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

876 pointsby stock_toasteryesterday at 8:47 PM440 commentsview on HN

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


Comments

ChrisArchitectyesterday at 10:31 PM

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

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JumpinJack_Cashtoday at 1:06 AM

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grttw14yesterday at 9:14 PM

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nba456_yesterday at 9:17 PM

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stahhhpittoday at 12:05 AM

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

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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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_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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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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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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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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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.

nullbiotoday at 4:14 AM

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

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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