The legal battle between OpenAI and Apple just got (even more) personal.
In response to a bombshell lawsuit accusing the startup’s employees of stealing Apple’s trade secrets, OpenAI called the case “meritless” and requested that it be tossed out by a federal judge. The response also suggested that Apple’s accusations were motivated in part by jealousy of OpenAI’s success.
“Apple should not be permitted to use a baseless and pretextual lawsuit to make up for its shortcomings in the market for talent and retaining its employees, and its failures to integrate AI into its products,” OpenAI’s legal team wrote in its 28-page response to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit accuses two former Apple employees, Chang Liu and Tang Tan, of illegally using their insider knowledge of the company’s trade secrets to help OpenAI—which hired Liu and Tan earlier this year and last summer, respectively—build its fledgling hardware business. OpenAI published a blog post on Tuesday dismissing Apple’s claims, along with excerpts of iMessage conversations between Liu and his former Apple colleagues and email threads between the two companies’ lawyers. The post admonished Apple in a finger-wagging tone, describing it as a company known for its “reputation for obsessing over the smallest details,” which it says the lawsuit “sadly” fails to live up to.
OpenAI’s official response to the lawsuit elaborates on some of the core arguments made in the blog post. Liu, it says, was merely trying to help former colleagues, after they first allegedly contacted him, find information they were struggling to locate after he left the company in January; and as for Apple’s claim that Tan encouraged departing Apple employees to disclose trade secrets during interviews with OpenAI, this was nothing more than “routine recruitment and hardware-development activity,” according to OpenAI’s lawyers. Apple also failed to identify a specific trade secret that was allegedly shared with Tan, OpenAI’s filing says, undermining the lawsuit’s claim that he violated the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA).
Apple is widely viewed as a late bloomer in the AI race, one of the few major tech giants that did not quickly make the technology a priority following the explosion of ChatGPT onto the cultural scene in late 2022. That’s been perceived by some as a strategic error, by others as wise patience given the ongoing volatility and uncertain future of the AI market. The company hasn’t completely sat on the sidelines, though. It announced a partnership with OpenAI in June of 2024 to integrate ChatGPT into Siri and other on-device services. But the relationship between the two companies has turned bitter since then, in part due to OpenAI building its own hardware business, which led to last year’s acquisition of IO, a company founded by former Apple executive and iPhone designer Jony Ive. Tan was another IO cofounder.
The battle for top talent has therefore been a factor leading to the bad blood between the two tech giants, as well as the source of much animosity throughout the tech industry more generally in recent years. Legions of software engineers and other employees have departed old-guard tech giants to join the ranks of young AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, where they’ve been greeted with starting salaries that are massive even by Silicon Valley standards. Over 400 former Apple employees have been hired by OpenAI, according to Apple’s lawsuit.
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