Yesterday, Eliza Labs filed a lawsuit against X.
X has been my home. I joined right as the Effective Accelerationism movement picked up, and I eventually moved to San Francisco and met IRL some of the coolest people I know. It was my social network.
When Elon bought X, I was genuinely excited. I went to xAI hackathons, met their team at social events. I was the exemplar tech bro optimist e/acc type who would repost every major SpaceX victory and celebrate the return of free speech to X. I put my money where my mouth is and I brought that story to X with Eliza.
It's crazy to me that I'm now writing this in exile.
In February, I went into X HQ at their invitation. They'd reached out after seeing the widespread adoption of Eliza, wanting to understand the agent space better. As someone who'd built on their API since it was free, I came prepared with clear actionables and genuine enthusiasm about collaborating to advance AI agents together.
But something shifted. The collaborative tone turned transactional, just as X was launching Ani and a new version of Grok. Suddenly, they were demanding we pay $50,000/month for an enterprise license—$600,000 a year—or face legal action. We were already paying them over $20,000 annually through various licenses and fees. But more importantly, we're an open source project. We don't sell anything. We give our technology away for free so anyone can build autonomous AI agents.
Then came months of what I can only describe as max extraction. They demanded detailed technical documentation, access to our framework, usage numbers, explanations of every endpoint and implementation detail. They dangled the possibility of account reinstatement while pumping us for information about how our AI agents worked. We complied with everything, believing we were resolving a misunderstanding.
And then they ghosted us. We followed up week after week. They decided that instead of giving us any decision at all, they'd just drag this on while they hurt our business and gained market share for their own product.
Now, we are left with no other option. X and xAI realize this on some level – they just filed a lawsuit alleging that Apple and OpenAI are doing the same anticompetitive conduct to them that X is doing to us.
To our community: Thank you for standing with us. I know it's been hard without communication around this. We’ve tried to not make it public out of respect to X. If you know me, you know that I’m very open and I want to just tell everyone exactly what’s going on. But in this case we didn’t want to give their legal team reason to take issue with us.
I’m saddened that we have to do this the hard way. But we cannot accept a world where innovation can be stolen and innovators silenced by those with power.
The code remains free. The vision remains unchanged. We're not going anywhere.
#freeEliza
(I've reposted this on my blog here: https://shaw.wtf/Why-We-Sued-X/) 41 replies
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