “Oh I didn’t say they didn’t have the RIGHT to do it,” he wrote. “I said it was absurd and ridiculous and I resigned.” He later added that while he was a “very low level” employee, he remained “proud of what we worked on,” teasing that results would speak for themselves “soon.”

Neither xAI nor Elon Musk have made any statement about the incident at the time of this writing. But given the fact that Kraker’s post is doing rounds on the feeds of many X users, we might just see Musk’s response any time now.