Apple Lawyer Mixed Up OpenAI Names Before Trade-Secret Suit

When Apple sued OpenAI last week for trade-secret theft, one of the load-bearing claims in the complaint was that OpenAI 'never responded' to its concerns. NBC News reports that emails it reviewed tell a different story. OpenAI did reply in February to Apple's initial outreach. What derailed the back channel, according to the reporting, was Apple's own outside attorney, who mixed up the names and email addresses of two OpenAI employees with the last names Wang and Chang, and later apologized for the mistake.

That detail cuts against the framing of the complaint, which was filed on Friday and paints OpenAI as unresponsive. If the pre-suit outreach actually stalled because Apple's lawyer sent messages to the wrong person, the record starts to look less like corporate stonewalling and more like a legal-team error that produced a lot of silence and then a lawsuit. The underlying allegations are still serious. Apple accuses OpenAI of coaching departing Apple employees in how to evade security processes, and separately names Chang Liu, a former employee who joined OpenAI, over an allegedly stolen Apple laptop.

For a case that Apple has described in filings covered by CNBC as a scheme operating 'at every level,' a bungled email thread is not a decisive fact, but it is the kind of thing a judge and a jury both notice. Discovery around who wrote to whom, when, and what OpenAI's counsel actually said in February is going to matter more than it usually would, because Apple's own filing has put that period into contention.

The honest caveat is that NBC News is working from a slice of the correspondence, not the full docket, and neither side has said publicly what OpenAI's February reply contained. What the reporting doesn't give you is the identity of Apple's attorney, the OpenAI counsel on the other side of the thread, or the substance of the exchanges beyond the mix-up itself. Anyone trying to read the odds on this case should watch for those emails to surface in briefing, because they will either shore up Apple's 'never responded' framing or continue to erode it.