Apple puts dozens of former employees at OpenAI on legal notice
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| Apple appears to believe that additional former employees have shared company information with OpenAI. Credit: Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images |
Former Apple employees who now work at OpenAI have been put on notice.
According to a new report from Financial Times, Apple has sent legal preservation letters to roughly 40 former employees, which request that they save any documents or communication that could be relevant to their prior employer.
Last week, Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that two former employees who went on to work for the AI giant shared Apple's trade secrets. Apple believes that this confidential information was used by OpenAI to develop the consumer hardware products that the AI company is currently working on.
OpenAI has denied the allegations, of course. However, in its lawsuit, Apple said that it believes this is "just the tip of the iceberg."
So, what do these new legal letters mean? It appears that Apple believes that there may be more former employees who misused confidential company information besides Tang Yew Tan and Chang Liu, the two employees whom Apple is currently suing. The legal letters could also serve as a warning from Apple, putting former employees on notice that Apple is watching their work closely. Based on the Financial Times report, the employees could also be subject to discovery requests as the lawsuit unfolds.
Tan is Apple's former Vice President of Product Design and currently works at OpenAI as the company's Chief Hardware Officer. Liu was formerly an iPhone engineer at Apple and left the company to join OpenAI at the beginning of the year.
According to Apple, more than 400 former employees now work at OpenAI. As more details emerge, it'll be interesting to find out Apple's reasoning in targeting these specific OpenAI employees, who make up about 10 percent of its former workers who jumped to the AI company.
Wonder if Apple has ever hired similar talent from other companies?
ReplyDeleteYes of course they have and hiring of a few (but key) engineers from another company did not help Apple’s case when Masimo claimed trade secret theft of pulse oximetry (blood oxygen) technology. Apple lost. Details in the OpenAI case will emerge, but given the large number of former employees moved and apparently accessing Apple servers after they left, it is hard to see how OPenAI will emerge as not guilty here.
ReplyDeleteJony is yearning for the simple days @ AAPL, when all he had to worry about was making things thin.
ReplyDeleteHear that humming … ?
ReplyDeleteThat’s the sound of a hundred office shredders, all starting at once. …
if they sent the letters via Apple Mail then the respondents will never get them. Case closed.
ReplyDeleteIf one hasn't before experienced civil litigation–I've been through it 3 times–this is one of those moments in which you find out a lot about yourself.
ReplyDeleteLet them fight…
ReplyDeleteYou mean 10 seconds round 1 lights out for OpenAI?
DeleteSam Altman's hardware is going to fail miserably.
ReplyDeleteHardware is hard.
And designing it, producing it, servicing it, selling it, is a long road.
It is very different from code, you need real world business relationships for starts.
So Apple is now just accusing any ex employee.. man have they got a complex... All Apple is trying to do, as per usual, is come up with bogus lawsuits BS to block the competition to gain market share and consumer trust.
ReplyDeleteIt was OpenAI that started it.
DeleteThey got pi**ed Apple chose Google to power Siri.
So you think they're just sending these to random people with zero evidence?
DeleteYes. This is Apple, they literally tried to argue in a court of law, around the globe, they owned the rights to trade mark exclusively an oblong shape and the colours black and white, to block Samsung devices from sale.
DeleteSo you think Apple designed the SP02 sensor and implemented it in their Apple Watch by themselves and the tech is not stolen from, lets name a company...Masimo?
DeleteOh, such drama. Apple has sent preservation letters (not a lawsuit) to less than a tenth of former Apple employees at one specific company that's notorious for ignoring intellectual property, and you state it's "any ex employee" and they "got a complex". If your neighbors start taking parts off your car and reading your mail you'd do exactly what Apple is doing.
DeleteWell I’m sure the company whose existence is due to theft of other people’s intellectual property would never engage in practices of stealing intellectual property
DeleteYep.
We're just bringing up other random and unrelated lawsuits now? How about something more relevant, like all the other companies and people suing OpenAI for stealing their work. Apple ain't the only one they've stolen from.
DeleteBased on the actual legal filing, they have plenty of actual proof. They were very explicit about it and it’s damning, especially the part where Chang Liu emailed documents to himself and then bragged about it in another email to an Apple employee, WHILE working at OpenAI.
DeleteA completely false (and irrelevant) characterization of that lawsuit. Apple made neither of those claims.
DeleteThat’s a lie. They sued over trade dress, which was the presentation, packaging, and even the advertising of Samsung’s stuff. Why are you parroting a long-debunked pile of BS?
DeleteThis thread is full of this. So many ignorant responses.
DeleteYou’ve reviewed all the documents and there is nothing actionable from former Apple employees?
DeleteYou literally have no clue what you’re talking about.
But… someone said it in a YouTube video I watched once and it fits my idea of what Apple is like so it must be true :O
DeleteThat's not how this works—these letters aren't accusations, they're just notices to preserve documents in case they're needed during discovery.
DeleteOpen AI “uhoh maybe we backstabbed the wrong guy 😳”
ReplyDeleteHow do you even know without your own corporate espionage?
ReplyDeleteOpenAI hired hundreds of people away from Apple. OpenAI is working on hardware products. Apple doesn't need a "spy" to figure this out; they usually just track the data walking out their own front door. Before high-level engineers leave, corporate security teams run digital forensics that flag mass downloads, USB transfers, or emails sent to personal accounts, leaving a 'paper' trail. It's highly likely the former Apple employees receiving these letters (some dozens out of the hundreds who were hired away) left some sort of digital signature that was flagged.
DeleteAlso, Apple works with a tight-knit network of global suppliers; if OpenAI starts ordering custom components that are similar to Apple's manufacturing specifications, those suppliers or matching patent filings will quickly sound the alarm back to Apple. Maybe those count as "spies" but they don't need to be coming from within OpenAI.
Well it's not illegal to hire former employees of another company, especially in California and a lot of previous knowledge lives in someone's very own brain. We used to call it "work experience" and "developed skills" and it's also not illegal to order components. It would be thrown out as coincidental
Delete• It is illegal to ask them to bring confidential prototypes and data.
Delete• It is illegal to hack into company systems in order to steal trade secrets.
• It is illegal to approach suppliers and pretend to be an Apple employee whilst actually an OpenAI one.
Apple's legal team aren't idiots. They know the difference between someone taking a job at a new company and bringing actual hardware and data with them.
I was quoting someone's comment, not Apple or it's Lawyers.
DeleteYour 3rd point isn't proven, is it? And if someone takes information "just in case it helps in your new job" isn't necessarily the problem of the new hiring company either unless they were the ones asking to get it in the first place to get even hired.
A very basic example.
Lets say you worked at company A and you always found the style guide and slide desk templaes very nice and therefore you take a PowerPoint copy if it makes your new job potentially easier at the new company, I doubt any company is going to check the source of your ideas. Instead you will be greeted with a "this is such a great idea!"
Asking interviewees to bring proprietary hardware to interviews for "show and tell" is a false equivalency to the non proprietary "work experience".
DeleteBut did they do that or is Apple just saying they did? Let's see how it plays out in court
DeleteNow monitoring your own corporate network and discovering a breach is “espionage?” Good grief.
DeleteIt must be very difficult to tread that fine line - say I was a tech / car guy at Mercedes then transferred to Porsche - surely just even knowledge I have built up is close to a trade secret ?
ReplyDeleteScam Altman and his cash incinerating business model of a company will be bankrupt before this is finalized
ReplyDeleteLooks like it will be a long battle. Waiting to see what will happen.
ReplyDeleteIsn’t OpenAI the sole reason for all this memory shortage chaos and all at the hands of them stealing Apple’s trade secrets? I am heart broken how insanely expensive information technology has gotten because of AI.
ReplyDeleteRemember when OpenAI was a non-profit and took everyone's money and now are PBC... bet they go IPO in 2027.
ReplyDeleteIt's Google "Don't be Evil" all over again.
So what if Jonny Ive states that he was the one that came up with the design (Which I'm sure is the reason he is there - Design) Are Apple going to say his design is not his own?
ReplyDeleteYes, because when you work for a company and produce things, the results belong to the company. That’s why you are paid to be there. It’s a mystery why that’s not crystal clear to you. That’s one of the most basic tenets of business and employment.
DeleteNow it's getting juicy! Keep up the blunt force drama, Apple!
ReplyDeleteHope the lawsuit is settled before AI becomes a commodity.
ReplyDeleteDid Jony Ive find something in the mail?
ReplyDelete