OpenAI Rebuts Apple Trade-Secrets Suit, Publishes Receipts

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. The honest caveat is that this is entirely OpenAI's telling, and what looks decisive in a blog post 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.