The tech industry reeled last month when Apple sued OpenAI for allegedly stealing trade secrets as the startup builds its nascent AI hardware business. In a blog post published late Tuesday night, OpenAI dismissed the lawsuit as a baseless witch hunt—and said it has the evidence to prove it.
The post, titled “Apple is getting this wrong,” has the tone of a pupil disappointed with a once-beloved mentor who’s lost their way. “Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time, and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details,” the post reads. “This careless, aggressive and oddly personal lawsuit sadly doesn’t live up to that reputation.”
The lawsuit accuses Chang Liu, a former Apple staff member who left the company in January to join OpenAI, of using a former colleague’s company-owned laptop to download technical documents, among other infractions. OpenAI is trying to undercut that claim with a series of screenshots published in its new blog post. They’re somewhat difficult to parse, as they’ve been heavily redacted (cutting out both the names of Apple employees included in the conversation as well as other legally sensitive details). But the messages appear to show Liu walking his former colleagues through accessibility issues in Apple’s internal systems. According to OpenAI, Liu did nothing wrong here, and the blame should instead fall on Apple for “failing to properly manage system access when people leave.”
Apple has also accused one of its former executives, Tang Tan, who joined OpenAI as part of that company’s $6.5 billion acquisition of Jony Ive’s hardware company IO last year, of helping departing Apple employees bypass the company’s security protocols.
Reuters reported Tuesday that Apple had requested a preliminary injunction against Liu, Tan, and OpenAI, which, if granted, would prevent the defendants from publicly disclosing confidential information as the case proceeds. It’s unclear if redacted employee messages of the sort OpenAI published in its blog post would fall into that category. In any case, OpenAI wrote in its blog post that 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’s new blog post also added a strange twist to the circumstances in which the legal complaint first surfaced.
According to the lawsuit, Apple first reached out to OpenAI in February to discuss concerns that company IP was being “improperly” used by former employees now working for the ChatGPT maker. OpenAI didn’t respond, the company reportedly claimed in the lawsuit.
OpenAI’s rebuttal paints a different picture. In another series of screenshots, a third-party attorney representing Apple named Gabriel Gross is shown emailing OpenAI general counsel Che Cheng with a request to discuss “former Apple employees at OpenAI retaining non-public, confidential, and proprietary information,” as it was described in the email’s subject line, according to one of the screenshots. The next day (February 24), Gross emails Cheng again, apologizing for having apparently mistaken him for another OpenAI employee with the last name of Wang, whom Gross described as “one of the former Apple employees at issue.”
OpenAI was quick to call out this embarrassing slip-up in its blog post. “Apple had claimed that they contacted OpenAI in February and that we didn’t respond. They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.”
A short collection of heavily redacted text and email conversations published in a company blog post is not, of course, anything close to a legal finishing move. There’s every reason to believe this will be a long and drawn-out battle between two of the biggest tech companies in the world, potentially with real stakes for the future of OpenAI’s hardware ambitions.