Apple Sues OpenAI Alleging Theft Of Trade Secrets

In the middle of the Artificial Intelligence wars, which has included quite a bit of employee shuffling between AI hungry tech companies seeking to gain an edge, it seems someone might not have been all that intelligent when it comes to sharing things they knew at the company they’re leaving with the company they’re interviewing for.

Apple today dropped a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that ChatGPT maker and some of Apple’s ex-employees stole trade secrets. 9to5Mac has the fullest report I’ve seen on this so far, including this statement from Apple:

At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously. Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. We will always defend our teams’ hard work and innovations, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so.

The full filing can be read here. The details are quite interesting if you’re into this kind of corporate skullduggery and legal maneuvering.

Here’s a quote from the filing:

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 theplan[?]” 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.”

This will certainly further strain on Apple’s partnership with OpenAI. Word had circulated earlier this past Spring that OpenAI was going to be the first company to release legal beagles at Apple over dissatisfaction with the partnership.

I’ll say this, even though everything is alleged at this point, Apple has to be pretty pissed off to drop this lawsuit. Of course if the accusations are true who could blame them. It’s certainly a shot across the bow if not directly at the water line.

But then again, when it comes to companies like OpenAI (also Apple and others) that had no compunction about scrapping the entire Internet to train their AI robots on the intellectual property of others, nobody should be trusting anybody with anything in these corporate circles.

The one thing this era has reminded us is that there’s no honor among thieves and not much that any company or government says that can be trusted.

I wonder if anyone has run the legal filing through OpenAI’s just announced products for a legal analysis yet?

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