Apple just delivered its latest blow in its lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming to have unearthed “shocking evidence” from a former employee’s laptop.
In a brief submitted Monday to a United States District Court in the Northern District of California, Apple’s legal team said that Chang Liu—who left the company to join OpenAI in January—illegally used his ex-employer-issued MacBook to download a “highly confidential” Apple circuit schematic. Liu then allegedly uploaded the schematic to LTspice, a program which simulates circuit performance before they’re physically built. OpenAI handed the laptop over to investigators last month, six weeks after the lawsuit was filed on July 10.
In a text message sent by Liu at around the same time (March of this year) and included in the brief, Liu says he deployed an AI agent to autonomously run the circuit simulations on LTspice. This makes his actions even more damning, according to Apple: “Where trade secret information is fed into an AI agent or model that ‘learns’ from it, such ‘learning’ may create irreversible and continually propagating uses of the trade secret,” the company’s legal team wrote in Monday’s filing.
Submitted in support of Apple’s earlier request for expedited discovery of evidence, the filing also accused Liu of attempting to cover his tracks after he’d learned he was the subject of an investigation.
In June, according to Apple’s legal team, Liu “discussed destroying the types of forensic data Apple needs” for its suit with OpenAI colleague Yu-Ting Peng. The filing goes on to claim that Liu’s Mac Mini, which he allegedly used to power the LTspice simulations, should also be handed over as evidence, and that expedited recovery was necessary since “the full scope of [his] misconduct thus remains unknown.”
OpenAI responded to the lawsuit last month by claiming that Apple’s “meritless” accusations of intellectual property theft were motivated by “its shortcomings in the market for talent and retaining its employees, and its failures to integrate AI into its products.” (The jealousy card is going to become a lot harder to play if the claims made in Apple’s latest filing are borne out.) It also defended Liu, whom it said had merely been helping his new ex-Apple colleagues navigate that company’s labyrinthine departure protocols.
Apple’s lawsuit also accuses Tang Tan, another former employee hired by OpenAI last summer, of encouraging other departing employees to discuss confidential information in their interviews with OpenAI. In its response last month, OpenAI said Apple failed to identify a specific trade secret that was allegedly shared with Tan in his communications with departing Apple employees, and that he therefore could not be said to have violated the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA).
OpenAI did not immediately reply to Gizmodo’s request for comment about Apple’s latest filing.