Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus Poaches xAI Co-Founder from OpenAI

xAI Exodus: All 11 non-Musk co-founders have now left xAI, with Musk acknowledging the company "was not built right the first time around."

Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus has hired Kyle Kosic, an xAI co-founder who led the infrastructure behind Elon Musk's Colossus supercomputer, from OpenAI. Kosic is expected to continue working on AI infrastructure at the secretive startup.

Project Prometheus is an artificial intelligence startup co-founded and co-led by Jeff Bezos that focuses on "physical AI", systems designed to interact with and transform the material world rather than just processing digital data like text or images.

Building on Bezos's reported multi-billion-dollar commitment, the hire signals how aggressively Prometheus is recruiting top AI talent as it pursues a physical-world AI strategy. Kosic was the first of xAI's co-founders to leave the company in 2024, beginning a wave of co-founder departures that has since seen all 11 non-Musk co-founders depart. Neither Prometheus nor Bezos has commented publicly on the hire.

Project Prometheus, co-founded by Bezos and former Google Life Sciences executive Vik Bajaj, is building AI designed to understand the physical world with a focus on aerospace, automobile manufacturing, and engineering. Rather than building a general-purpose model and seeking applications afterward, the startup plans to acquire companies and use their proprietary operational data to train industry-specific models.

First surfacing publicly in November 2025, the venture has amassed significant funding, partly from Bezos himself. According to the Financial Times, the founders are looking to raise tens of billions of dollars for a permanent investment vehicle modeled after Berkshire Hathaway, acquiring stakes in companies across its target industries to train specialized AI models. Prometheus is also in discussions with sovereign investment funds from Singapore and Gulf nations.

By November 2025, the company had hired around 100 employees across offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich. It has since grown to hundreds of staff, drawing researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta. Aggressive recruitment from leading AI labs underscores Prometheus's strategy of building domain expertise through top-tier talent acquisition.

Kosic's move to Prometheus caps a journey across three leading AI organizations. He co-founded xAI alongside Musk in 2023 and led the infrastructure team that built the Memphis-based Colossus supercluster, which was assembled in just 120 days. He left xAI to join OpenAI in 2024 before moving to Prometheus.

His departure was the first in a steady stream of exits. By March 2026, all 11 co-founders besides Musk had left the company, including Manuel Kroiss, who led the pretraining team and reported directly to Musk, and Ross Nordeen, described as Musk's right-hand operator who came from Tesla. Musk recently acknowledged that xAI "was not built right the first time around," adding that the company is being rebuilt from the foundations up.

SpaceX recently acquired xAI, bringing it under the same corporate umbrella as X (formerly Twitter), but the consolidation has not stemmed the departures. According to reports, xAI raised $20 billion at a $230 billion valuation in early 2026 yet generated just $107 million in quarterly revenue as of September 2025, a gap that highlights the challenges facing the company even as it scales.

Kosic's recruitment gives Prometheus direct access to infrastructure expertise built at the largest GPU scale in the industry. Prometheus is hiring people with experience building massive infrastructure projects, signaling that compute capacity is central to its strategy for training industry-specific models.