OpenAI drags Apple’s lawsuit into the court of public opinion

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OpenAI drags Apple’s lawsuit into the court of public opinion

The ChatGPT maker has published message exchanges as evidence that ‘Apple is getting this wrong.’

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See All by Jess Weatherbed

Apple’s legal battle against OpenAI just got messier now that the ChatGPT-maker has publicly aired receipts to counter Apple’s version of events. In a blog post published overnight titled “Apple is getting this wrong,” OpenAI said that Apple’s lawsuit accusing it of stealing trade secrets is “careless, aggressive, and oddly personal,” sharing iMessage and email exchanges to challenge allegations central to the case.

This isn’t a legal response from OpenAI, but it’s an attempt to sway the court of public opinion by poking contradictions into Apple’s case using cherry-picked communications.

The lawsuit filed by Apple last month primarily revolves around former Apple employees Chang Liu and Tang Tan, who have since joined OpenAI. Liu was a former iPhone engineer who now works on OpenAI’s technical team, and Tan was employed by Apple for 25 years, formerly overseeing the iPhone and Apple Watch design before taking on the role of OpenAI’s chief hardware officer. Apple alleges they took “secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products” with them to advance OpenAI’s hardware plans. Reuters reports that Apple asked for a preliminary injunction on Monday to prevent Liu, Tan, ​and OpenAI from accessing, acquiring, using, or disclosing alleged confidential information while the lawsuit moves ahead.

“Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets,” OpenAI said in its blog post. “We’re much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.”

Apple’s lawsuit alleges that Liu failed to return a company-owned computer and used an authentication vulnerability to access Apple’s cloud-based network storage weeks after he left the company. Liu is also accused of downloading confidential files from Apple’s storage system, and instructing another Apple colleague on how to do so and “avoid trouble” with the company’s security team ahead of her joining OpenAI.

OpenAI’s clapback paints this in a different light:

“Apple accuses Chang Liu of accessing Apple confidential information after leaving the company, but only now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information. Apple now tries to shift the blame to “residual access”, but they also don’t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave. What that means in practice is that former employees who are trying to do the right thing when they leave still have access to Apple files—despite not wanting them or even being aware of them.“

In its lawsuit, Apple also alleges that Tan asked for confidential Apple information when interviewing Apple employees for OpenAI jobs, and instructed interviewees to showcase some of the Apple components they worked on. In response, OpenAI says that Tan “has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies.”

In its blog post, OpenAI also refuted allegations that it didn’t respond to Apple’s initial inquiries, saying that Apple “now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names,” and has conceded that it didn’t have a discussion with OpenAI’s General Counsel. The ChatGPT-maker published emails of interactions between the two companies’ legal counsel, alongside iMessages Liu exchanged with an Apple employee. You can read them in full on OpenAI’s blog.

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