Apple is suing OpenAI, accusing it of stealing company secrets
Apple on Friday accused OpenAI of stealing secrets about products still in development, setting up a legal battle between two of the world’s biggest tech companies.
In a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the consumer technology giant said OpenAI, an artificial intelligence leader with a new hardware business, asked Apple job applicants to share details about secret projects and to bring components and prototype devices to interviews.
Apple also accused OpenAI employees of downloading internal documents from a laptop owned by the iPhone maker.
OpenAI used confidential information to approach Apple’s manufacturing partners, including asking one partner to demonstrate Apple’s technique for finishing the metal on its devices, the suit says.
Apple sent OpenAI a letter in February expressing concern that confidential information could “inappropriately flow into OpenAI’s business,” according to the lawsuit. OpenAI did not respond, Apple said.
“OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the flimsiest of foundations, rotten at its core with an illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,” Apple wrote in its lawsuit.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. Both companies have denied the claims.)
Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI adds to the sharper partnership between the tech titans. Apple has largely remained on the AI ​​sidelines, even as other tech giants spend hundreds of billions of dollars building AI models and data centers, and startups are pushing the technology envelope.
To help catch up, Apple in 2024 it entered into an agreement with OpenAI to use the start-up’s AI technology to redesign its products, including its Siri digital assistant. But OpenAI was disappointed with Apple’s integration of ChatGPT and even considered legal action. In January, Apple said it was working with Google to support Siri and its other AI products.
Contributing to this tension is OpenAI, which confidentially filed for an initial public offering and is itself creating a new family of hardware products.
OpenAI paid $6.5 billion last year to buy IO, then a year-old design studio founded by Jony Ive, a former longtime Apple designer. Engineers and designers have been leaving Apple for OpenAI since this deal.
In its lawsuit on Friday, Apple accused Tang Tan, OpenAI’s hardware director and former Apple executive coaches its Apple employees on how to avoid Apple’s security processes for departing employees.
Mr Tan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Apple accused another former employee, Chang Liu, of using a former colleague’s laptop to access and download technical documents while working at OpenAI. Mr. Liu told an Apple employee what information about unannounced products she should review before job interviews, Apple said.
Mr. Liu also planned to access internal documents through an Apple-owned laptop that he did not return when he left the company, according to the suit.
Mr. Liu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI misled a manufacturing company it contacted to learn about the metal coating technique into believing it had Apple’s permission to display it, according to the suit.
Apple is seeking an injunction preventing OpenAI from owning, using or sharing Apple’s trade secrets, as well as an order requiring OpenAI to return the intellectual property to Apple.