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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Elon Musk’s X.AI corporation is suing OpenAI with a new complaint this week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Musk is accusing Sam Altman’s San Francisco company of stealing confidential information from Musk’s company xAI by trying to pilfer Musk’s staff. A Chinese engineer who used to work for Musk is accused of carrying out the scheme.
Now, records reveal the truth about the female OpenAI employee accused of engineering the corporate espionage against Musk. Her name is Tifa Chen and she worked for the Communist state-owned Bank of China and actively recruited a foreigner with a Chinese PhD for a visa, according to records obtained by PATRICK REPORTS.
Will Elon Musk now understand the corporate security AND national security implications of foreign visa programs?
A man named Xuechen Li and others are accused of stealing Musk’s secrets and running with them to his enemy OpenAI. Xuechen Li is reportedly a Chinese national.
According to Elon Musk’s lawsuit: ‘”On July 23, OpenAI Research Talent Advisor Tifa Chen sent a message request to Li via the encrypted messaging application Signal. On July 24, Chen sent Li a message on Signal indicating that a link to, on information and belief, a cloud storage location was sent to Li. The very next day, July 25, Li uploaded the entire xAI source code base to a personal cloud account. Li then deleted his browser history and system logs to hide evidence of his misdeeds. Indeed, Li later admitted to deleting the system logs to try to cover his tracks. 56. At 11:20 a.m. on July 25, Li downloaded from his personal cloud account the entire exfiltrated set of xAI source code onto his personal laptop. 57. At 3:28 p.m. on July 25—four hours after Li’s successful pilfering of xAI’s source code—Chen expressed disbelief, sending Li a message on Signal that equated to “no way!'”
The lawsuit is riveting. So who is Tifa Chen? “Tifa started their career as an intern at Corporate Banking Department in Bank of China,” according to her bio at theorg.com.
In 2023, Tifa Chen proudly referred to her “candidate who’s joining our Frontiers research team,” a man named Cheng Lu from who declared that he was “currently processing a visa with the company’s support.” Cheng Lu has a PhD from Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The national security implications of corporate and geopolitical espionage are massive in this day and age, when foreigners from China and India use visas to take the jobs in the United States or American companies simply offshore their tech and customer service work overseas. Plus, there are evidently a whole lot of H-1B visa holders who don’t bother sticking around the United States year-round. And the visa holders are always coming in, courtesy of recruiters like Tifa Chen.
How could we forget the case of Weiyun “Kelly” Huang, a student visa holder from Beijing who ran scam startups to give fake resume credits to H-1B applicants?
Musk is dealing with corporate espionage problems in other areas of his business empire. Musk recently sued an ex-Tesla engineer for allegedly trying to steal his robotics blueprint and cut Musk out. The ex-Tesla engineer happens to be named Zhongjie “Jay” Li.
Since Karoline Leavitt’s statement watered down President Trump’s H-1B announcement (Trump’s $100,000 fees for H-1B applications are one-time only, not annual and don’t count current visa holders) the crusade to get American workers back to work continues.
If you’ve been discriminated against for being an American, you can contact the Department of Labor’s Hour and Wage Division and Harmeet Dhillon’s office of Civil Rights at the Department of Justice. And you can always send me an email at [email protected].
