Co-founder of xAI Launches River AI, Developing User-Controlled Personalized AI Agent

According to Dynamic Beating monitoring, Igor Babuschkin, former co-founder of xAI who has worked at OpenAI and Google DeepMind, announced the founding of the artificial intelligence startup River AI. River AI aims to develop a personalized AI agent that can learn from users and be controlled by users, enhancing human capabilities instead of replacing human work.

In addition to Igor Babuschkin, River AI's founding team includes several former xAI employees. Vincent Stark, who was in charge of xAI product security until December 2025, serves as the Chief Legal Officer, while Ievgen Soboliev and Dmytro Soboliev, brothers, served as xAI engineers. River AI will provide an API interface for third parties to build AI models, helping personalized intelligent agents achieve continuous learning and planning to expand into the hardware and physical infrastructure sectors.

Since the xAI merger with SpaceX, dozens of employees and nearly all co-founders have resigned. Musk has pledged to rebuild xAI during SpaceX's preparations for going public. Apart from River AI, several departing xAI members have also founded new companies, such as Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He, who co-founded the AI lab Humans&.