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Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

1477 pointsby stock_toasteryesterday at 8:47 PM823 commentsview on HN

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai/


Comments

liendolucastoday at 11:51 AM

I don't really get it. High profile people working for Apple leave for OpenAI, obviously for money. Is it worth it though? You already have a good job, enough money and work for an iconic company.

I mean people in these positions taking these decisions, wouldn't have actually benefited way much more if staying at Apple and actually disclosed OpenAI attempts to steal IP and technology?

gabriel-uribeyesterday at 11:15 PM

This season of Silicon Valley is getting spicy

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rambojohnsontoday at 4:08 PM

just desserts. let them fight each other. every major monopolistic corporation in this country was founded on theft anyway. lets not clutch pearls here guys...

AbstractH24today at 12:40 PM

How far are we from OpenAI being “too big to fail”?

Eventually this bubble will burst. Question is what’ll do it.

(I’ll say I don’t use OpenAI after the DoD stuff, so don’t misconstrue this as approval.)

SirHackalottoday at 1:27 AM

Get ‘em Apple. Begin the IP wars have…

fauchletenerumyesterday at 11:17 PM

> According to a report by The New Yorker, Swartz described Altman as a "sociopath" who "can never be trusted" and "would do anything

Who is surprised by this development?

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ed_mercertoday at 1:17 AM

> At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies

I sure hope they weren't referring to Siri here

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seydortoday at 4:57 AM

New revenue streams

LoganDarkyesterday at 10:56 PM

Weirdly, this seems like they're trying to train a model to work like Apple? They seem really interested in processes and how stuff is done, rather than only the finished artifacts.

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apparentyesterday at 10:11 PM

>In its lawsuit Friday, Apple accused Tang Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and a former Apple executive, of coaching his hires from Apple on how to evade Apple’s security processes for departing employees.

The word "coaching" is very malleable, and could refer to perfectly legal conduct, or conduct that is illegal, unethical, or both. How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are? One would assume he was told by previously-departed Apple employees. Would they have been forbidden to disclose information about the outgoing process? I would think so, given how careful Apple is about these things.

> Apple accused another former employee, Chang Liu, of using a former colleague’s Apple-owned laptop to access and download technical documents while working at OpenAI. Mr. Liu told that Apple employee what information about unannounced products she should study before job interviews, Apple said.

I would be very hesitant to assist a former colleague who is still at Apple in this way. Apple is well known for using deliberate leaks to smoke out leakers, and it would be easy for them to get a current/loyal employee to go through the interview process at a competitor for the purpose of finding out if the competitor is trying to get Apple employees to act unethically/illegally.

EDIT: I see my comment, which I posted on the HN thread for an NYT article, has been merged into the comment section of a different article, and is now being downvoted a bunch. Please understand I did not post this comment here, so if it seems out of place that's why.

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zygotoday at 3:52 AM

Nothing is too low for Sam. I expect any kind of shady shit from that company

naturalmovementtoday at 12:30 AM

I will never grow tired of highly paid so-called geniuses so deluded by their own hubris they think no one will not only not notice them moving GBs of data onto a USB on their last day of work, but assume they also don't have logs of everything you accessed and everything you took.

Little no-name companies have this capability with off the shelf software.

Large companies like Apple have entire departments of staff whose job it is to monitor data theft.

It's bonkers and I love every single story as if it's never been told before.

paxystoday at 3:12 AM

Reminder that Apple hired 30+ engineers from Masimo and stole multiple trade secrets, including their blood-oxygen monitoring tech, leading to a $634 million judgement against them. They also asked President Biden to intervene and pressure the ITC to reverse their ruling.

Not saying OpenAI is innocent here of course, but really no large corporation is. This is just how the game is played.

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jhatemyjobtoday at 4:31 AM

This kind of stuff happens all the time. The employees in question are just incredibly bad at covering their tracks, normally they'd get fired and that would be it.

It is fishy that OpenAI's leadership didn't have the watchdogd in place to catch it. And there's this huge public lawsuit about it now. Plus there's the Elon lawsuit. Makes me think somebody wants OpenAI to go down. Almost like a sacrificial scapegoat, in order to achieve psychosocial unity in the programming community, or something like that.

opengrasstoday at 2:41 AM

> Chang Liu

What did he steal, Garageband?

quietthrowtoday at 12:57 PM

At the end of the day leadership matters in corporate settings (or for a country for that matter). The person at the helm sets the tone for the culture - what’s acceptable what’s not etc. how to go about achieving a goal. Objectively speaking and leaving out judgement of good or bad- Sam, Trump etc all are extremely good at the skill they bring. And when they are put in a position of power they do end up revealing who they are. Thats the thing about power - once you have it will reveal who you are and you have no control over that And Thats the deal. Sam prolly has no idea about it but given who he is he only has a bunch of narcissistic megalomaniacs surrounding him and so on and so forth with dilution as levels progress

NetOpWibbyyesterday at 11:17 PM

Super stupid actions by these ex-employees LMAO

These people think OpenAI can/will protect them?

Luker88today at 8:52 AM

And everyone will keep using them, and nothing will happen, because the markets are completely irrational, sociopathic and nobody was actually in charge, regulations are bad etc...

What is the realistic expectation where megacorporations are above a good chunk of the law, the citizens can't hopefully pass any legislation and pardons are just a matter of a donation?

dreamoftheirisyesterday at 11:41 PM

WOW so these companies really are stealing enterprise data to make competing products! Fucking slimy! How can anyone trust them now?

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sashank_1509today at 12:10 AM

Hot take, but Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could. Of course Apple can sue and they will probably settle some amount with OpenAI, but acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment, and OpenAI is uniquely worse at stealing corporate secrets is laughable. Especially considering Apple’s famous history!

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tancoptoday at 9:17 AM

[dead]

s08148692yesterday at 10:33 PM

Well they trained their model by scraping all digitised human knowledge and ignoring IP and CW laws so whats a little bit of corporate espionage in the grand scheme of things

laravinson26today at 10:18 AM

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ChrisArchitectyesterday at 10:31 PM

Some more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48865019

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JumpinJack_Cashtoday at 1:06 AM

[flagged]

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grttw14yesterday at 9:14 PM

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nullbiotoday at 4:14 AM

If you think this is bad, I promise that anything they're doing at Anthropic is 10x worse.

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firesteelraintoday at 12:43 AM

Are we sure this isn’t espionage? The names of the parties involved may also imply stealing by certain foreign countries

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nba456_yesterday at 9:17 PM

[flagged]

stahhhpittoday at 12:05 AM

Stop trying to cram your "P" into "AI".

nba456_today at 12:50 AM

Like when Apple sued Samsung. Why bother with the free market when you can just sue your competitors?

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andy_pppyesterday at 11:00 PM

Can't wait for the inevitable bailout and US tax dollars to pay for this!

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nba456_yesterday at 9:50 PM

Reminds me of Apple suing Samsung. Why bother with the free market when you can just sue your competitors?

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Conscatyesterday at 10:08 PM

According to Apple, are there any tech companies in the galaxy who haven't stolen their trade secrets?

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exabrialyesterday at 9:36 PM

They didn't still the property, that would be illegal. They trained a model on it. That's totally ok.