OpenAI: Apple’s trade secret theft accusation is baseless

OpenAI argued in a court filing Monday that Apple’s accusations of trade theft against the AI company are baseless, suggesting the problem instead lies in the iPhone maker’s own policies.

The ChatGPT maker pointed to Apple’s practice of encouraging employees to use personal accounts for work and its same-day offboarding process for creating the issues at the heart of the lawsuit.

“This dispute is a mess of Apple’s own making, and it is trying to blame everyone else,” OpenAI wrote in Monday’s filing.

Apple sued OpenAI and two former employees in July, accusing them of attempting to access and steal confidential information.

The lawsuit named Tang Tan, who worked at Apple for more than two decades before joining OpenAI as its chief hardware officer, and Chang Liu, who departed for OpenAI after eight years at Apple.

It alleged that Tan and Liu improperly accessed company documents after leaving Apple and sought to obtain insider information through job interviews with current Apple employees.

However, OpenAI argued the pair were “trying to help Apple,” calling the firm’s exit process a “mess.”

The ChatGPT maker suggested that Apple’s policy encouraging employees to use their personal iCloud accounts for work makes it hard to “disentangle Apple information” from these accounts when they leave.

It also highlighted the company’s policy of walking employees out of the building immediately after or within days of their resignation, arguing this doesn’t allow enough time to return devices and prototypes, remove Apple information from personal accounts and transfer over responsibilities.

OpenAI contended that after leaving Apple, Liu gave certain employees access to his iCloud account to retrieve documents and accessed documents on behalf of those employees after finding the firm had not removed his permissions.

“Liu’s rushed exit, along with Apple’s failure to securely maintain its digital systems, inevitably combined to create a situation in which Liu’s Apple co-workers were without knowledge about the Apple files they needed—and Liu, now at OpenAI, was the only one with such knowledge,” Monday’s filing read.

In Tan’s case, OpenAI dismissed allegations that he sought insider information from Apple employees in job interviews as “baseless,” arguing the 24-year Apple veteran directed candidates to bring products for “show and tell” that were old, shipped and publicly available.

It also rejected the suggestion that Tan improperly held onto and shared an Apple document laying out a checklist for departing employees, suggesting it is not a trade secret and the decision to share the document was to “facilitate compliance.”

“Apple cannot stop the next 400 employees from leaving by filing baseless lawsuits,” OpenAI wrote. “In California, employees have choices. They can leave a company like Apple that has struggled to adopt AI and move to an exciting startup that builds innovative products.”

“Apple may not like those choices,” it continued. “But it cannot claim those choices are unlawful, and it cannot use its own sloppy procedures to blame others for its own mess.”

The Hill has reached out to Apple for comment.

The lawsuit comes at a moment when the relationship between the two tech giants, who previously entered into a partnership to integrate ChatGPT into Apple devices, is increasingly strained.

Bloomberg reported earlier this year that OpenAI was considering legal action against Apple amid concerns that it was not living up to its side of the deal.

Apple, which has struggled to find its footing in the new AI age, is separately facing a major transition as John Ternus takes the reins from longtime CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday.