OpenAI says Apple is suing over lost engineers, not stolen trade secrets

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to throw out Apple's trade secrets lawsuit, and it has not been polite about it. In a motion filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, the ChatGPT maker argued that Apple is using litigation to paper over a problem of its own making: it cannot hold on to its engineers, and it cannot ship competitive AI. The filing calls the case a baseless and pretextual lawsuit meant to compensate for Apple's position in the talent market.The tone runs through all 31 pages. Variations of the word "fail" turn up close to 50 times in the document, which is less a legal accident than a message. Apple sued on July 10, naming OpenAI along with chief hardware officer Tang Tan and engineer Chang Liu, both former Apple employees, and alleging they carried confidential product information out of the building and fished for more during job interviews.OpenAI says Apple's own iCloud policy created the access it now calls theftThe most pointed section of the motion goes after how Apple manages departing staff. OpenAI argues that Apple encouraged employees to use personal iCloud accounts for work, mixing corporate and personal data, then read personal iMessages sitting on company devices. Its position is that leftover access is a foreseeable result of Apple's own systems, not evidence of anyone stealing anything.That maps onto the messages OpenAI published earlier this week. In them, Liu, whose last day at Apple was January 22, is repeatedly pinged by former colleagues asking him to help locate files, refresh their memory on shipping decisions and point them to the right engineer. One Apple employee tells him she signed out of his iCloud and declined to keep a copy of his data.The Apple OpenAI lawsuit is really a fight over 400 departed employeesApple's complaint says more than 400 of its former staff now work at OpenAI, a number that says more about the shape of this dispute than the individual allegations do. Tan spent 24 years at Apple leading iPhone and Apple Watch design before joining Jony Ive's IO, which OpenAI bought last year for $6.5 billion. Liu was an iPhone engineer.The relationship soured well before the lawsuit. The two companies signed a Siri deal in 2024; by January, Apple had turned to Google instead.Apple wants an injunction while OpenAI wants the case goneApple asked the judge on Monday for a preliminary injunction that would bar OpenAI from touching the alleged trade secrets while the case runs. OpenAI answered first in public, with a blog post titled "Apple is getting this wrong" that flagged an embarrassing detail: Apple's outside counsel emailed the wrong person after confusing two similar last names, then claimed a phone call that never happened.Now it wants the case dismissed outright. If the judge disagrees, discovery will pull both companies' hiring and security practices into open court, which neither side particularly wants.Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.