RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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OpenAI has come out swinging in its legal battle with Apple—and brought receipts.
The AI lab published a response —along with a tranche of private emails and messages—pushing back on some of the claims in Apple’s lawsuit filed last month that accused OpenAI, its hardware unit io Products, and two former Apple employees of trade secret theft.
Apple had accused the AI lab of carrying out a coordinated effort to take confidential information about unreleased Apple products and processes. The suit includes claims alleging that a former employee who joined OpenAI took advantage of a security bug, that job candidates were encouraged to bring proprietary Apple hardware into interviews, and that OpenAI leadership effectively normalized this conduct.
OpenAI’s blog post is not a legal response to the suit, but rather an effort to publicly point out flaws in some of Apple’s accusations and legal process—and potentially court public opinion.
“Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time, and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details,” OpenAI wrote in the blog. “This careless, aggressive, and oddly personal lawsuit sadly doesn’t live up to that reputation.”
In what appears to be two missteps, the company says Apple’s outside lawyers emailed the wrong individual after confusing “two Asian last names,” and that a purported conversation with OpenAI’s general counsel “never happened.”
OpenAI accused the company of trying to hide the fact that they never raised the specific allegations in this lawsuit at that time. Instead, the lab says that Apple only informed OpenAI that they were “resolving any issues” and did not contact the company any further until they sued. Representatives for Apple did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. A spokesperson for OpenAI pointed Fortune to the publicly available blog post.
In its lawsuit, Apple alleged that OpenAI benefited from confidential information taken by former Apple engineer Chang Liu and former design executive Tang Tan.
OpenAI counters that Apple now concedes its own employees reached out to Liu—not the other way around—and published messages it says show Apple staff asking Liu for help locating files and answering technical questions after his January 22 departure.
OpenAI also argues that these emails undercut Apple’s narrative that the company ignored its concerns, saying they demonstrate that OpenAI responded to Apple’s outreach and that any breakdown in communication stemmed from Apple’s own outside counsel.
The dispute reflects a rapidly deteriorating relationship between the two companies, which have shifted from collaborators to competitors as both push into competing product areas. While Apple has been leaning on Google to integrate more advanced AI into its ecosystem, OpenAI has moved deeper into consumer devices—particularly after acquiring Jony Ive’s design firm io and recruiting several former Apple staff, moves that appear to have heightened tensions.
Apple, in a motion for a preliminary injunction filed this week, told the court it is seeking “to stop the theft of its trade secrets” and warned that it has “suffered and will continue to suffer irreparable harm” without an order blocking OpenAI and the two former employees from using or spreading its confidential information. The company argued that if Apple trade secrets “get embedded in [OpenAI’s] products and operations,” it could end up competing in the consumer hardware market “against its own trade secret technologies,” according to the filing.
Representatives for Apple did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. A spokesperson for OpenAI pointed Fortune to the publicly available blog post.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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