Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

Some pretty damning stuff:

> OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can.

> Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan.

> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.

> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI.

Non-competes and the like are gross but what's described here isn't just "bring your expertise to OpenAI" it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.

OpenAI is a company built on copyright violation.

That means it’s in the corporate DNA to treat laws as things for little people.

Apple have deep enough pockets that they can actually sue OpenAI but I bet OpenAI are surprised they got caught.

Now ask yourself, would the Codex agents on your machine ever over step legal boundaries? Would OpenAI ever make use of data you, voluntarily, send to their servers?

If they did could your company afford to sue OpenAI and would it still be too late to save the business?

Apple has all the money in the world to take this to court, I don't see why they'd accept a settlement. The discovery process alone could honestly destroy OpenAI by making investors and employees nervous enough to look elsewhere. Would be especially interesting if this crosses into criminal territory, especially if there's solid proof of upper management or executives being aware.

Until the industry addresses the Original Sin of Generative AI (and the ascendance of Thievery Corporations), we should expect more and more of this. So far, theft has been rewarded. As long as you make enough money, people seem to be okay with ignoring long-lasting impacts of intellectual theft. As long as you become King of the Cannibals, it seems many are happy to remember you as King and not as the Cannibal.

This is basically the end of OpenAI hardware. This is by far worst than the Waymo vs. Uber lawsuit which killed the Uber self driving project.

Also if you are a business using OpenAI models, I would highly suggest you do not because they are most likely looking at your code and IP.

OpenAI is about to get ROCKED on this. From this report, this looks open and shut. Apple has basically infinite money and incredible lawyers. Not sure what OpenAI can counter with unless they have clear, hard evidence this hasn’t been happening.

A company that behaves like this in one area, cannot be trusted in any area. Any enterprise that endorses/allows OpenAI products to be used is taking a big risk.

Apple kindly wanted to make OpenAI add in some legal liabilities to their IPO filling.

Discovery is going to be great fun (for Apple).

The irony to me is Apple did the exact same thing to Motorola back in the day, which I saw firsthand as a Mot eng. Poached employees and IP. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.

Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.

Interesting how Tang Yew Tan worked at Apple for 25 years (!!) and then threw it all out for this.

This is a really bad look for a company that has vast quantities of our IP stored on its servers.

The employees doing the stealing are serious offenders here and I hope they lose all the job security they just had. There’s no way they wouldn’t know they’d be fired if Apple found out what they were doing, but the money was too irresistible to them and they thought they’d get away with it.

this is just a repeat of the whole Uber case in regards to self driving vs Waymo.

the people responsible will be sent to jail - and if they can pay trump for pardons they will get out - but if not they're looking at 10 years at the FEDs.

Apple: they stole our trade secrets. OpenAI: we just asked GPT-5.6 to predict what Apple was working on and it was weirdly accurate.

Apple was smart to move to Gemini before suing OpenAI. But I feel nothing's gonna come out of it.

Casually dragging new employees into the deepest shit, it’s breathtaking. Also the naïveté of going along with it??

> He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information

Just remembering randomly here, xAI also sued an employee who went to OpenAI for trade secret theft:

https://winbuzzer.com/2025/09/01/xai-sues-former-engineer-al...

If instead of downloading the files they took the info out in the form of neural network trained on the files and able to reproduce the information, that would be just fair use, 100 pound.

Altman showing how desperate he is to get into hardware. He knows local models that supplement models in chip are the end of OIA

This may be the reason why OpenAI reportedly delayed its IPO.

They might have had an inkling that this was coming.

Probably among many reasons for the switch to Gemini for their band aid AI until they get theirs were they want/need.

OpenAI are really starting to look and smell like “the bad guys” in the industry.

I forgot they were still working on a device, any guesses what it is?

I’m guessing a wrist wearable

Mr Tan is suddenly going to be in a LOT of trouble

It's not really surprising that a company that is essentially built on stolen IP will steal more IP when there's an opportunity .

It's ok because this information was just being used to train their models.

If you sleep with dogs you're gonna get fleas. These AI companies have made billions by stealing other peoples content, what makes you think they would be above stealing from Apple?

In every company I've worked at (all with >1000 employees), there is always some text in the offer or onboarding documents clearly stating that you should not bring any previous employer's trade secret or intellectual property to this company.

I wonder whether Open AI's offer letter or onboarding document also says such a thing.

I expected this to be mostly about Apple being angry that OpenAI hired its hardware people, but the complaint sounds more specific and obviously it is still only Apple’s side for now.

Quick reminder that Apple was part of the silicon valley crew that partook of illegal non-poaching arrangements with other SV companies, helping to stifle salaries and more.

But, that's a bit of a tangent. On the other hand, Apple is accused of (and a jury ruled against them on the issue) hiring from Masimo to steal trade secret. Appeals are pending, of course, but it's a reminder that Apple is not lily white on this topic.

Is this the simple case of being used to stealing so much (most ai companies pretty much stole all of data available on the internet with little consequence) that they also felt comfortable stealing data from companies?

Copy of the Complaint.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...

9. In the months before he left Apple, Mr. Tan met with OpenAI or its collaborators and discussed meetings with a key Apple supplier. He began emailing himself information about Apple’s suppliers and internal summaries of the consumer electronics industry. And today, when interviewing Apple employees for jobs at OpenAI, Mr. Tan uses Apple’s confidential information to gain access to even more insider knowledge. He has used an Apple internal project codename to ask, “What’s the plan[?]” for an unannounced Apple product. He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information. These directions to bring Apple’s parts to OpenAI job interviews surprised at least one of the candidates, who commented that he “didn’t even know we could take those from the office.”

10. This is part of OpenAI’s strategy to extract Apple’s confidential information. OpenAI has been instructing Apple employees to bring “CAD/design artifacts” and “prototypes” to their interviews and to divulge details about their work such as “subsystem and component selection,” the “tools or methodologies you use for system integration, such as CAD software, simulation tools,” and “Vendor selection and communication/collaboration with vendors.”

11. OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can. After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols. Unsurprisingly, Apple’s investigation has found a pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.

This is going to be interesting.

Only because both companies have access to billions and infinite lawyers.

This reads like there are enough alleged serious federal felonies that DOJ needs to get involved immediately.

People do this kind of stuff because people rarely go to jail for white-collar crime.

Bad look for Jonny Ive

Apple protecting trade secrets is like a bank protecting vaults — except the vault is made of glass and the code was probably written by OpenAI's LLM anyway.

So I guess we can forget about next AI IPOs for a while, can't we? It's Crazy that Elon may end up winning this one, too.

There comes a point in a startup's life where more controls are needed. Red tape. The stuff that slows down the big boys. Problem is, the red tape is scar tissue from previous informal process failures.

Sam, thinking that he could get away with everything.

The master strategist of the west.

Sam Altman is doing Sam Altman stuff.

Wow. Makes me see OpenAI in an entirely different light.

I'm curious, who is actually making the calls and who is actually doing the scouting for these people. If this is coordinated, the chain must long, so let's see it!

What a neat culture OpenAI has.

It would not be bard hard to believe if you told me that they stole Siri and then they put it back on the shelf.

Why are most lawsuits filed on Friday? To avoid the excessive news cycle? But in this case, Apple might want that.

just desserts. let them fight each other. every major monopolistic corporation in this country was founded on theft anyway. lets not clutch pearls here guys...

probably the real reason why Apple opted Gemini over ChatGPT

I don't really get it. High profile people working for Apple leave for OpenAI, obviously for money. Is it worth it though? You already have a good job, enough money and work for an iconic company.

I mean people in these positions taking these decisions, wouldn't have actually benefited way much more if staying at Apple and actually disclosed OpenAI attempts to steal IP and technology?

Seems to me that OpenAI has a culture of questionable ethics that includes this incident but goes way beyond it. This seems very “on brand” for them.

How far are we from OpenAI being “too big to fail”?

Eventually this bubble will burst. Question is what’ll do it.

(I’ll say I don’t use OpenAI after the DoD stuff, so don’t misconstrue this as approval.)

This season of Silicon Valley is getting spicy

Reminder that Apple hired 30+ engineers from Masimo and stole multiple trade secrets, including their blood-oxygen monitoring tech, leading to a $634 million judgement against them. They also asked President Biden to intervene and pressure the ITC to reverse their ruling.

Not saying OpenAI is innocent here of course, but really no large corporation is. This is just how the game is played.

Get ‘em Apple. Begin the IP wars have…

> According to a report by The New Yorker, Swartz described Altman as a "sociopath" who "can never be trusted" and "would do anything

Who is surprised by this development?

> At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies

I sure hope they weren't referring to Siri here

New revenue streams

Weirdly, this seems like they're trying to train a model to work like Apple? They seem really interested in processes and how stuff is done, rather than only the finished artifacts.

>In its lawsuit Friday, Apple accused Tang Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and a former Apple executive, of coaching his hires from Apple on how to evade Apple’s security processes for departing employees.

The word "coaching" is very malleable, and could refer to perfectly legal conduct, or conduct that is illegal, unethical, or both. How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are? One would assume he was told by previously-departed Apple employees. Would they have been forbidden to disclose information about the outgoing process? I would think so, given how careful Apple is about these things.

> Apple accused another former employee, Chang Liu, of using a former colleague’s Apple-owned laptop to access and download technical documents while working at OpenAI. Mr. Liu told that Apple employee what information about unannounced products she should study before job interviews, Apple said.

I would be very hesitant to assist a former colleague who is still at Apple in this way. Apple is well known for using deliberate leaks to smoke out leakers, and it would be easy for them to get a current/loyal employee to go through the interview process at a competitor for the purpose of finding out if the competitor is trying to get Apple employees to act unethically/illegally.

EDIT: I see my comment, which I posted on the HN thread for an NYT article, has been merged into the comment section of a different article, and is now being downvoted a bunch. Please understand I did not post this comment here, so if it seems out of place that's why.

Nothing is too low for Sam. I expect any kind of shady shit from that company

I will never grow tired of highly paid so-called geniuses so deluded by their own hubris they think no one will not only not notice them moving GBs of data onto a USB on their last day of work, but assume they also don't have logs of everything you accessed and everything you took.

Little no-name companies have this capability with off the shelf software.

Large companies like Apple have entire departments of staff whose job it is to monitor data theft.

It's bonkers and I love every single story as if it's never been told before.

This kind of stuff happens all the time. The employees in question are just incredibly bad at covering their tracks, normally they'd get fired and that would be it.

It is fishy that OpenAI's leadership didn't have the watchdogd in place to catch it. And there's this huge public lawsuit about it now. Plus there's the Elon lawsuit. Makes me think somebody wants OpenAI to go down. Almost like a sacrificial scapegoat, in order to achieve psychosocial unity in the programming community, or something like that.

> Chang Liu

What did he steal, Garageband?

At the end of the day leadership matters in corporate settings (or for a country for that matter). The person at the helm sets the tone for the culture - what’s acceptable what’s not etc. how to go about achieving a goal. Objectively speaking and leaving out judgement of good or bad- Sam, Trump etc all are extremely good at the skill they bring. And when they are put in a position of power they do end up revealing who they are. Thats the thing about power - once you have it will reveal who you are and you have no control over that And Thats the deal. Sam prolly has no idea about it but given who he is he only has a bunch of narcissistic megalomaniacs surrounding him and so on and so forth with dilution as levels progress

Hot take, but Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could. Of course Apple can sue and they will probably settle some amount with OpenAI, but acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment, and OpenAI is uniquely worse at stealing corporate secrets is laughable. Especially considering Apple’s famous history!

Super stupid actions by these ex-employees LMAO

These people think OpenAI can/will protect them?

And everyone will keep using them, and nothing will happen, because the markets are completely irrational, sociopathic and nobody was actually in charge, regulations are bad etc...

What is the realistic expectation where megacorporations are above a good chunk of the law, the citizens can't hopefully pass any legislation and pardons are just a matter of a donation?

WOW so these companies really are stealing enterprise data to make competing products! Fucking slimy! How can anyone trust them now?

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Well they trained their model by scraping all digitised human knowledge and ignoring IP and CW laws so whats a little bit of corporate espionage in the grand scheme of things

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Some more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48865019

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Stop trying to cram your "P" into "AI".

Like when Apple sued Samsung. Why bother with the free market when you can just sue your competitors?

Can't wait for the inevitable bailout and US tax dollars to pay for this!

Reminds me of Apple suing Samsung. Why bother with the free market when you can just sue your competitors?

They didn't still the property, that would be illegal. They trained a model on it. That's totally ok.

According to Apple, are there any tech companies in the galaxy who haven't stolen their trade secrets?