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

https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-trade-secret-theft/

by stock_toaster • 12 days ago

1660 940 12 days ago

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai/

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.

ErneX2• 12 days ago

This isn’t the first time something like this happens and I always wonder how are these seemingly smart people earning good money so dumb.

atlasunshrugged• 12 days ago

Right? Just straight up documentation with no shame: From an Axios article on this

Liu celebrated the exploit, according to the filing. "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny," he said in a message to a former colleague who was still employed by Apple.

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-trade-sec...

bigyabai10• 12 days ago

"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

- Steve Jobs

calebio• 12 days ago

Google/Waymo + Uber/Otto comes to mind here with Anthony Levandowski.

generj3• 12 days ago

It’s even more ridiculous when choosing to do it Apple. It’s hard to think of a company with more legal resources and which is more protective of its hardware IP.

truncate• 12 days ago

Overconfidence. These people think they are much smarter than others to be caught.

ofjcihen• 12 days ago

I’ve been present when the world comes crashing down around people who thought they were too smart to get caught.

The surprise in their eyes is always very genuine.

stavros2• 12 days ago

Because companies get an advantage by having their people do this. You only hear about the times they get caught, but apparently they get caught so rarely that it's worth it.

jerf• 12 days ago

INT 18 WIS 3 is a terribly dangerous build in this world.

nsz65• 12 days ago

More like lot of people are leaving Apple for OpenAI (no surprise) and an Apple manager wants to send a signal to everyone leaving to chill with what they walk out with. Corps have to perform a lot of theatre because there is lot of info constantly leaking out.

zzyzxd• 12 days ago

Those people are designers. And they don't necessarily understand software, data, or security. When I explained to my non-technical friends about how they were being tracked by website cookies, it sounded like a sci fi story to them. But yes, it's dumb.

I was more surprised by how they managed to keep using work devices after termination. This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.

Hadriel• 12 days ago

seemingly smart is the key here. intelligence doesnt make up for ethics.

paxys7• 12 days ago

Intelligence is domain-specific. People who have put too many skill points in technical knowledge often have none left for common sense and street-smarts.

throwyawayyyy• 12 days ago

Either people are being really, really silly (which cannot be discounted), or the potential reward is so high as to override whatever qualms a normal person must have. Is that it? Is this people looking at a solid career at Apple or sudden millions from OpenAI, and thinking the risk is worth it somehow? Or, more darkly, is it people thinking _this is my only chance and I have to take it_? Or is it trickle-down lawlessness?

TheJoeMan• 12 days ago

As a counterpoint, why should a “metal finishing technique” be proprietary? Lying to the vendor that Apple said it’s ok is obviously wrong, but an employee taking that knowledge in their head doesn’t seem wrong to me. We have moved past the age of indentured apprentices and the freemasons.

estearum10• 12 days ago

Because Apple paid to produce that knowledge? It's good that people can spend a lot of time and money developing new knowledge and then for some period of time they get to exclusively reap the rewards of doing so.

Do you mind if I MITM all of your work output, your emails, your code, your messages, and attach my name to it and then receive your paychecks in exchange for my work?

mrWiz• 12 days ago

My reading is that the employee did not know the method but only of its existence.

cdrnsf• 12 days ago

It must have some sort of value if OpenAI went through the trouble to get access to it.

saghm4• 12 days ago

To me, the fraud is the issue. If the person actually has the knowledge to spec out the whole technique, then sure, they can ask for it. But if they just said "give me what you give Apple" or describes it in detail and the vendor says "no I only will give that when Apple says they're okay", I don't see anything wrong with that either.

tehjoker3• 12 days ago

Generally speaking, companies retaining a competitive advantage with each other is good for their investors but bad for the public. It's usually to the public's benefit for employees to share knowledge, it makes goods and services cheaper and more available.

UncleMeat• 12 days ago

If "eliminate all IP law" is your preference then that's fine but it isn't a reason to commit crimes while we have these laws.

wqaatwt6• 12 days ago

Short to medium term yes. However there are arguments to be made that this would significantly stifle innovation longterm.

ryandrake• 12 days ago

Culture issue. From How to Apply to Y Combinator[1] by Paul Graham:

"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.

1: https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html

estearum10• 12 days ago

Nah

You can beat the system and be disobedient while still behaving ethically. In fact that's the very best time to beat the system and be disobedient.

Vinnl• 12 days ago

I think something like "figuring out a way to stack the odds in your favour in a gameshow" would fit that bill, and that seems fairly innocuous to me.

Though full disclosure: I did that, so that might colour my view. https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow/

miroljub2• 12 days ago

Every single time.

If someone calls himself open, you should know who it is and what to expect.

Aurornis4• 12 days ago

It gets even worse. The person not only kept the laptop and used an exploit to download confidential Apple documents, they bragged about it to a contact who was still working at Apple who was also feeding him information:

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. He also maintained a relationship with Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng, an Apple employee who continued to give him updates on Apple's projects, vendor decisions, and engineering details. When Liu learned he still had access to Apple's systems, he texted Peng "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny."

This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.

Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.

Doing it at a the company that most aggressively enforces secrecy is even crazier.

JumpCrisscross7• 12 days ago

We need criminal charges to be filed against Liu, Tan and Peng. (And deep discovery to find anything Altman might have said to or about them.)

atomicnumber3• 12 days ago

Nah man that's how you end up in the permanent underclass. If you want to make it you have to throw everyone and everything else under the bus, be a bizarrely mustache-twirling evil misanthrope and general freakazoid-type loser, and most importantly get too big to fail / too rich to sue bc you have the good lawyers who can basically stall suits to death. Here's an application to Wendy's.

khurs2• 12 days ago

"Whenever I leave a company I make sure..."

But its also that companies responsibility to ensure that the employer doesn't take anything.

Apple know how to use MDM on Apple laptops, why wasn't the device locked and located.

joe_mamba13• 12 days ago

Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them

Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust, responsibility and accountability, but there's people coming from low trust environments where exploiting loopholes and scamming everyone outside their inner circle is the norm, and it's the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.

They're brazen because they've never been caught or suffered consequences for their actions.

This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview.

steve_adams_86• 12 days ago

Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them

Right. I noticed a coworker who recently left the organization was still running some of our software on his personal computer (evident in the access logs) and notified him that I could see, he should be more careful, etc. We agree to these contracts because compliance matters, not just because we need the job.

xyzsparetimexyz• 12 days ago

Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them

Meh, I'm not returning my nice 4k wfh monitor unless they ask for it specifically

throw0101a• 12 days ago

Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them […]

At $WORK we have the option of getting a work smartphone or having the company pay for (at portion of) our monthly mobile bill.

I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination. (Others chose payment because they did not want the 'hassle' of carrying a second device (and to save some cash).)

reactordev2• 12 days ago

When espionage was your goal all along...

grvdrm• 12 days ago

This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply you.

Spot on perfect. I see this too often and not just in tech.

inigyou• 12 days ago

Rich people do this all day and it's why they're rich. There's nothing shocking about seeing a non-rich person try the same thing in hopes of becoming rich.

mvkel• 12 days ago

"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb f*ks" - Mark Zuckerberg

Sometimes there are no consequences

cush• 12 days ago

Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back

It’s a total liability to hold onto anything. Even if you don’t do anything with it, it could get stolen or misplaced, and you’re liable. Not worth the headache.

ookblah• 12 days ago

lol openai will be fine, but this guy and everyone in his blast radius is fucked. play stupid games win stupid prizes.

taurath• 12 days ago

This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.

Its also how some folks act like when they've done something they morally can't deal with - their subconscious starts throwing all sorts of obvious signs up until they get caught. I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you show up or not, enjoy your retirement.

__natty__• 11 days ago

OpenAI chosen not the sharpest tool in the shed

throwaway949493• 11 days ago

This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.

Found out I already had a bank account with €2000 balance in my name. Temptation was high to take over the account and withdraw the cash.

Fortunately didn't touch a dime.

Long story short, my identity got stolen, account was used to collect eBay scam money and cash out from ATMs. I was a suspect and investigated for money laundering and membership to organised crime.

I had to sue the Prosecutor's Office to have them investigate the scammers and confirm my innocence. They initially refused because it was too hard... Italy.

breppp5• 11 days ago

>This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply you.

To me this sounds more like an extreme response to imposter syndrome, as in take the documents and the actual knowledge with you so you won't be exposed

HumblyTossed• 11 days ago

Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.

I work from home and I have a lot of equipment here (because of what I do - think sensor fusion). Everything is labeled with a bright sticky tape that signifies it belongs to my employer. If I'm not using something at the moment, it's safely stowed in a box that is labeled. My SO knows where everything is, so in the event something happens, they know who it belongs to and who to call. In addition, I keep an inventory sheet of everything. I broke it all down easily so that my SO doesn't have to worry. By doing this, it makes it easy on me as well to know what I have, how long I've had it, when it needs to be returned by, etc.

None of that belongs to me, but they trust me with it and I respect that and I take excellent care of all of it. The mindset that these ex-employees have is just mind blowing. I couldn't fathom doing that.

AnthonyMouse• 11 days ago

This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.

I think this is a cultural difference between security people and large populations of ordinary people. Security people tend to know both that breaking into something is generally possible if you put enough effort into it and that corporations are full of little napoleons who will try to curse your entire family for five generations if you embarrass them in public. And then "never affront the lawnmower" becomes a cultural norm out of self-preservation.

Whereas for ordinary people, even in tech, seeing a security lapse is often met with some combination of cynicism and schadenfreude and "LOL" seems like a pretty normal response.

Also notice that you're reading the company's version of events, which is naturally casting this exchange as a conspiracy against the company rather than the former employee reporting the security lapse to their contact who still works there who should have passed it up the chain -- but might not if they're afraid of sticking their hand in the lawnmower.

Meanwhile I have trouble feeling outrage at this sort of thing because I don't think legal protection of trade secrets is a good policy. Competitors have a moral obligation to uncover things like this to increase competition in the market and if the company wants legal protection for its technology then it should file a patent (which will subsequently expire to the benefit of the public) rather than expecting public assistance for its attempt to sustain a monopoly rent forever.

angrydev• 11 days ago

omg, did you see Brian’s hat?

godelski2• 11 days ago

  > Whenever I leave a company

Whenever I start at a company I create a "firewall"[0] between everything. No personal stuff on company machines, no work stuff on personal machines. I don't want them spying on my personal life. I'm not sure why others are okay with their employers spying on them and having access to their devices.

[0] I'm worried if I don't put in quotes people will think I just create a VLAN. I do that but I also mean it in the non technical sense. e.g. if a company wants to use smartphone apps I tell them to give me a company phone, they don't get to use mine for free.

raxxorraxor• 8 days ago

You will be flagged as untrustworthy in any IT/dev role and rightly so. If any employer gets associated with them and they handle customer data, trust in any of your privacy promises will be gone.

As a dev you are often confronted with confidential data, so you should deal with it in a different way.

saghm4• 12 days ago

The crucial part of why non-competes are gross is that they're trying to enforce what you do after someone stopped receiving anything from the past employer. If someone is helping competitors when still working somewhere, or actively taking stuff from their past employer after they've left, then yeah, of course that's dumb and should be punished. But there's no reason a non-compete clause is needed for that!

ungreased06752• 12 days ago

Theft of trade secrets and a non-compete are unrelated and separate things.

paxys7• 12 days ago

The companies are based in California, so regular non-competes are irrelevant. This is solely about IP theft.

petilon• 12 days ago

This may be just one bad employee, i.e., Mr. Tan. Your quoted sentences say OpenAI did such and such, but it may all be just Mr. Tan. That's not to say OpenAI is not responsible because they are supposed to give strong guidance to new hires that they are not to bring any confidential information from their former employer.

ls-a• 12 days ago

Apple will lose this because they didn't do the due diligence to do basic protection against this.

etchalon4• 12 days ago

Apple doesn't have a history of losing lawsuits.

duxup• 12 days ago

Yeah every job transition I’ve managed I was straightforward and some new employers instructed me to do so.

It’s weird too, these people’s history will show up on job sites and etc, people will find out… fast.

The examples seem clumsy and amateurish.

DrewADesign• 12 days ago

Sure, “Trade Secret” non-competes are usually a pretext employers use to keep low-wage workers under their thumbs, but protecting bonafide trade secrets is their only sorta legitimate use, IMO. The world would be better if they were illegal, but letting engineers disperse confidential information from their last employer wouldn’t be the beneficial part.

yoyohello133• 12 days ago

It seems to be a common trait of the AI people to just brazenly violate the law. It’s like a requirement for working at openAI is to think rules don’t apply to you because you’re so smart.

calf• 12 days ago

No it's because they think they're saving the world.

sumedh3• 11 days ago

It seems to be a common trait of the AI people to just brazenly violate the law.

Isnt Apple part of the same group, doesnt Apple collude with other companies to suppress wages?

mandeepj2• 12 days ago

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

That's one of the dumbest things one can do while on their soon-to-be ex-employer's network.

MichaelDickens• 12 days ago

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.

Reminds me of how Sam Altman told the board that a safety reviewer had approved one of their AI models when the reviewer had done no such things.

tonyhart7• 12 days ago

make sense since they stole all of humanity knowledge for their gain

villgax• 12 days ago

AirDrop you mean lol? Anyone can now have a local LLM make a QR code based data transfer script

Griffinsauce2• 12 days ago

emailing themselves

These are supposedly our brightest minds..

aucisson_masque• 12 days ago

Remember it's apple lawyer words, not established facts.

SilverElfin• 12 days ago

Apple colluding on no poaching agreements was far worse and more damaging. So I don’t feel bad for them.

ozgung• 12 days ago

I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession. It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.

Relevant articles in IEEE Code of Ethics:

3. to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist;

4. to avoid unlawful conduct in professional activities, and to reject bribery in all its forms;

From NSPE Code of Ethics for Engineers:

III.4.b. Engineers shall not, without the consent of all interested parties, participate in or represent an adversary interest in connection with a specific project or proceeding in which the engineer has gained particular specialized knowledge on behalf of a former client or employer.

https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8 https://www.nspe.org/career-growth/nspe-code-ethics-engineer...

latexr3• 12 days ago

I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession.

That’ll never happen with the current incentives. Programming is too easy to get started with and too well-paid to not attract unethical people who are only interested in money.

sumeno• 11 days ago

It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.

Oh, it absolutely does, just not in the direction that's good for society. OpenAI (as one example) didn't become like this by accident, it was intentional. Sam Altman isn't going to hire ethical leadership for his company, they would just get in his way.

sumedh3• 11 days ago

If the CEO goes not care about ethics why should the employees?

Tarq0n2• 11 days ago

Ethics are probably internalized long before someone commits to an engineering career. I'm not sure they can be taught later.

whywhywhywhy• 11 days ago

understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession

Nah this is just pushed on you to disempower you. If you take trade secrets elsewhere lawyers will be used to attack you.

Speaking of lawyers when they move practices they take their IP with them, funny that.

nrmitchi• 11 days ago

Software people want to be “engineers” when it’s prestigious and (financially) beneficial, but avoid the actual classification when it comes with industry standards of behaviour.

behnamoh• 11 days ago

I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession. It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.

For some reason, the ethics followed by Asians, especially the Chinese are not fully compatible with the ethics of the west. Sometimes Chinese people call it being smart to circumvent or bypass the rules, something that would be called cheating in the west.

paradoxyl• 12 days ago

Companies take cultural cues from leadership. When you have a puffed-up sociopath who has never accomplished anything but lying his way to the top, this is what you get.

I'm both infuriated and worried that such a flim-flam man has put himself at the center of the U.S. stock market.

hiworld65432• 11 days ago

Correct.

lII1lIlI11ll• 12 days ago

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.

Most of what happened in this case is straight-up illegal and other parts can be covered by NDA. No need for non-competes to prevent any of this.

krzyk• 11 days ago

How did he keep laptop?

ct0• 11 days ago

How do we know this wasn't Apple's plan all along? A double agent of sorts isn't a new concept.

wavemode2• 11 days ago

Elaborate?

gigatexal• 11 days ago

I hope Apple crushes openAI in this lawsuit and everyone who leaves for OpenAI and bag of cash instead of their dignity and honor is made known.

dimitrios1• 11 days ago

it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.

Thank you for recognizing this. As much as the developer community has come out against companies non-competes in the past, we should come down on even harder on one of our own stealing, because this does the most harm against the case against non-competes. It's grosser in the sense that one company doing a foul thing is bad, but ideally people can band together and work to dismantle the foul thing. But a person legitimizing the foul thing is the greater harm.

varispeed• 11 days ago

Should we believe that OpenAI is not stealing secrets of companies using their models?

_fat_santa• 11 days ago

What does the financial compensation need to be for an engineer to actually do this? I'm gonna assume that if you work at Apple and are being recruited by OpenAI, you are not a dummy. Then you probably know that doing something like this runs the risk of you getting sued by a trillion dollar company.

If I had a potential employer ask me to do this, I would reply "oh hell fucking no", withdraw my application, and notify my companies security, legal and HR teams.

But then again it's easy to have the moral high ground when you're not staring down an offer that will completely change your and your families lives. I'm sure most employees probably thought what I'm thinking until they are looking at a 7 figure offer.

abnercoimbre• 11 days ago

Goes the other way around too: many many employees didn't care about layoffs or the less fortunate until [complete this sentence].

zeroonetwothree• 11 days ago

Claims in a lawsuit always seem very favorable towards their side or else they wouldn’t have filed. The truth usually ends up more in the middle.

tcp_handshaker2• 11 days ago

The out of court settlement, OpenAI will pay Apple , with no recognition of guilt... will be in the billions, but 100 times smaller than the business advantages they will get from it.

Its the cost of doing business and OpenAI knowns it.

nerdsniper8• 11 days ago

Non-competes are awful. But enforceable protections for trade secrets makes perfectly good sense.

Two very different things!

preg_match5• 7 days ago

OpenAI is a company that has built 100% of it's revenue off of theft. Not that I think that's necessarily a bad thing, at least for some domains. Nor do I think it makes their product not valuable.

But, it does mean that obviously they have zero regard for pesky things like "trade secrets" or IP. They shit on IP, like, as a rule.

This is why I was frustrated nobody was prosecuting the AI companies in the beginning when the IP theft first started. Sure, we might not care if they stole books off of libgen, whatever. But big picture here, is this a precedent we want to allow and what are the consequences?

Turns out the consequences were obvious: intra-American espionage and corporate sabotage. Oops, that doesn't bode well for home-grown AI.

tiahura2• 12 days ago

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.

andrewinardeer• 12 days ago

This is going to be interesting.

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

grttw14• 12 days ago

Imagine comparing what apple has access to vs a deeply money losing firm

FridgeSeal• 12 days ago

The “nuclear bomb vs coughing baby” meme comes to mind.

generj3• 12 days ago

More importantly Apple can effectively bring up the shadow of this lawsuit whenever OpenAi tries to acquire money.

They can make legal fillings and calls to Bloomberg to keep the story going as long as they want to and suck some oxygen out of any IPO ramp up.

benoau4• 12 days ago

I would guess these days Apple probably has more lawyers than engineers.

avgDev• 12 days ago

Lawyers: rubbing hands together

chasd00• 12 days ago

Yeah it reminds me of tha Pink Floyd lyric “..we’re so happy we can hardly count!”.

jediknightluke• 12 days ago

OpenAI has concepts of money.

simondotau3• 12 days ago

OpenAI investors have concepts of money. OpenAI has their money.

Culonavirus• 12 days ago

I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

mingus882• 12 days ago

Apples billions are in cash

OpenAIs billions are in IOUs to Nvidia

cosmicgadget8• 12 days ago

IPO has entered the chat.

__turbobrew__• 11 days ago

Do you think there are any lawyers which take Azure credit as payment?

LandoCalrissian• 12 days ago

Only one has Actual Money™ and quite a lot of it.

throwatdem123112• 12 days ago

Can you pay for lawyers with RAM, GPUs or IOUs for tokens?

exabrial• 12 days ago

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

nba456_2• 12 days ago

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

dofm• 12 days ago

Some of the Apple/Samsung complaint was horseshit (and was a bit of a distraction because they knew they'd need to settle their suit with Nokia).

But it was design copying and IP infringement stuff: duplication of things already in the wild.

This is on another level. If any of this is true, it's extraordinary, and I think OpenAI will likely want to settle quickly, thus increasing Apple's AI-related earnings.

Conscat• 12 days ago

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

mingus882• 12 days ago

If you can’t see the difference between a design firm pointing out obvious riffs on their first to market designs…

And a company openly instructing poached employees to exfiltrate documents on their way out the door, well…

cosmicgadget8• 12 days ago

I didn't read the full complaint but the article focuses on bringing Apple IP to interviews. It's not clear that it was intended to steal trade secrets.

The Liu guy seemingly did so but he wouldn't be the first person to try to take his own work product out the door for personal reasons.

I distrust statements like:

“pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.”

This could mean almost anything.

frays• 12 days ago

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

apparent2• 12 days ago

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.

wilsonnb3• 12 days ago

How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are?

The openAI employee in question is also a former Apple employee.

apparent2• 12 days ago

Ah, somehow I missed that even though it was included in the quote I copied. Thanks!

MeetingsBrowser6• 12 days ago

Not just any employee. A 24 year veteran and at the time of departure the VP of design for the iPhone and Apple Watch

BeetleB• 12 days ago

How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are?

Either by being a former Apple employee, or polling former Apple employees.

madeofpalk3• 12 days ago

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.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28453229-apple-v-ope...

Lawsuits like this tend to be surprisingly easy to read, partly because they intend for the public/journalists to read them.

ChrisArchitect• 12 days ago

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

LoganDark4• 12 days ago

The threads have now been merged, it seems.

s08148692• 12 days ago

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

generj3• 12 days ago

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

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

j2kun• 12 days ago

Discovery is the entertainment for the rest of us.

mayneack2• 12 days ago

this will settle before it gets to discovery I bet

rising-sky• 12 days ago

Yes, exactly. Probably a settlement similar in spirit to Google v Uber RE: Anthony Levandowski stealing self driving IP

glenpierce3• 12 days ago

Depends on the objective of Apple. It’s hard to imagine they’re after a quick payout. They may wish to keep this in the news cycle as long as possible. I could see them both harming open ai and sending a message to employees thinking of leaving that if they even consider breaking their confidentiality agreements, it will absolutely ruin their careers.

ryukoposting6• 12 days ago

I keep seeing this take in the comments, but why wouldn't Apple make an example of OpenAI? They can certainly afford to. There's no lawyering your way out of a case this cut and dry, if it makes it to court. OpenAI has already signaled intent to become a direct competitor to Apple, why wouldn't Apple publicly humiliate them before they can get that product off the ground?

selfmodruntime• 12 days ago

Hard to believe when they could use this opportunity to hurt a competitor.

wavemode2• 11 days ago

Apple isn't bringing this lawsuit for the cash. For publicity reasons this will go to trial.

xnx5• 12 days ago

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.

tangenter• 12 days ago

Meh. Consider that you had no choice and no say that your data out there, both present and historic as mined, aggregated and analyzed by data collectors, was used as a training set for the LLMs. I think you’re a tad too late with your warning. They’re already thieves and they know it. And they know you can’t and won’t do anything about it.

xnx5• 12 days ago

Public/crawlable data is very different from private/internal documents and code that employees might prompt with.

MeetingsBrowser6• 12 days ago

I’m not one to defend huge companies, but OpenAI is a huge company.

It’s possible this kind of behavior is endorsed throughout, or it’s possible it’s limited to this specific group.

We know nothing beyond what Apple has alleged.

felixgallo• 12 days ago

Do you know who the CEO is?

BoorishBears2• 12 days ago

Are you joking or are you confusing huge valuations with huge headcount?

mixdup2• 12 days ago

You think the group tasked with developing whatever hardware device they're trying to build is isolated away from senior leadership and is running rogue?

bunderbunder2• 12 days ago

I’ve been at companies where just one group - or even just one person - did something unconscionable and kept getting away with it until the story hit the headlines. And I can tell you, it was never just an isolated incident involving just that group. It’s also all the people who knew something was up and didn’t say anything. And it’s the corporate leadership fostering a pervasive culture of turning a blind eye to ethical problems. Often by allowing people in power to ensure that sounding the alarm is a career-limiting move.

sandeepkd• 12 days ago

Not being able to prove is one thing, pretending it may not be the case is next level of positivity. There are definitely going to be pockets of hard working smart folks in every place, however the company as a whole would get a bad name even if few folks are indulged and the company is not doing anything about it.

driverdan3• 11 days ago

It’s possible this kind of behavior is endorsed throughout, or it’s possible it’s limited to this specific group.

As others have pointed out elsewhere this is literally the type of behavior OpenAI is founded on. Gathering up other people's IP and using it to build their own thing. It's how all the big LLMs are built.

amelius• 12 days ago

A company that behaves like this in one area, cannot be trusted in any area.

A company locking down their phone platform cannot be trusted with their laptop OS.

benoau4• 12 days ago

You can trust Apple. I mean they openly lied to a judge last year under oath, but you can trust them.

willtemperley4• 12 days ago

Can you provide a source? Otherwise your comment is useless.

xp846• 12 days ago

I'm the farthest thing from an Apple fanboi you can find, but Apple's not so unethical as to make all this (OpenAI trade secret) stuff up. The OpenAI settlement they'll no doubt get from this won't amount to 30 days of their App Store rent-seeking that they were propping up with those lies.

If they can't prove any of this stuff they wouldn't file the suit. No matter what you or I think of Apple, the chances that this went down at least as criminally as they allege, are very high.

winstonwinston• 12 days ago

Apple earned some trust unlike openai.

an0malous2• 12 days ago

This is only like the 12th reason not to trust OpenAI. The culture starts from the top

_aavaa_• 12 days ago

The same can be said about Apple. Several companies have complained about them taking a meeting with apple, presenting their product, only to have Apple then rip it off and build it in house. To say nothing of sherlocking.

thatwasunusual• 12 days ago

"Good artists copy; great artists steal" - Pablo Picasso, but was also used by Steve Jobs, ironically.

ricksunny• 12 days ago

I always wonder why this long-supported theme doesn’t get more mindshare amid tech commenters’ worship at the altar of Apple.

baxtr3• 12 days ago

Presenting a product prototype or idea at a meeting is vastly different from an ex-employee stealing corporate secrets - to me at least.

amazingamazing• 11 days ago

Example?

nvarsj3• 11 days ago

As an old timer, I saw this firsthand happen with Motorola. Apple did the same shenanigans, stealing IP and engineers. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.

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

overgard15• 11 days ago

Eh, I don't think Apple is particularly ethical or anything (I very much dislike their app store policies), but if you have to choose between two devils Apple is vastly preferable because they're not after my data or my job.

sk4rekr0w3• 12 days ago

This thread is certainly achieving Apple's PR goals

orliesaurus• 12 days ago

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

iwontberude• 12 days ago

Which equals fame and intrigue in the Trump era, big congratulations to Mr. Tan on his new found wealth

LoganDark4• 12 days ago

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.

phainopepla2• 12 days ago

That doesn't seem that weird to me. Good processes lead to good artifacts.

LoganDark4• 12 days ago

Apple just seems like a weird target for that kind of stuff, is all.

thewebguyd• 12 days ago

Given that allegedly hardware information was involved I’d lean more toward this is for developing either custom silicon based on Apple’s designs or OpenAI wants to make consumer hardware. Aren’t they making something with Jony Ive too?

Cyberdog4• 12 days ago

I assumed consumer hardware too though I can't imagine what OpenAI hardware would look like. Another take on the "smart speaker" that has hit the consumer market with a resounding "meh?"

Andrex6• 12 days ago

There's rumors they've been planning a phone.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/29/everything-we-know-abou...

al_borland2• 12 days ago

A lot of people have tried to copy Apple’s finished product and they never get it right, because they don’t have the process behind it. How something looks is only a small part of it.

Marciplan• 12 days ago

probably the real reason why Apple opted Gemini over ChatGPT

simondotau3• 12 days ago

Changing suppliers is potentially the reason why Apple’s AI strategy was so delayed.

solfox• 12 days ago

Pretty foolish of them to play so unethically only to lose such a big account and now gain an open-and-shut lawsuit that will seriously damage their ability to compete in hardware for a very long time.

cosmicgadget8• 12 days ago

Maybe they believed Apple would roll their own AI and not have to license Google's.

Andrex6• 12 days ago

There's also the possibility it was a coincidence, and the stakeholders in the Gemini decision are breathing a heavy sigh of relief.

etchalon4• 12 days ago

Based on the timelines at play here, I'd wager this.

spongebobstoes• 12 days ago

I heard oai turned apple down, not the other way around

andy_ppp2• 12 days ago

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

Cyberdog4• 12 days ago

Bailout of OpenAI? Doubt it, unless Trump and Musk have some sort of falling out (again).

andy_ppp2• 12 days ago

Has nobody heard about this theory yet? https://youtu.be/RqDAMeqvUgo

jgalt212• 12 days ago

Hence the rise of the DSA.

Robdel12• 12 days ago

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.

overfeed• 12 days ago

OpenAI also has infinite money, and the graph for money/lawyering gets clamped well below what OpenAI can afford. It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.

transdev12• 12 days ago

OpenAI really doesn’t have infinite money. They have a lot of money, sure, but it is being burned like crazy, we know this. It is widely known that they are deeply unprofitable.

Compare that with Apple, a company that throws off billions of cash every quarter. This isn’t a legit comparison.

enraged_camel• 12 days ago

> OpenAI also has infinite money

Except OpenAI needs every cent of that money for compute, and they don't have healthy profits that can replenish what they spend.

Their financial situation is simply not comparable to that of Apple's.

rukuu0012• 12 days ago

OpenAI also has infinite money

And an infinite money-eating bonfire

anon3738392• 12 days ago

I agree that both companies have sufficient capital that legal resources are a a wash. But:

It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.

This we don't know. We don't know what Apple wants to accomplish with this suit. They may be more interested in the injunctive relief than the monetary recovery. They may want to weaken OpenAI as part of a strategic pivot toward marketing local, private AI inference. As everyone has noted, the factual allegations are detailed and extensive - Apple likely has OpenAI dead to rights on this.

crossroadsguy3• 12 days ago

Infinite money if lawyers are accepting AWS and Azure credits. You got to store those discovery documents somewhere after all.

amazingman3• 12 days ago

OpenAI's money belongs to investors and can be pulled if, say, investors got spooked. Apple's money is much more real.

dgellow• 12 days ago

OpenAI wealth isn’t really that liquid

jkman• 11 days ago

Lmao if only one could pay lawyers in equity and promissory notes

overgard15• 11 days ago

Nope, OpenAI is the equivalent of a rich kid spending his parents money (they certainly aren't making it). As soon as VC dries up and the hyper scalers stop subsidizing them the bills are going to come due very quickly.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

(This was independently verified by the Financial Times)

xp846• 12 days ago

For real. If Apple can prove half of this complaint, OpenAI need to be jumping straight to "how can we settle this immediately." Can you imagine how much fun Apple lawyers would have taking this to a jury trial? Especially considering overall Apple knows that the public overall vaguely likes Apple and distrusts "AI" companies for, hmmm... (alleged) IP theft.

I'm also wondering about all these involved ex-Apple people who decided to pivot to crime, it seems like OpenAI has to fire all of them, no? Because how do you just keep them, knowing that they're all basically tainted, and that Apple will be coming back to sue you again for anything that seems "inspired" by Apple products or tech.

What a massive cock-up for whoever (Tan?) is at the top of this conspiracy, to think this was worth the risk, and to have not known that the chances of getting caught going this far outside the legal boundaries were less than 100%.

downrightmike• 12 days ago

Also OpenAI is the one that bought all the ram chips for the years to come, so no one likes them

mannanj2• 12 days ago

Is there any other AI company with as much controversy as this company?

- ~murdered~ (dead) employee who's mother is on a anti-sam hate campaign - ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company - conflict of interest with Microsoft

Despite Anthropic's bad press, they haven't been as dishonest as this company.

dataviz10002• 12 days ago

ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company

Are we discussing Steve Jobs in 1985?

Any time there is that much money and power involved there is going to be intense drama.

frankdenbow• 12 days ago

proactively creating the script for the movie

an0malous2• 12 days ago

What kind of repercussions will OpenAI face?

y1n03• 12 days ago

Basically nothing. I mean they’ll have to pay up but money clearly isn’t something OpenAI worries about. They’ll just raise more from the infinite vc money tree.

anon3738392• 12 days ago

Apple may get a chance to rifle through OpenAI's trade secrets. And they may win an outcome where there is direct court supervision over what OpenAI is allowed to build and how.

paxys7• 12 days ago

In the extreme case it may result in OpenAI having to abandon their in-progress consumer hardware products, but honestly that might actually be good for them. I really can't see all that investment being worthwhile. Better for them to stick to their core competency.

More realistically - OpenAI will cooperate, the specific employees involved will be punished, there will be a settlement, and this whole matter will be forgotten.

calebkaiser• 12 days ago

Based on a cursory read of the situation, it seems similar (at least on its face) to the Waymo vs Uber situation. In that case, Uber payed a Waymo an equity stake and signed an agreement about which technology they would/wouldn't use. The key person involved also was sentenced to 18 months in prison (pardoned after 6 months).

sfifs• 12 days ago

Well OpenAI is offering equity to the US Government (and who knows who else privately) Tim Apple famously refused to bring manufacturing back to the US when the current president asked and play hardball on infosec. While this is a civil case, increasingly judiciary seems to be an extension of the executive. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

ecommerceguy• 12 days ago

Does this ring true in California?

m463• 12 days ago

I hope they can pull it off.

That said, silicon valley is full of stories where people brazenly stole from company A to start company B and pretty much got away with it.

EDIT: this is the one I remember:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems%2C_Inc....

busymom0• 12 days ago

The silicon valley TV show even had episodes on this! Man I miss that show. They'd have so much funny material nowadays if they came back.

blueblisters• 12 days ago

OpenAI will just put the employees involved under the bus. They can claim the information acquired wasn't used for OpenAI's benefit or authorization especially since the device isn't actually out yet.

diab0lic• 11 days ago

Given that they tricked a vendor in using a secret metal finishing technique by lying and saying they had permission… I’d say the “wasn’t used for OpenAI’s benefit” argument is going to be a difficult case to make. They’ve got intent at the very least.

xtracto• 12 days ago

This is when I wish Jobs was still in charge of Apple. I never quite liked him, but I like Altman way less. And Jobs would CRUCIFY the whole openAI team for this. It would be beautiful to watch.

crossroadsguy3• 12 days ago

That's a very twisted kind of relative deification.

thraway38373• 11 days ago

It wouldn’t be effective at accomplishing anything. He wanted to go thermonuclear (his words) on Google and Samsung. Yet here they are, equal heavyweights to Apple.

I love Apple, and I’m a fanboy, but they are not the good guys.

throw28273• 11 days ago

"Great artists steal."

moomoo11• 12 days ago

Apple should buy OpenAI

sneak• 12 days ago

With what money? I don't think you have looked at OAI's valuation lately.

IAmGraydon2• 11 days ago

Apple doesn’t want a financial sinkhole. They’re in the business of actually making money.

browski• 12 days ago

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

willtemperley4• 12 days ago

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

ungreased06752• 12 days ago

I don’t put my company’s IP on their servers, because I don’t trust them to not steal it.

willtemperley4• 12 days ago

I do hope Anthropic are better with IP, and I think they may be. Given Dario Amodei hasn't been sued by OpenAI while building Anthropic this seems likely.

I think Amodei may actually be quite a good human, despite my trust in big tech being at an all-time low.

overgard15• 11 days ago

If you're using their services, you're more or less giving them their data. (Dunno if that's your situation, just saying)

throwaway27448• 12 days ago

That's also a bad look for any company who willingly hands its IP over

fantasizr• 12 days ago

this time they stole from people who have the resources to fight back

yoyohello133• 12 days ago

It’s really unsurprising. Stealing IP is their whole business model.

gabriel-uribe• 12 days ago

This season of Silicon Valley is getting spicy

fauchletenerum• 12 days ago

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?

cosmicgadget8• 12 days ago

Apple suing someone when they lose ground in a space is never surprising.

NetOpWibby• 12 days ago

Super stupid actions by these ex-employees LMAO

These people think OpenAI can/will protect them?

dreamoftheiris• 12 days ago

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

InsideOutSanta• 12 days ago

Yeah, I find the majority of comments here interesting. Sure, it should be common sense not to email internal documents to yourself when you leave, or keep a company laptop and access internal networks after you no longer work at a place. That's just dumb and unethical and illegal.

But also, I can't find it in myself to really care about this. Trillion-dollar company takes ideas from other trillion-dollar company. Apple has done this to much smaller companies countless times. But OpenAI-on-Apple violence is so far removed from a crime that actually harms normal people that I'm not sure why I should give a shit.

stahhhpit• 12 days ago

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

oogabooga13• 12 days ago

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

sashank_15092• 12 days ago

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!

JumpCrisscross7• 12 days ago

Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could

The closest involved Apple selling Xerox pre-IPO shares [1]. And there are zero allegations any PARC employees who moved to Apple with confidential information the this has gone down.

acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment

It's not. It's why it gets litigated and criminally charged. I won't disagree that there is a section of Americans who think it's commonplace. But that's because they're either personally doing the crimes or surrounded by criminals.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-21/larry-tesl...

sashank_15092• 12 days ago

Hmmm it does seem like this seems much worse than what I thought of Apple doing (like stealing the idea for a mouse and GUI from Xerox), the best I could find is Qualcomm claiming Apple stole its modem code and gave it to Intel. That was settled before trial.

This however does actually seem far worse, reminds me more of Waymo vs Uber, people can go to jail.

losthubble• 12 days ago

Didn't apple get banned from selling apple watch because they pretended to want to buy IP and basically just poached and gutted the company instead?

uhfraid• 12 days ago

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

I’m guessing a wrist wearable

benoau4• 12 days ago

I’d guess phone, anything else is too compute-constrained and just an accessory for them, plus has to pay 30% of subscriptions and can be disadvantaged strategically.

cosmicgadget8• 12 days ago

My money is on drone with missile pods.

kalleboo• 12 days ago

An egg

yesfinally• 12 days ago

Fried egg fried egg gotta get down on fried egg

Aybody's lookin forward

To tha

Weakened

lobsterthief2• 12 days ago

… in these trying times?

orangepanda• 12 days ago

The one from Black Mirror?

setnone• 12 days ago

the only ai device that makes any sense is a robot

dash23• 11 days ago

Maybe handcuffs, hee hee

thraway38373• 11 days ago

Likely a device where the largest share of interaction pattern is through voice conversations and chats with the system to get it to do things for you: messages, email, etc.

It would have to run Android, and try to provide compatibility for existing apps in order for this to be a successful device.

overgard15• 11 days ago

I don't really know, but from what I've heard it sounded kind of like a wearable amazon echo. Because I guess reaching into your pocket for your cell phone is too big a lift? Kind of fits with OpenAI's MO of only selling things that lose money (AFAIK the Echo is still unprofitable?)

naturalmovement• 12 days ago

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.

system2• 12 days ago

Sam Altman is doing Sam Altman stuff.

html5cat• 12 days ago

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

The_Blade2• 12 days ago

who knows, maybe he had giant gambling debts or other addiction(s) or bad real estate investments and/or lost half of it all to an ex-wife first. things that Jony might be readily aware of. assuming there is more than a kernel of truth to this - and i can't imagine not, the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account - it doesn't surprise me that Tan was a criminal, it's that he was such a bad criminal

andersonpico• 12 days ago

the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account

who responded to what?

telotortium• 12 days ago

What did he scrub? Looks like an account with posts to me

romanovcode2• 12 days ago

Isn't scrubbing any of the data on a public platform that everyone sees AFTER you are being sued is not the smartest decision?

afavour• 12 days ago

And how many years of being passed over for promotions, I wonder.

Not that it justifies what he did for a moment but you can absolutely work somewhere for a long time and end up resenting it by the time you leave.

appplication3• 12 days ago

Being spurned is one possible motivation, but so is an outstanding offer, where you go from middle of the pack performer with career stagnation to superstar leading the hot new product.

khuey• 12 days ago

And how many years of being passed over for promotions, I wonder.

He was Vice President of Product Design when he left Apple. How many more promotions could there be?

jonReadingNews• 12 days ago

not even the first time https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/iyo-sues-former-eng...

Edit: this was a year ago

thraway38373• 11 days ago

Wow. Was just going to comment about how Tan threw away his professional credibility. This stuff will be the first result that comes up in a search or LLM.

He’s made terrible decisions since leaving Apple. I wonder if MIT/folks will now investigate his entire academic career as well.

What a way to throw away 25 years of hard work. Started off as a designer and worked his way up to VP. I’m sure we’ll hear from anonymous Apple employees about the nature of this person. Maybe he was pleasant to work with?

dtf• 11 days ago

“Don’t over plan your life. Be open to the wonders and opportunities that present themselves,” Tan said.

[sharing reflections on his journey from MIT graduate to Apple executive to OpenAI Chief Hardware Officer as part of the Distinguished Speaker series hosted by the School of Engineering]

[https://thetech.com/2025/10/30/tang-tan-openai]

baxtr3• 11 days ago

Reminds me of the (infamous) eBay sellers back in the days who collected perfect ratings for a couple of years just to suddenly turn into scammers, pulling off what was known as a "long con" or "exit scam."

AbstractH242• 11 days ago

Which reminds me of most reddit right now

driverdan3• 11 days ago

Where do you think he learned it? While working at Apple from them doing the same type of thing.

m3kw93• 11 days ago

I would think programmers would at least verify a bug before announcing a bug. Lets hear both sides of the story before judging.

yumraj• 12 days ago

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

They might have had an inkling that this was coming.

simonswords82• 12 days ago

I read that Apple warned them about a potential litigation in February so you could be correct.

nba456_2• 12 days ago

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

y1n03• 12 days ago

What a dumb take. Apple is the most wildly successful company in the market. You think whatever pittance they get from this will outweigh the cost of stolen ip?

etchalon4• 12 days ago

What a neat culture OpenAI has.

nullbio14• 12 days ago

This is a drop in the ocean compared to what Anthropic does behind closed doors.

azinman24• 12 days ago

Based on what?

meken2• 11 days ago

I’ve seen an uptick in these types of comment on HN - vague ominous sounding attacks on Anthropic.

It honestly seems like a coordinated PR effort from OpenAI folks to “both sides” the companies.

Which would, if true, be a further indictment of the culture at OpenAI.

ed_mercer• 12 days ago

At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies

I sure hope they weren't referring to Siri here

Cider99862• 12 days ago

Although I haven't tried the new Siri.

SirHackalot• 12 days ago

Get ‘em Apple. Begin the IP wars have…

wnevets• 12 days ago

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?

rukuu0012• 12 days ago

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

PeterHolzwarth• 12 days ago

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.

akamaka3• 12 days ago

The jury ruled against Apple only on the issue of patents, and the claims of trade secret theft were dismissed. There doesn’t seem to be evidence that the Masimo employees who went to work for Apple brought any confidential information along with them.

bel83• 11 days ago

Yeah I cannot feel any sympathy for either companies here.

They all do this exact thing, including Apple. OpenAI was just the last one to get caught.

And if OpenAI uses this hardware information to bring less locked hardware to the masses, wishful thinking I know, then more power to them.

If AI keeps improving, it is very important to make sure everyone gets at least a smidge of a chance of equal access to AI otherwise the income disparity will grow even more. And Apple is the last company in the world to think of the masses. They sell $1000 aluminium monitor stands: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-monitor-stand-price-re...

rustystump• 11 days ago

This is silly. Iirc there is a big dif between poaching people for ip and telling people to lie keep working download and physically steal ip.

Open ai is not a hero. Open ai is the kind of intellectual property theft and i hope the entire thing crashes and burns. There are plenty of other companies out there less disgusting that can work on foundation models

aleksandrm• 12 days ago

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!

opengrass• 12 days ago

Chang Liu

What did he steal, Garageband?

paxys7• 12 days ago

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.

akamaka3• 12 days ago

The $634 million judgement you’re referring to was only for Masimo’s patents, and the other claims they made about trade secret theft were dismissed.

bel83• 11 days ago

only for Masimo’s patents.

Sorry but there's no such thing as "only patents", these are often what companies live and die for.

The handwaving of Apple wrongdoings have no limits.

namocat• 10 days ago

I now wonder whether Tang Tan was involved in the Masimo incident while at Apple. Maybe he brought that part of the Apple culture to OpenAI.

jtfrench2• 12 days ago

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.

ag709• 12 days ago

unrelated, but I love the writing style of this comment

Lucasoato• 12 days ago

Written by gpt-5.6-sol

Tarq0n2• 11 days ago

Ignoring patent law has done great things for 16th century continental Europe and more recently China. Rent-seekers and ladder kickers shouldn't always be respected, they'll slow down societal advancement to a crawl if you let them. The question is whether the gains these AI companies are making from their transgressions are overly privatized.

b3kart• 11 days ago

I think significantly fewer people would have an issue with this if the profit was socialized. The fact that a company took all of humanity’s data and is profiting from _is_ the issue.

sealeck2• 11 days ago

And we can also ignore model law; we should require OpenAI/Anthropic to provide unrestricted access (at standard API rates) to their competitors so they can use this to train new models.

semiquaver3• 11 days ago

IP infringement is not theft. There’s a whole “you wouldn’t download a car” meme about this.

Intellectual property has always been a made up idea that has been abused for years by big companies far in excess of its societal value. I’m not sad that the force of IP restrictions seems to be weakening, but I am surprised to see so many people in tech that previously were pretty lassez faire on IP to suddenly take it so seriously now that it’s become a useful means to criticize AI companies with.

collinmcnulty• 11 days ago

Which is why OpenAI and Anthropic think it’s fair play for other companies to distill their models, right?

sealeck2• 11 days ago

I think this comment is quite disingenous -- it's like if there's a rule that says "nobody can walk on the grass" that you object to because you'd like to have a picnic with some friends; your claim is that if someone gets out a bulldozer and drives it across the lawn to make a parking lot followed by an army of lawyers that anyone who wanted to picnic is objecting purely because it's a convenient way to criticise the bulldozers.

carljungslabtek• 11 days ago

I’m not sure if “theft” is the right word or not but selling copied dvds on the street is completely different from “sharing is caring” piracy. These companies took the entirety of human knowledge for free and now want to sell it back to you, and even openly tout that it will put most of us out of our jobs.

It’s not the same thing as downloading a car or a purse for private individual use.

shimman• 11 days ago

Because the AI companies also stole from things society values extremely high: artists, workers, children, and humans.

I don't really care about IP for the exact same reasons you say, but what I hate even more are rich elites thinking they can continue stealing massively from the commoners unabated.

We just spent the last 15 years seeing big tech literally making society worse, and I think people are finally fed up with the results.

zelphirkalt2• 11 days ago

Well, the problem is, they are not held accountable, but heaven forbid you as a simple citizen engage in that much IP infringement, holy moly are they gonna be at your doorstep quickly.

It's rules for thee but not for me. On an enormous scale. If it was fair, then we would have a global announcement, that the US are abandonning IP laws and copyright, and no one needs to worry about infringing on any such a thing any longer.

overgard15• 11 days ago

Didn't Anthropic pay like $3 billion dollars or something for their IP theft? And yes, I'm going to keep calling it theft. Comparing a kid stealing a song off limewire to a company stealing the entire internet is not the same thing.

panhandlecrow• 11 days ago

The “tech worker” of today is nothing like the SF based hackers and early product designers of Web 2.0, twitter era.

Artists in their own right and yet fundamentally pirates who opened the browser ecosystem, pioneered open APIs, invented ad blocking, embraced open source, engineered browser based telephony and streaming, gave us modern services like PopcornTime carrying the torch from torrents/piratebay into the modern era.

Give me Photoshop and JavaScript and I care not who makes the laws.

Today we have charlatans, hackademics, and heavily moderated sites like HN. The tech industry is nothing like it used to be - if anything it’s inverted with all the corporate replicas in every role and the creatives kicked out. There is no rebellion even slightly, no originality - they sound like hens, predictable and unprofound in every way.

The real creative hacker type needs a new vertical, this one has been taken over like ants on a sandwich.

justinhj• 11 days ago

Unlike Uber and Airbnb that did break local laws and got away with it because people wanted their service (and also deep pockets for handling litigation and encouraging politicians to see your way), training an ai is generally not theft.

If I read a physics textbook and now I know some physics do I perform a theft when I use it practice or teach someone else?

impulser_• 12 days ago

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.

glenpierce3• 12 days ago

Good point. If these are the ethical standards they go by, who’s to say they’re abiding by any standards to keep my data private.

nullbio14• 12 days ago

Obviously they are looking at your IP and code. Anthropic trains on your data regardless of you opting out, I know that one for certain. There's no coincidence they "keep your data temporarily despite opting out" - because they wash it in legal loopholes. There is no opt out. These companies WILL steal your business. Only a matter of time before they are sued as well.

Chu4eeno2• 12 days ago

Weren't they required by a court to keep everything, despite the privacy policy etc.? Or am I mixing up my companies in constant law battles.

azinman24• 12 days ago

Anthropic trains on your data regardless of you opting out, I know that one for certain.

How do you know that?

hhh• 12 days ago

How is it obvious? We have strong legal agreements that state otherwise, do you think they are just lying and risking thousands of lawsuits?

I think it's more likely that there are 3/4 of a billion users that don't have these agreements and just pay for ChatGPT Plus and don't opt-out of anything, and are feeding the scaling machine every day.

everfrustrated• 11 days ago

Anthropic trains on your data

This is why companies are wanting the AWS hosted models because they trust AWS running of the same models more than the vendors themselves.

tiahura2• 12 days ago

My guess it winds up like the old FAT joke about Android.

sk4rekr0w3• 12 days ago

This is way overstated.

OpenAI will certainly launch devices. It is to be seen how competitive they are and how much product market fit they achieve.

OpenAI also has better data retention policies relative to Anthropic on SOTA models.

alpineman2• 12 days ago

Do you really believe those policies after stories like this?

overgard15• 11 days ago

Use local hardware if you can people! Chatbots are a luxury anyway and the local ones are catching up. You don't need the fanciest bells and whistles. Don't believe the narrative that you're "falling behind" if you're not using the latest model 20 hours a day.

zygo• 12 days ago

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

maz1b• 12 days ago

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

Voultapher• 12 days ago

My gut instinct is to call you a mooncalf, given the lengthy documented history of OpenAI "re-appropriating" things and wanting to profit from it. So here is my honest question, what light did you see them in before and what did you base that on?

nyanmatt• 11 days ago

Maybe lead with the question instead of the feigned insult?

nicce2• 12 days ago

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

Based on what has been already going on there, not even surprised anymore.

wwind123• 12 days ago

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.

luciana1u• 12 days ago

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.

jhatemyjob• 12 days ago

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.

drob518• 12 days ago

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.

mandeepj2• 12 days ago

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

seydor• 12 days ago

New revenue streams

narrator• 12 days ago

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...

throwa356262• 12 days ago

    xAI argues the stolen data contains “cutting-edge AI technologies with features superior to those offered by ChatGPT”. The company claims this information could provide OpenAI with a “potential overwhelming edge in the race to dominate the AI landscape”.

This has to be a joke. The also-ran accusing the market leader. Specially when some of what xAI has achieved was stolen from Google.

avadodin• 12 days ago

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.

Lio• 12 days ago

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?

thewhitetulip• 12 days ago

Don't matter to people who look at codex as a way to replace employees

baxtr3• 12 days ago

Maybe. But those people might care about their IP being stolen by Codex.

sunnybeetroot2• 12 days ago

And Apple is a company built on anti trust violations[1].

Every company that sees it profitable to break the law and pay a fine seems to do it. There are no “good guys”.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/apple/659296/apple-failed-complianc...

mhdi_kr99• 12 days ago

steam/valve are good guys

fny2• 11 days ago

Developers walked into their walled garden with joy. It's no where near what this article describes.

anon7000• 11 days ago

Completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand though. Ok, so every massive company (including OpenAI) is built on anti-trust violations. I agree we should go after everyone for this, but whether Apple has done bad stuff is a complete distraction from IP violations at OpenAI

overgard15• 11 days ago

That doesn't make any of it morally excusable. "The other guy is just as bad!" is an argument for toddlers.

The reason why "the other guy is just as bad" is we've removed real consequences from these companies and people.

Someone should probably be in prison for the Grok CSAM thing for instance.

While we're calling people out, this one is extremely rich: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-... . The old man dying, to me, is not that most extreme part. It's the part where Meta has internal documents about guidelines for minors having romantic relationships with chatbots. WTF! Quoting:

    “It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” according to Meta’s “GenAI: Content Risk Standards.” The standards are used by Meta staff and contractors who build and train the company’s generative AI products, defining what they should and shouldn’t treat as permissible chatbot behavior. Meta said it struck that provision after Reuters inquired about the document earlier this month.

    "The document seen by Reuters, which exceeds 200 pages, provides examples of “acceptable” chatbot dialogue during romantic role play with a minor. They include: “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed” and “our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss.” Those examples of permissible roleplay with children have also been struck, Meta said."

gtirloni• 11 days ago

This is irrelevant and simply whataboutism.

aftergibson• 12 days ago

Okay, yup, this line of reasoning has me removing agents from my personal machines. I was enjoying the convenience and waved that internal niggle away with a vague feeling of "they would never exploit this", but you're right, I needed that wake up call.

dannyw2• 11 days ago

You could consider open source coding harnesses (I quite like Pi especially its customisability) as a middle ground and alternative.

And for what it's worth, Codex is still open source under Apache 2.0. Claude Code is closed-source.

DrBazza• 12 days ago

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

Maybe? But more likely their 'surprise' will be that it's actually happened, because the people doing this kind of thing must surely know it's wrong and won't be telling their bosses, and/or their bosses definitely won't be passing that info up the chain. Just like movies, 'plausible deniability'.

jstummbillig• 11 days ago

That was a wild read.

taude• 11 days ago

Everyone is deluding themselves if they think their enterprise privacy contracts with these frontier model companies (especially in CA) aren't reading and processing their private data

WhereIsTheTruth• 11 days ago

If only it was just copyright violation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji

zftnb666• 12 days ago

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.

himata4113• 12 days ago

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?

runako2• 12 days ago

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.

steve1977• 12 days ago

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

avodonosov2• 12 days ago

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.

m3kw93• 11 days ago

Is the same clean room technique used for code bases.

avodonosov2• 11 days ago

The fair use concept applies to any copyrighted material, I suppose.

BTW, maybe OpenAI can build on this their defence line. If they prove in court that the materials they got from Apple have never been used for design of products, and OpenAI only collected some linguistic statistics from the docs (as we know, training LLM is concepfually no different from calculating word frequencies), which does not violate copyrights. As for possible similafities in pfoducts to the Apple design, that's just a coincedence, developers can come to equal solutions when solving equal problenms. Equipped with modern AI assistants they quickly re-discover approaches others have discovered.

anematode3• 11 days ago

Exactly!

cromka2• 12 days ago

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.

agigao• 12 days ago

Sam, thinking that he could get away with everything.

The master strategist of the west.

Luker88• 12 days ago

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?

alpineman2• 12 days ago

Bad look for Jonny Ive

barrkel• 12 days ago

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.

kneel25• 11 days ago

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.

nvarsj3• 11 days ago

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.

stefan_• 11 days ago

Of course, this is essentially the basis of capitalism. Corporations are just people, folks, spread the knowledge and we all get richer.

The best corporations I worked at had people dedicated to reverse engineering competitor products and were deeply steeped in the market, the worst were those where product just cared about making their bosses happy.

plun92• 11 days ago

Reverse engineering is not the same as this.

awakeasleep• 11 days ago

what do you mean by "exact same thing"

This isn't about "poaching" employees (in our society people can work where they choose, they are not property of a feudal lord) and using their knowledge.

This is about ex-employees accessing Apple's internal fileshares. It's about instructing employees who were about to leave to take everything they could with them, and giving them training on how to evade Apple's offboarding security process.

nvarsj3• 7 days ago

Well I don't know the details from Apple's side, and this was 20 years ago. That was just the discussion on the ground. I personally experienced a senior Mot employee grilling me about some IP I had developed, then go to Apple the next week. Also saw many directors/VPs with extensive proprietary knowledge go to Apple. Apple opened up recruiting events 10 minutes down the street from Mot HQ in Schaumburg Hilton to poach the best people (which I went to, and flew to Cupertino to interview for the original iPhone ios team - wish I had passed that, I would be retired by now!). I know there was also a free flow of information as part of the ROKR collab while Apple was working secretly on the iPhone.

liendolucas• 11 days ago

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?

AbstractH242• 11 days ago

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.)

quietthrow• 11 days ago

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

greenoracle9• 11 days ago

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.

cmiles8• 11 days ago

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

nullbio14• 11 days ago

Anthropic is doing the same thing but at an even larger scale than OpenAI, ironically. OpenAI was just unlucky enough to get caught.

ralphington• 11 days ago

[citation needed]

kzrdude• 11 days ago

Yeah but it also seems like they have the best model right now?

preisschild• 11 days ago

"Open"AI, Apple, Anthropic, "Space"X are all bad guys

overgard15• 11 days ago

I think their moral failures are just a bit more visible at the moment. I don't think the other companies are much better. Maybe they're more competent at not running afoul of the law.

If this is the kind of thing that makes people want to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions, I'd suggest going to local models instead of Anthropic, or smaller providers with more stringent ethical guidelines.

xandrius• 11 days ago

Starting? Did you just connect to the Internet?

Andrex6• 9 days ago

Yeah, whatever small amount of Koolaid I was excited to drink went out the window when they ditched the charity angle. A broken clock's right twice a day and Musk is right about that.

rambojohnson• 11 days ago

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...

sidcool• 11 days ago

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

verdverm• 11 days ago

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-uber-executive-s...

Prior art suggests jail time and product failure

jakeinspace• 11 days ago

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.

bigyabai10• 11 days ago

I don't see why they'd accept a settlement.

glances at Kushner's $1 billion OpenAI investment through Thrive Capital

Are you sure they won't settle? Apple settled their case with NSO Group, even though they were (and still are) hacking iPhone handsets. Seems to me like Apple is happy to settle cases that interfere with their political ambitions whenever America's government asks them to stand down.

If Apple's protectionist treatment is predicated on non-interference with other protected companies like OpenAI, maybe they will be motivated to settle out of court.

causal• 11 days ago

If OpenAI is this shady culturally then all kinds of dark secrets could come out.

They just released 5.6 to great fanfare with benchmarks showing even their weakest model (Luna) supposedly smoking Fable. Having used it a couple hours I'm certain this is a lie, and I'm now curious what else is.

dzonga• 11 days ago

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.

overgard15• 11 days ago

I'd really love to see OpenAI use ChatGPT to mount their defense. Eat your own dog food! It should be PhD level right?

_RPM• 11 days ago

The culture of cheating is normalized in Asian culture.

halamadrid• 11 days ago

I fail to understand the need to do this, isn't it obvious from the history that Apple will find out and will go after this? Why take this risk? I feel its better to start from scratch & redo things so that you get two things

1. a chance to correct problems you couldn't before because things evolved too much 2. don't break rules or agreements you have signed before

The first one is the key part - I think redoing something the second time almost always ends up in a better result. If you are paid to do it with enough resources and team then all the more easier.

pwthornton• 11 days ago

Did you really expect better from a Scam Altman company?

0 morals or ethics.

zkid18• 11 days ago

Wow, American AI labs are now quite close in ethical competition to their Chinese counterparts heh.

It seems we're truly in a power war rn.

warumdarum• 11 days ago

One way a bubble can pop is from the healthy endavours to devour the bubble inhabitants whose funds run out in a legal feeding frenzy?

Someone• 8 days ago

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

How come Apple didn’t remotely wipe that laptop or at least black it from accessing their network? Whether they couldn’t or didn’t, that doesn’t show well for their IT department.

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

Related Stories