Apple Is Suing OpenAI for Allegedly Stealing Hardware Secrets

The iPhone-maker claims OpenAI encouraged poached Apple employees to bring over confidential presentations, secret prototypes, and key supplier details. Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its hardware chief on Friday for allegedly stealing the iPhone-maker's trade secrets, including unreleased parts and prototypes, confidential designs, and documents about stealth projects. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI chief hardware officer Tang Tan, who spent 24 years at Apple and oversaw iPhone product design, and his colleagues at the AI company of encouraging people departing or considering leaving Apple to bring with them proprietary and unreleased technology. Tan allegedly helped coach recruits on how to evade Apple's data security protocols and directed them to bring confidential Apple parts to job interviews at OpenAI. "OpenAI's nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets," Apple says in the lawsuit, which was filed in US district court in San Jose.