Bezos’s AI start-up poaches xAI co-founder from OpenAI

Project Prometheus, Jeff Bezos’s AI start-up, has hired Kyle Kosic from OpenAI, the Financial Times has reported.

Kosic co-founded xAI, the company behind chatbot Grok, with Elon Musk in 2023, and stayed for one year before returning to his previous employer OpenAI. He has now joined Bezos and his co-founder Vik Bajaj at Prometheus, which is focused on applying AI to the physical world.

According to Kosic’s LinkedIn, he has been a “builder” at a stealth startup since leaving OpenAI in November of 2026.

Prometheus has already hired over 120 employees, many from leading AI companies including Meta, OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind.

The exact details of the company’s mission are not yet public, but a source close to the company told the Financial Times it is intent on building a model that understands the laws of physics. Previous reporting from Fortune suggested the model is being developed to learn from physical trial and error as well as digital training data.

The company has already raised $6.2 billion, some of which has come directly from Bezos, one of the richest men in the world. According to a report by the Financial Times in February, the funding valued Prometheus at around $30 billion.

The company aims to use some of these funds to buy out industrial companies affected by AI and train its models on their data. A person familiar with the company told the Financial Times that Prometheus might act like a “Berkshire Hathaway-type holding company” for companies that have been disrupted by AI, or are likely to be in the future.



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