OpenAI airs Apple lawsuit dispute in public blog post

OpenAI has publicly pushed back against Apple's lawsuit by releasing communications that it says contradict the iPhone maker's account. In an overnight blog post titled "Apple is getting this wrong," OpenAI described Apple's lawsuit as "careless, aggressive, and oddly personal" and shared iMessage and email threads to challenge key allegations. The post is not a formal legal filing but an effort to influence public opinion, as the companies face off in court.

The lawsuit, filed last month, centers on former Apple employees Chang Liu and Tang Tan, who now work at OpenAI. Liu, a former iPhone engineer, is on OpenAI's technical team, while Tan, who spent 25 years at Apple overseeing iPhone and Apple Watch design, serves as OpenAI's chief hardware officer. Apple claims they took confidential information about unreleased technologies, processes, and products to advance OpenAI's hardware ambitions. According to Reuters, Apple on Monday requested a preliminary injunction to prevent Liu, Tan, and OpenAI from accessing, acquiring, using, or disclosing alleged confidential information while the case proceeds.

Apple's lawsuit accuses Liu of failing to return a company-owned computer and using an authentication vulnerability to access Apple's cloud-based network storage weeks after leaving. He is also said to have downloaded confidential files and instructed another Apple employee how to do the same while avoiding Apple's security team before she joined OpenAI.

OpenAI offers a different take. It says Apple now admits that its own employees reached out to Liu for help locating information, even as it accuses him of accessing Apple data after departure. The company argues that Apple's "residual access" claim ignores a systemic issue: Apple fails to properly manage system access when people leave, leaving former employees with unwanted and often unknown access to files.

On Tan, Apple alleges he sought confidential information while interviewing Apple employees for OpenAI roles and urged candidates to showcase Apple components they worked on. OpenAI responds that Tan has consistently made clear that OpenAI does not want and must not use any confidential information from other companies.

OpenAI also denied that it ignored Apple's initial inquiries. The company says Apple's outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names and conceded that no discussion took place with OpenAI's general counsel. OpenAI published the email exchanges between legal teams and Liu's iMessages with an Apple employee in full on its blog.