Apple on Friday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and two former employees, saying the giant phone maker’s trade secrets were misused to benefit the company’s AI venture into consumer hardware.
The lawsuit is against a former senior systems electrical engineer at Apple and former vice president of product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch, as well as the OpenAI Foundation, OpenAI Group PBC and io Products.
“This case is about former Apple employees stealing Apple trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI,” the filing said. “Apple brings this suit to put a stop to this.”
What do we know about the lawsuit?
The lawsuit is against two former Apple employees who now work for OpenAI, as well as the OpenAI Foundation, OpenAI Group PBC, and io Products.
It was filed in a federal court in California.
Apple alleges that one of the defendants failed to return a company-issued work laptop, subsequently used an authentication bug to access its internal network and download “dozens of Apple’s confidential hardware-related files.”
The other defendant, Apple claims, has been emailing himself information about Apple suppliers and internal industry summaries before leaving the company.
“At every level, from technical staff members to the chief hardware officer and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI is stealing Apple’s trade secrets and confidential information,” Apple said in the 41-page complaint.
Apple and OpenAI, from allies to competitors
The lawsuit dramatically escalates months of tension between the two tech giants after years of collaboration, in which Apple allowed its users to access ChatGPT results through Siri, giving iPhone users the option to sign up for a ChatGPT subscription directly from the iOS Settings menu.
Last year, OpenAI bought io Products, a hardware startup founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive, as it aims to move beyond software into consumer hardware.
OpenAI has never explicitly specified what type of device it is creating, only describing it as an effort to find a new way to interact with AI that goes beyond “traditional products and interfaces”.
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Edited by: Shawn Sinico
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