OpenAI Rebuts Apple Trade-Secrets Suit, Publishes Receipts
TL;DR
- Apple expanded its defendant list from 2 to at least 13 former employees in one filing, signaling investigators found a coordinated scheme rather than isolated incidents.
- OpenAI published private iMessage threads and emails publicly during active litigation, an almost unheard-of corporate move designed to pre-empt the preliminary injunction before briefing closes.
- Apple's lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing names, a procedural error OpenAI is now citing as evidence of Apple's own factual sloppiness.
Trade-secrets defendants usually respond with a terse 'we deny the allegations' and then vanish into discovery. OpenAI just did the opposite, publishing a blog post titled 'Apple is getting this wrong' that, as flagged by 9to5Mac, reproduces email screenshots and internal messages to argue Apple's July 10 complaint is, in OpenAI's words, 'careless, aggressive and oddly personal.'
The rebuttal leans on two embarrassments for Apple's outside counsel. OpenAI claims those lawyers 'emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names,' and only corrected course after OpenAI pointed it out. It also says Apple's assertion of a pre-suit discussion with OpenAI's General Counsel 'never happened.'
On the two named ex-Apple employees at the center of the suit, OpenAI publishes what it says are internal messages from hardware exec Tang Tan telling colleagues 'we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies.' Tan, OpenAI notes, spent more than 24 years at Apple. For Chang Liu, whom Apple alleges retained access to internal data after leaving, OpenAI's counter is that 'Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information,' blaming Apple's own offboarding hygiene rather than an exfiltration scheme.
The genre matters as much as the content. Doing a company-blog rebuttal with receipts, rather than fighting only in filings, is a bet that shaping the narrative before discovery is worth the cost of putting your version on the record early. OpenAI followed with a motion to dismiss days later, calling the suit 'pretextual.' Every screenshot and quote in the post is OpenAI's selection from its own files, and what looks decisive there can shrink under cross examination. The reporting doesn't give you Apple's counter-evidence, which specific hardware program is really in dispute, or how the court will treat those screenshots. The people who benefit most if OpenAI is right are the rival labs still recruiting from Apple, who now have a public template for how to answer back when the poaching claims come.
What others are reporting
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TechCrunch Read →
Details the 11 newly named employees and specific misconduct: one photographed confidential docs before an OpenAI interview; multiple former staff recently returned retained Apple devices.
Another former Apple employee seems to have met with Mr. Liu and Ms. Peng in advance of Ms. Peng's interview at OpenAI.
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Forbes Read →
Leads from OpenAI's defensive posture and documents the wrong-person email incident, where Apple confused names, handing OpenAI its sharpest evidentiary rebuttal against the injunction.
Apple's request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets.
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AppleInsider Read →
Raises the enforceability problem: once information is in engineers' heads, an injunction cannot un-know it, and frames Apple's motion as primarily a discovery acceleration play.
Apple will be irreparably harmed absent a preliminary injunction.
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JURIST Read →
Focuses on the concurrent expedited discovery request as the operative legal lever: Apple wants document production before defendants can modify their positions.
Originally reported by 9to5mac.com
Read the original article →Original headline: OpenAI Rebuts Apple Trade-Secrets Suit With iMessages, Says Apple's Lawyers Emailed the Wrong Person