The legal fight between Apple and OpenAI escalated this week, with OpenAI asking a court to throw out Apple's trade-secret lawsuit in a filing it describes as "rotten to its core".
Apple sued OpenAI in early August, accusing two former Apple executives now working at OpenAI — Chang Liu and Tang Tan — of misappropriating confidential hardware technology. On August 6, OpenAI filed a 31-page motion to dismiss, arguing that Apple never identified specific trade secrets that were taken. Days earlier, the company published a lengthy rebuttal titled "Apple is getting this wrong", laying out internal emails and iMessages to counter the claims.
In that post, OpenAI said Apple's outside lawyers had emailed the wrong person in February — confusing two Asian last names — and falsely claimed to have spoken with OpenAI's general counsel. It also published messages in which Apple employees asked Chang Liu, whose last day was January 22, to help locate files after he had left. OpenAI says Apple told its counsel it was "resolving any issues", then went silent for five months before suing.
The dispute arrives in the same week Apple's new Siri experience launched on Google's Gemini models in a deal reportedly worth around $1 billion a year — a pairing that underscored how quickly the alliances around AI are shifting in Silicon Valley.
