Apple Sues OpenAI, Accusing It of Stealing Company Secrets
2 50An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Apple on Friday accused OpenAI of stealing secrets about products still in development, setting up a legal face-off between two of the world's biggest tech companies. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the consumer tech giant said that OpenAI, a leader in artificial intelligence that has a new hardware business, had asked job candidates from Apple to share details about secret projects and to bring device components and prototypes to their interviews. Apple also accused an OpenAI employee of downloading internal documents from a laptop owned by the iPhone maker. OpenAI used the confidential information to approach Apple's manufacturing partners, including asking one partner to demonstrate Apple's technique for finishing metal on its devices, the lawsuit says. Apple sent a letter to OpenAI in February to raise concerns that confidential information could be "making its way to OpenAI's business improperly," according to the suit. OpenAI did not respond, Apple said. "OpenAI's nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets," Apple wrote in its lawsuit.
[...] In its lawsuit Friday, Apple accused Tang Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer and a former Apple executive, of coaching his hires from Apple on how to evade Apple's security processes for departing employees. Apple accused another former employee, Chang Liu, of using a former colleague's Apple-owned laptop to access and download technical documents while working at OpenAI. Mr. Liu told that Apple employee what information about unannounced products she should study before job interviews, Apple said. Mr. Liu also planned to access internal documents through an Apple-owned laptop that he didn't return when he left the company, according to the lawsuit. OpenAI had misled the manufacturing company it approached to learn about the metal finishing technique to believe it had Apple's permission to view it, according to the lawsuit. Apple is seeking an injunction that would prevent OpenAI from possessing, using or sharing Apple's trade secrets, as well as an order requiring OpenAI to return Apple's intellectual property.
2 comments
No this is not possible (Score: 5, Funny)
by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Saturday July 11, 2026 @12:28AM (#66232368)
Sam Altman is a fine, upstanding young man with not a hint of deception in his bones. He would never lie, cheat, steal, infringe copyright, engage in corporate espionage, abuse his sister, lie to the board, or anything remotely unethical. When Aaron Schwartz said that Sam Altman couldn't be trusted, of course he was being sarcastic.
Re: No this is not possible (Score: 5, Interesting)
by xgerrit ( 2879313 ) on Saturday July 11, 2026 @01:12AM (#66232392)
I worked for a startup that was building a fitness app, and Apple asked our marketing team to pitch ideas for an Earth Day promotion to promote us in the App Store. Our team had a pretty unique idea that we all were excited about, but after the pitch our Apple contact stopped answering messages about the promo. Sure enough, 3 months later Apple took the exact idea and used it in a promo for one of their own products on the App Store. At the time I thought this was some weird one-off thing that happened, but it turns out it wasn't.. it's exactly how they operate [wsj.com]. Make no mistake, OpenAI is no saint, but Apple is a ruthless mega-corporation that's been stealing ideas for years. There's no one to root for in this one.