Some pretty damning stuff:
> OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can.
> Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan.
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI.
Non-competes and the like are gross but what's described here isn't just "bring your expertise to OpenAI" it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
OpenAI is about to get ROCKED on this. From this report, this looks open and shut. Apple has basically infinite money and incredible lawyers. Not sure what OpenAI can counter with unless they have clear, hard evidence this hasn’t been happening.
OpenAI also has infinite money, and the graph for money/lawyering gets clamped well below what OpenAI can afford. It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.
OpenAI really doesn’t have infinite money. They have a lot of money, sure, but it is being burned like crazy, we know this. It is widely known that they are deeply unprofitable.
Compare that with Apple, a company that throws off billions of cash every quarter. This isn’t a legit comparison.
I agree that both companies have sufficient capital that legal resources are a a wash. But:
> It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.
This we don't know. We don't know what Apple wants to accomplish with this suit. They may be more interested in the injunctive relief than the monetary recovery. They may want to weaken OpenAI as part of a strategic pivot toward marketing local, private AI inference. As everyone has noted, the factual allegations are detailed and extensive - Apple likely has OpenAI dead to rights on this.
> OpenAI also has infinite money
And an infinite money-eating bonfire
Unless Apple protracts the case, that won't become an issue.
>> OpenAI also has infinite money
Except OpenAI needs every cent of that money for compute, and they don't have healthy profits that can replenish what they spend.
Their financial situation is simply not comparable to that of Apple's.
The OPs point wasn’t that OpenAis financial situation is comparable to Apples. It was that the likely cost of litigation is a drop in the ocean for OpenAi too despite their comparative lack of cash to burn. Legal disputes like this cost in the hundreds of millions over many years, so well below 1% OpenAis last single funding round in single year. If they got a tiny benefit from this (very gross) behaviour it may be finically well worth while. OpenAI may very well go under IMO, but this will barely be a straw on the camels back.
OpenAI has no shortage of vc money sources.
For now.
This could wind up like the old FAT joke about Android.
OpenAI will just put the employees involved under the bus. They can claim the information acquired wasn't used for OpenAI's benefit or authorization especially since the device isn't actually out yet.
Well OpenAI is offering equity to the US Government (and who knows who else privately) Tim Apple famously refused to bring manufacturing back to the US when the current president asked and play hardball on infosec. While this is a civil case, increasingly judiciary seems to be an extension of the executive. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Does this ring true in California?
For real. If Apple can prove half of this complaint, OpenAI need to be jumping straight to "how can we settle this immediately." Can you imagine how much fun Apple lawyers would have taking this to a jury trial? Especially considering overall Apple knows that the public overall vaguely likes Apple and distrusts "AI" companies for, hmmm... (alleged) IP theft.
I'm also wondering about all these involved ex-Apple people who decided to pivot to crime, it seems like OpenAI has to fire all of them, no? Because how do you just keep them, knowing that they're all basically tainted, and that Apple will be coming back to sue you again for anything that seems "inspired" by Apple products or tech.
What a massive cock-up for whoever (Tan?) is at the top of this conspiracy, to think this was worth the risk, and to have not known that the chances of getting caught going this far outside the legal boundaries were less than 100%.
I hope they can pull it off.
That said, silicon valley is full of stories where people brazenly stole from company A to start company B and pretty much got away with it.
EDIT: this is the one I remember:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems%2C_Inc....
The silicon valley TV show even had episodes on this! Man I miss that show. They'd have so much funny material nowadays if they came back.
What kind of repercussions will OpenAI face?
In the extreme case it may result in OpenAI having to abandon their in-progress consumer hardware products, but honestly that might actually be good for them. I really can't see all that investment being worthwhile. Better for them to stick to their core competency.
Apple may get a chance to rifle through OpenAI's trade secrets. And they may win an outcome where there is direct court supervision over what OpenAI is allowed to build and how.
Basically nothing. I mean they’ll have to pay up but money clearly isn’t something OpenAI worries about. They’ll just raise more from the infinite vc money tree.
Is there any other AI company with as much controversy as this company?
- ~murdered~ (dead) employee who's mother is on a anti-sam hate campaign - ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company - conflict of interest with Microsoft
Despite Anthropic's bad press, they haven't been as dishonest as this company.
> ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company
Are we discussing Steve Jobs in 1985?
Any time there is that much money and power involved there is going to be intense drama.
> Are we discussing Steve Jobs in 1985?
Steve Jobs left because he lost a corporate power struggle. Sam Altman was fired because the board thought he was too fundamentally untrustworthy to remain as CEO (if we're to believe their statement ofc).
Different kinds of "controversy" IMO
Steve also actually, you know, left. And stayed away for over a decade.
This is not drama though, it's more inline with unethical, immoral, and bad. It's indicative of company with bad character.
proactively creating the script for the movie
A company that behaves like this in one area, cannot be trusted in any area. Any enterprise that endorses/allows OpenAI products to be used is taking a big risk.
I’m not one to defend huge companies, but OpenAI is a huge company.
It’s possible this kind of behavior is endorsed throughout, or it’s possible it’s limited to this specific group.
We know nothing beyond what Apple has alleged.
I’ve been at companies where just one group - or even just one person - did something unconscionable and kept getting away with it until the story hit the headlines. And I can tell you, it was never just an isolated incident involving just that group. It’s also all the people who knew something was up and didn’t say anything. And it’s the corporate leadership fostering a pervasive culture of turning a blind eye to ethical problems. Often by allowing people in power to ensure that sounding the alarm is a career-limiting move.
It very well could be a culture issue.
If it is, would you extend your opinion to say Apple turns a blind eye to ethical issues as well?
All of the employees divulging secrets came from Apple after all. The person named in the lawsuit was a 24 year Apple veteran and a VP at departure.
You think the group tasked with developing whatever hardware device they're trying to build is isolated away from senior leadership and is running rogue?
Not being able to prove is one thing, pretending it may not be the case is next level of positivity. There are definitely going to be pockets of hard working smart folks in every place, however the company as a whole would get a bad name even if few folks are indulged and the company is not doing anything about it.
Do you know who the CEO is?
Same thought I had, I realized I was zero percent surprised reading the claims made, it feels like a perfect representation of the personality Sam Altman shows the world.
Are you joking or are you confusing huge valuations with huge headcount?
OpenAI had >5000 employees last year. How many work in the hardware group?
This is only like the 12th reason not to trust OpenAI. The culture starts from the top
The same can be said about Apple. Several companies have complained about them taking a meeting with apple, presenting their product, only to have Apple then rip it off and build it in house. To say nothing of sherlocking.
Meh. Consider that you had no choice and no say that your data out there, both present and historic as mined, aggregated and analyzed by data collectors, was used as a training set for the LLMs. I think you’re a tad too late with your warning. They’re already thieves and they know it. And they know you can’t and won’t do anything about it.
Public/crawlable data is very different from private/internal documents and code that employees might prompt with.
You can trust Apple. I mean they openly lied to a judge last year under oath, but you can trust them.
I'm the farthest thing from an Apple fanboi you can find, but Apple's not so unethical as to make all this (OpenAI trade secret) stuff up. The OpenAI settlement they'll no doubt get from this won't amount to 30 days of their App Store rent-seeking that they were propping up with those lies.
If they can't prove any of this stuff they wouldn't file the suit. No matter what you or I think of Apple, the chances that this went down at least as criminally as they allege, are very high.
Can you provide a source? Otherwise your comment is useless.
Judge's ruling.
> To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.
> [..]
> Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies. They did not seek to withdraw the testimony or to have it stricken (although Apple did request that the Court strike other testimony). Thus, Apple will be held to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
> A company that behaves like this in one area, cannot be trusted in any area.
A company locking down their phone platform cannot be trusted with their laptop OS.
Until the industry addresses the Original Sin of Generative AI (and the ascendance of Thievery Corporations), we should expect more and more of this. So far, theft has been rewarded. As long as you make enough money, people seem to be okay with ignoring long-lasting impacts of intellectual theft. As long as you become King of the Cannibals, it seems many are happy to remember you as King and not as the Cannibal.
Apple kindly wanted to make OpenAI add in some legal liabilities to their IPO filling.
Discovery is going to be great fun (for Apple).
Discovery is the entertainment for the rest of us.
this will settle before it gets to discovery I bet
Yes, exactly. Probably a settlement similar in spirit to Google v Uber RE: Anthony Levandowski stealing self driving IP
Interesting how Tang Yew Tan worked at Apple for 25 years (!!) and then threw it all out for this.
who knows, maybe he had giant gambling debts or other addiction(s) or bad real estate investments and/or lost half of it all to an ex-wife first. things that Jony might be readily aware of. assuming there is more than a kernel of truth to this - and i can't imagine not, the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account - it doesn't surprise me that Tan was a criminal, it's that he was such a bad criminal
> the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account
who responded to what?
This is a really bad look for a company that has vast quantities of our IP stored on its servers.
I don’t put my company’s IP on their servers, because I don’t trust them to not steal it.
I do hope Anthropic are better with IP, and I think they may be. Given Dario Amodei hasn't been sued by OpenAI while building Anthropic this seems likely.
I think Amodei may actually be quite a good human, despite my trust in big tech being at an all-time low.
Amodei tried to regulation capture the AI access and also tried to ban open weights. So I disagree with you.
Hasn't his lab not released a single open weight model?
That's also a bad look for any company who willingly hands its IP over
this time they stole from people who have the resources to fight back
It’s really unsurprising. Stealing IP is their whole business model.
This may be the reason why OpenAI reportedly delayed its IPO.
They might have had an inkling that this was coming.
Altman showing how desperate he is to get into hardware. He knows local models that supplement models in chip are the end of OIA
Casually dragging new employees into the deepest shit, it’s breathtaking. Also the naïveté of going along with it??
> He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information
Probably among many reasons for the switch to Gemini for their band aid AI until they get theirs were they want/need.
I forgot they were still working on a device, any guesses what it is?
I’m guessing a wrist wearable
I’d guess phone, anything else is too compute-constrained and just an accessory for them, plus has to pay 30% of subscriptions and can be disadvantaged strategically.
My money is on drone with missile pods.
An egg
Fried egg fried egg gotta get down on fried egg
Aybody's lookin forward
To tha
Weakened
If you sleep with dogs you're gonna get fleas. These AI companies have made billions by stealing other peoples content, what makes you think they would be above stealing from Apple?
I'm curious, who is actually making the calls and who is actually doing the scouting for these people. If this is coordinated, the chain must long, so let's see it!
It's ok because this information was just being used to train their models.
Mr Tan is suddenly going to be in a LOT of trouble
Which equals fame and intrigue in the Trump era, big congratulations to Mr. Tan on his new found wealth
Quick reminder that Apple was part of the silicon valley crew that partook of illegal non-poaching arrangements with other SV companies, helping to stifle salaries and more.
But, that's a bit of a tangent. On the other hand, Apple is accused of (and a jury ruled against them on the issue) hiring from Masimo to steal trade secret. Appeals are pending, of course, but it's a reminder that Apple is not lily white on this topic.
Copy of the Complaint.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...
9. In the months before he left Apple, Mr. Tan met with OpenAI or its collaborators and discussed meetings with a key Apple supplier. He began emailing himself information about Apple’s suppliers and internal summaries of the consumer electronics industry. And today, when interviewing Apple employees for jobs at OpenAI, Mr. Tan uses Apple’s confidential information to gain access to even more insider knowledge. He has used an Apple internal project codename to ask, “What’s the plan[?]” for an unannounced Apple product. He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information. These directions to bring Apple’s parts to OpenAI job interviews surprised at least one of the candidates, who commented that he “didn’t even know we could take those from the office.”
10. This is part of OpenAI’s strategy to extract Apple’s confidential information. OpenAI has been instructing Apple employees to bring “CAD/design artifacts” and “prototypes” to their interviews and to divulge details about their work such as “subsystem and component selection,” the “tools or methodologies you use for system integration, such as CAD software, simulation tools,” and “Vendor selection and communication/collaboration with vendors.”
11. OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can. After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols. Unsurprisingly, Apple’s investigation has found a pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.
This is going to be interesting.
Only because both companies have access to billions and infinite lawyers.
Apples billions are in cash
OpenAIs billions are in IOUs to Nvidia
IPO has entered the chat.
Michael Burry intensifies
OpenAI has concepts of money.
OpenAI investors have concepts of money. OpenAI has their money.
I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
2026 Wimpy would be an effective serial entrepreneur.
Only one has Actual Money™ and quite a lot of it.
Lawyers: rubbing hands together
Yeah it reminds me of tha Pink Floyd lyric “..we’re so happy we can hardly count!”.
Can you pay for lawyers with RAM, GPUs or IOUs for tokens?
Imagine comparing what apple has access to vs a deeply money losing firm
More importantly Apple can effectively bring up the shadow of this lawsuit whenever OpenAi tries to acquire money.
They can make legal fillings and calls to Bloomberg to keep the story going as long as they want to and suck some oxygen out of any IPO ramp up.
The “nuclear bomb vs coughing baby” meme comes to mind.
I would guess these days Apple probably has more lawyers than engineers.
> Chang Liu
What did he steal, Garageband?
Reminder that Apple hired 30+ engineers from Masimo and stole multiple trade secrets, including their blood-oxygen monitoring tech, leading to a $634 million judgement against them. They also asked President Biden to intervene and pressure the ITC to reverse their ruling.
Not saying OpenAI is innocent here of course, but really no large corporation is. This is just how the game is played.
Get ‘em Apple. Begin the IP wars have…
probably the real reason why Apple opted Gemini over ChatGPT
Pretty foolish of them to play so unethically only to lose such a big account and now gain an open-and-shut lawsuit that will seriously damage their ability to compete in hardware for a very long time.
Maybe they believed Apple would roll their own AI and not have to license Google's.
There's also the possibility it was a coincidence, and the stakeholders in the Gemini decision are breathing a heavy sigh of relief.
Based on the timelines at play here, I'd wager this.
Changing suppliers is potentially the reason why Apple’s AI strategy was so delayed.
I heard oai turned apple down, not the other way around
What a neat culture OpenAI has.
Weirdly, this seems like they're trying to train a model to work like Apple? They seem really interested in processes and how stuff is done, rather than only the finished artifacts.
Given that allegedly hardware information was involved I’d lean more toward this is for developing either custom silicon based on Apple’s designs or OpenAI wants to make consumer hardware. Aren’t they making something with Jony Ive too?
There's rumors they've been planning a phone.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/29/everything-we-know-abou...
I assumed consumer hardware too though I can't imagine what OpenAI hardware would look like. Another take on the "smart speaker" that has hit the consumer market with a resounding "meh?"
A lot of people have tried to copy Apple’s finished product and they never get it right, because they don’t have the process behind it. How something looks is only a small part of it.
That doesn't seem that weird to me. Good processes lead to good artifacts.
Apple just seems like a weird target for that kind of stuff, is all.
This season of Silicon Valley is getting spicy
I will never grow tired of highly paid so-called geniuses so deluded by their own hubris they think no one will not only not notice them moving GBs of data onto a USB on their last day of work, but assume they also don't have logs of everything you accessed and everything you took.
Little no-name companies have this capability with off the shelf software.
Large companies like Apple have entire departments of staff whose job it is to monitor data theft.
It's bonkers and I love every single story as if it's never been told before.
> According to a report by The New Yorker, Swartz described Altman as a "sociopath" who "can never be trusted" and "would do anything
Who is surprised by this development?
Apple suing someone when they lose ground in a space is never surprising.
Super stupid actions by these ex-employees LMAO
These people think OpenAI can/will protect them?
Hot take, but Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could. Of course Apple can sue and they will probably settle some amount with OpenAI, but acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment, and OpenAI is uniquely worse at stealing corporate secrets is laughable. Especially considering Apple’s famous history!
> Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could
The closest involved Apple selling Xerox pre-IPO shares [1]. And there are zero allegations any PARC employees who moved to Apple with confidential information the this has gone down.
> acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment
It's not. It's why it gets litigated and criminally charged. I won't disagree that there is a section of Americans who think it's commonplace. But that's because they're either personally doing the crimes or surrounded by criminals.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-21/larry-tesl...
Hmmm it does seem like this seems much worse than what I thought of Apple doing (like stealing the idea for a mouse and GUI from Xerox), the best I could find is Qualcomm claiming Apple stole its modem code and gave it to Intel. That was settled before trial.
This however does actually seem far worse, reminds me more of Waymo vs Uber, people can go to jail.
Apple’s “stealing” has been dramatized because Jobs gave it a good line. It’s really not comparable to what these guys are doing.
Didn't apple get banned from selling apple watch because they pretended to want to buy IP and basically just poached and gutted the company instead?
WOW so these companies really are stealing enterprise data to make competing products! Fucking slimy! How can anyone trust them now?
Well they trained their model by scraping all digitised human knowledge and ignoring IP and CW laws so whats a little bit of corporate espionage in the grand scheme of things
The threads have now been merged, it seems.
[flagged]
... what the hell are you talking about?
[flagged]
Nothing that Steve Jobs advocated for coincides with OpenAI's business ethos. OpenAI would be just fine.
The burden of proof falls on you to defend that theory.
[flagged]
Steve Jobs would've drowned OpenAI in a thousand lawsuits like he did Samsung. He knew better than to compete fairly.
[flagged]
Sam Altman is doing Sam Altman stuff.
Stop trying to cram your "P" into "AI".
>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.
> How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are?
The openAI employee in question is also a former Apple employee.
Not just any employee. A 24 year veteran and at the time of departure the VP of design for the iPhone and Apple Watch
Ah, somehow I missed that even though it was included in the quote I copied. Thanks!
> After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28453229-apple-v-ope...
Lawsuits like this tend to be surprisingly easy to read, partly because they intend for the public/journalists to read them.
> How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are?
Either by being a former Apple employee, or polling former Apple employees.
Can't wait for the inevitable bailout and US tax dollars to pay for this!
Hence the rise of the DSA.
Bailout of OpenAI? Doubt it, unless Trump and Musk have some sort of falling out (again).
Has nobody heard about this theory yet? https://youtu.be/RqDAMeqvUgo
That video's over an hour long. Care to sum it up for us?
Like when Apple sued Samsung. Why bother with the free market when you can just sue your competitors?
What a dumb take. Apple is the most wildly successful company in the market. You think whatever pittance they get from this will outweigh the cost of stolen ip?
Are we sure this isn’t espionage? The names of the parties involved may also imply stealing by certain foreign countries
aren't most of their suppliers Chinese? don't need to spy to get hardware trade secrets when you get BCC'ed on everything.
That’s a pretty grotesque insinuation.
Why? It’s not unheard of to perform corporate espionage
> At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies
I sure hope they weren't referring to Siri here
Although I haven't tried the new Siri.
They didn't still the property, that would be illegal. They trained a model on it. That's totally ok.
Reminds me of Apple suing Samsung. Why bother with the free market when you can just sue your competitors?
Some of the Apple/Samsung complaint was horseshit (and was a bit of a distraction because they knew they'd need to settle their suit with Nokia).
But it was design copying and IP infringement stuff: duplication of things already in the wild.
This is on another level. If any of this is true, it's extraordinary, and I think OpenAI will likely want to settle quickly, thus increasing Apple's AI-related earnings.
According to Apple, are there any tech companies in the galaxy who haven't stolen their trade secrets?
If you can’t see the difference between a design firm pointing out obvious riffs on their first to market designs…
And a company openly instructing poached employees to exfiltrate documents on their way out the door, well…
I didn't read the full complaint but the article focuses on bringing Apple IP to interviews. It's not clear that it was intended to steal trade secrets.
The Liu guy seemingly did so but he wouldn't be the first person to try to take his own work product out the door for personal reasons.
I distrust statements like:
> “pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.”
This could mean almost anything.
It gets even worse. The person not only kept the laptop and used an exploit to download confidential Apple documents, they bragged about it to a contact who was still working at Apple who was also feeding him information:
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI. He also maintained a relationship with Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng, an Apple employee who continued to give him updates on Apple's projects, vendor decisions, and engineering details. When Liu learned he still had access to Apple's systems, he texted Peng "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny."
This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.
Doing it at a the company that most aggressively enforces secrecy is even crazier.
>This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply you.
Spot on perfect. I see this too often and not just in tech.
An acquaintance of mine was accidentally wired about $100k when it was supposed to be $5k. Before it could be reversed, they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country. They then changed all socials and handles. They are now ignoring all court documents and are on track to get a default judgement against them.
Their rationale? “It’s mine, they owed me this”. They are 100% convinced that they are in the right, not just that they can keep it but that they actually intended to send them this to begin with. I get it $100k isn’t nothing but they’re also throwing their life away for less than what they used to make a year in salary.
People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
If you're earning $100k in Silicon Valley, your expenses will swallow up almost all of that. A sudden $100k windfall, on the other hand, tax free and suitably invested,will let you live for years quite comfortably in many poor countries.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them […]
At $WORK we have the option of getting a work smartphone or having the company pay for (at portion of) our monthly mobile bill.
I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination. (Others chose payment because they did not want the 'hassle' of carrying a second device (and to save some cash).)
[delayed]
In my early career, I used my work computer (off hours) to do personal work. I never made any money, but it was still wrong.
At some point, I couldn’t live with myself, and purchased my own computer (better than what work gave me, anyway).
I never used my personal cell for work. The closest thing was coordinating meetups, when traveling.
I think that the new version of this is using your work's LLM account (potentially more powerful) to do personal work
As for what damage you do, it kind of depends on what you're doing. But in the end you're exposing your work machine to patterns and processes outside your normal job duties, potentially exposing it and the data/access it has to additional risks.
It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.
It’s not just wrong, you’re potentially allowing anything you do on that work computer to 1) be owned by the company and 2) be discoverable in court. it’s amazing how many it orgs are so lax with this. personal/work devices should and always be entirely separate. BYOD is a really bad crutch and a potential compliance nightmare timebomb for all parties.
"Whenever I leave a company I make sure..."
But its also that companies responsibility to ensure that the employer doesn't take anything.
Apple know how to use MDM on Apple laptops, why wasn't the device locked and located.
Absolutely, but just as it's not ok to enter someone's home just because they forgot to lock the door, it's not ok to exploit access at your old employer because their offboarding process missed something.
I do the same as GP does; I don't want there to be any chance that my former employer has forgotten to revoke access to something, so I make sure to clear out anything that might remain on any device that I don't return to them.
Who knows, maybe another former employee will decide to steal from them around the same time I leave, and me having access credentials on a personal device, even if I haven't used it, might arouse suspicion.
You get trustworthy people by trusting people. Generally when I was there there was a presumption of trust. Given how blatantly the defendants are alleged to have acted, that’s still the case.
>it’s also that company’s responsibility
Is it? I mean legally. Obviously it’s dumb of Apple to have left this guys access open, but that doesn’t mean they actually had any legal responsibility to lock him out. As far as I understand, the law is pretty clear that you can’t access anything you’re not allowed to by policy, whether there’s a technical block or not.
That doesn't absolve an employee (or ex-employee) of the covered entity going about and abusing the access they do have.
Many devices are indeed locked down. But given that it's an OS company and hardware vendor, many employees have access to hardware with e.g. SoC fusing that allows them to install custom-signed firmware. It's very difficult to make an OS lock out the people whose job it is to build the platform that OS depends on.
> then suggested I did get hired for my cybersecurity expertise, that I do take my obligations seriously, and he could just ask me to do whatever they were planning to do from the MDM console, and it would get done. He insisted that wouldn't be necessary since in his worldview the MDM was unbreakable and he just needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi or something.
> Very amusing worldview.
It’s ironic that you’re displaying the exact behavior pointed out by the GP:
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
MDM is implemented to protect company assets regardless of the actions of the users. It would not be due diligence on the part of the director to trust you to wipe your own device.
It’s not clear to me what the point of your comment is other than illustrating that you’re smarter than your director.
Um, no. Why would it be their responsibility? There are laws regarding IP theft. If you willingly break them you can't just say "well your security wasn't good enough".
Okay but why assume the latter part? In this case the perps were clearly caught.
There's really no way to prevent an employee from taking a piece of paper or a digital file from one place to another. The most you can prevent is accidental transfer. If they are malicious they will find a way no matter what guardrails you put.
Huh? This analogy makes no sense. It’s beside the point anyways.
The utility of laws isn’t in stopping something from occurring, it’s in establishing remedies for when they do. Someone illegally transferred IP to a competitor that had knowledge they were stealing, and now Apple is seeking their remedy.
“They could have prevented it” is victim blaming.
what part of "Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can." did you miss?
Mr Tan was not the one who retained the Apple-issued laptop:
> Liu also failed to return an Apple-issued laptop after his departure.
We need criminal charges to be filed against Liu, Tan and Peng. (And deep discovery to find anything Altman might have said to or about them.)
Wait, who is “we”? Why are you so invested in enforcing Apple’s IP rights?
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Bad people in control of AI is incredibly dangerous.
It’s a criminal charge. Have you seen a legal case for that? It’s always something like The People of California v. Someone. At least in theory, every citizen is an interested party when the prosecutor files a criminal case.
Why don’t you care about the rule of law?
If you're interested in seeing them prosecuted you probably want to wait a couple of years. The current DOJ isn't doing so hot.
> current DOJ isn't doing so hot
Hit them with state charges. Altman being a brat makes this politically attractive for any AG with ambitions.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Right. I noticed a coworker who recently left the organization was still running some of our software on his personal computer (evident in the access logs) and notified him that I could see, he should be more careful, etc. We agree to these contracts because compliance matters, not just because we need the job.
Rich people do this all day and it's why they're rich. There's nothing shocking about seeing a non-rich person try the same thing in hopes of becoming rich.
When espionage was your goal all along...
>Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust, responsibility and accountability, but there's people coming from low trust environments where exploiting loopholes and scamming everyone outside their inner circle is the norm, and it's the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.
They're brazen because they've never been caught or suffered consequences for their actions.
This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview.
I’ve been seeing this “high-trust society” dog whistle a lot lately, and I think it’s one of the funniest of its kind. You truly want me to believe that the United States, a country with a history of slavery and segregation, a country that went through a historical period dominated by people literally called “robber barons,” was a high-trust society before immigrants from less industrialized places came and ruined that?
> Petty theft, snatching, pickpockets, scams, etc are relatively uncommon compared to e.g. many popular places in Europe.
Yes, in non-popular places in Europe those are also quite uncommon, even more then in the US on average..
So the lesson here is that those type of crimes are common in tourist heavy places, like.. Times Square in NYC for example.
US office culture is generally pretty high trust. It has relatively high autonomy, authority, and low surveillance norms.
I don't know what that has to do with a historical period of slavery.
I think you could be more charitable, as GP said “culture,” not “society.”
Apple alleges not only individual malfeasance, but also recruitment tactics like “show-and-tell” aimed at recruiting those willing to bring company secrets (and discriminating against those who would not).
This is enough to constitute a low-trust culture that self-perpetuates.
Surely given the size of China there are plenty of honorable people. And surely in the US there are many dishonorable people, as you’ve pointed out.
100%.
The US is high-trust for insiders (rich white people). We allowed Donald Trump to loot the richest and most powerful society in history by imagining that he would follow the example of previous presidents instead of seeing him for the psychopathic mob boss that he is and always wanted to be.
Conversely, the US is zero-trust for outsiders such as foreigners, racially disfavored groups, and the poor. Allegedly-dog-eating Haitians and the like. We have guns and are not shy about using them. Being killed by police is a leading cause of death for young men of color, as noted by Ice Cube, and confirmed by researchers at Rutgers (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821204116).
> Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust...
That is just a long sentence for "us" vs "those people".
Having said that I don't entirely deny the effect of society on people's behavior. But at the same time, I have seen people from so called high-trust society being all polished and nice on the surface while being assholes and people from so called low-trust society being genuinely decent people despite not having the right name or the surface polish.
Also, assholes tend to attract assholes and people of the same tribe/clan/race tend to form groups.
Ok, the implication that I'm reading between the lines is that this sort of behaviour is somehow more tolerated by people with names like Liu and Tan, but is this actually the case?
I know there's some evidence of Chinese people working at big tech and feeding data back to the CCP but is this a "low trust culture" issue in general or an extrapolation of that one pattern?
Heh, as a (very white) American I presumed it was America in general today. From what I can see, it seems to be turning into a place where it's all scams, rug-pulls, crypto and sports gambling. This concerns me about the world that my 9 year old is growing up in, the only world he's ever known, even the early 2010s seemed to be higher trust than the past decade has felt like.
You don’t have to look any first than the White House to say that behavior is well-established in American culture, too. From the prosperity gospel to “don’t hate the player”, etc. this is deeply not a Chinese thing.
No, ‘high/low-trust culture’ has lately been co-opted as a racist dog whistle.
> The grandparent comment is just racist.
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. The concept of low and high-trust societies is well-studied [0], though how a given country maps to it may be disputed.
0: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3997396/
Not sure you're being clear about what you mean, here. Is OpenAI's company culture something you consider "low trust"?
It's more about people with "everybody steals so I should steal too" also known as "tylko frajer by nie ukradł" -- "only a loser wouldn't steal that" -- mentality.
And while its somehow "cultural" it's more about people hanging together having similar moral views.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Meh, I'm not returning my nice 4k wfh monitor unless they ask for it specifically
Exfiltrating secrets via monitor burn in would be wild though.
Or you can just snap a photo with your personal phone.
Nah man that's how you end up in the permanent underclass. If you want to make it you have to throw everyone and everything else under the bus, be a bizarrely mustache-twirling evil misanthrope and general freakazoid-type loser, and most importantly get too big to fail / too rich to sue bc you have the good lawyers who can basically stall suits to death. Here's an application to Wendy's.
I swear, some people are too quick to be offended or just can't recognize sarcasm.
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
Reminds me of how Sam Altman told the board that a safety reviewer had approved one of their AI models when the reviewer had done no such things.
The crucial part of why non-competes are gross is that they're trying to enforce what you do after someone stopped receiving anything from the past employer. If someone is helping competitors when still working somewhere, or actively taking stuff from their past employer after they've left, then yeah, of course that's dumb and should be punished. But there's no reason a non-compete clause is needed for that!
The companies are based in California, so regular non-competes are irrelevant. This is solely about IP theft.
I was responding to a direct statement by the parent comment about non-competes. If you think they're irrelevant, you should complain to them, not me.
Theft of trade secrets and a non-compete are unrelated and separate things.
Yes, this is why garden leaves are popular in quant finance.
You get paid for about a year to do nothing so that the trade secrets from your firm (trading strategies) expire.
That's very different from a non-compete. A non-compete is about your own know-how, not the company's.
Your gripe is with the parent comment then for mentioning them in the first place, not me. I was just responding to their aside.
Culture issue. From How to Apply to Y Combinator[1] by Paul Graham:
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
> we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.
1: https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html
Nah
You can beat the system and be disobedient while still behaving ethically. In fact that's the very best time to beat the system and be disobedient.
And, if YC is paying attention, this question might make a good filter for the unethical folks who’re willing to admit to their misdeeds.
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I think the person you are replying to was referring to Gary tan
It seems to be a common trait of the AI people to just brazenly violate the law. It’s like a requirement for working at openAI is to think rules don’t apply to you because you’re so smart.
Sure, “Trade Secret” non-competes are usually a pretext employers use to keep low-wage workers under their thumbs, but protecting bonafide trade secrets is their only sorta legitimate use, IMO. The world would be better if they were illegal, but letting engineers disperse confidential information from their last employer wouldn’t be the beneficial part.
Yeah every job transition I’ve managed I was straightforward and some new employers instructed me to do so.
It’s weird too, these people’s history will show up on job sites and etc, people will find out… fast.
The examples seem clumsy and amateurish.
> Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan.
That's one of the dumbest things one can do while on their soon-to-be ex-employer's network.
This may be just one bad employee, i.e., Mr. Tan. Your quoted sentences say OpenAI did such and such, but it may all be just Mr. Tan. That's not to say OpenAI is not responsible because they are supposed to give strong guidance to new hires that they are not to bring any confidential information from their former employer.
This isn’t the first time something like this happens and I always wonder how are these seemingly smart people earning good money so dumb.
Right? Just straight up documentation with no shame: From an Axios article on this
> Liu celebrated the exploit, according to the filing. "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny," he said in a message to a former colleague who was still employed by Apple.
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-trade-sec...
"Is you taking notes on a criminal f-cking conspiracy?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZLoMrRgFFE
I want this to run like a real f-cking business!
Appalling.
Meh. It's one megacorp stealing stuff from another megacorp, hardly "appalling", who cares. I'd probably react the same way; I just wouldn't leak it to my next employer, that's dumb.
These companies are big enough (especially financially) that I'm really surprised that they do not have their own FBI/CIA/NSA departments in the world of corporate espionage.
Exactly. If ever there was a y'all deserve eachother situation, it is this.
flagrant
I’ve been present when the world comes crashing down around people who thought they were too smart to get caught.
The surprise in their eyes is always very genuine.
It’s even more ridiculous when choosing to do it Apple. It’s hard to think of a company with more legal resources and which is more protective of its hardware IP.
And vindictiveness.
Steve declared thermonuclear war on Google because Android re-skinned to use BUTTONS.
> because Android re-skinned to use BUTTONS.
No. Steve's rage was justified, IMO. It was because Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board while simultaneously being Google's CEO and Google was surreptitiously building Android at the time. Mother of all conflict of interests.
There was a recent story that reminded me of it. Mike Krieger was on Figma's board and Anthropic's CPO, while Anthropic was surreptitiously building Claude Design.
Yes, briefly: https://qz.com/apple-google-yahoo-search-engine-safari-antit...
Disney comes to mind…
If I remember, there was a former Apple employee, who was quite influential with The Mouse House.
Nintendo?
Either people are being really, really silly (which cannot be discounted), or the potential reward is so high as to override whatever qualms a normal person must have. Is that it? Is this people looking at a solid career at Apple or sudden millions from OpenAI, and thinking the risk is worth it somehow? Or, more darkly, is it people thinking _this is my only chance and I have to take it_? Or is it trickle-down lawlessness?
Sometimes the reward is pitifully small. There was a podcast about insider trading and sometimes the insiders will give the information for free or a negligible sum. There’s something in human psychology that facilitates collaboration even in unethical acts.
Google/Waymo + Uber/Otto comes to mind here with Anthony Levandowski.
Google and Uber started as courtroom enemies, but probably had to commiserate some on Anthony Levandowski probably being the worst hire they both made.
> And also he briefly started a religion
I always assumed this was a tax-avoidance scheme
When all that went down, I was at Facebook. And some recruiter posted the news that Anthony was no longer at Uber, with a message like “this is a great opportunity to secure a top tier hire!”
I replied (on Workplace) “Absolutely the fuck NOT.”
Intelligence is domain-specific. People who have put too many skill points in technical knowledge often have none left for common sense and street-smarts.
INT 18 WIS 3 is a terribly dangerous build in this world.
Overconfidence. These people think they are much smarter than others to be caught.
More like lot of people are leaving Apple for OpenAI (no surprise) and an Apple manager wants to send a signal to everyone leaving to chill with what they walk out with. Corps have to perform a lot of theatre because there is lot of info constantly leaking out.
And now the entire industry knows they are too stupid to be employed.
seemingly smart is the key here. intelligence doesnt make up for ethics.
And I'd question the intelligence also. I don't think employment at FAANG means a lot in that regard.
Yeah but it isn't just unethical, it's also deeply stupid -- you will be caught.
Those people are designers. And they don't necessarily understand software, data, or security. When I explained to my non-technical friends about how they were being tracked by website cookies, it sounded like a sci fi story to them. But yes, it's dumb.
I was more surprised by how they managed to keep using work devices after termination. This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.
You assume they have a standard exit process.
A VP is not a designer, and doesn't have a standard anything.
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Because companies get an advantage by having their people do this. You only hear about the times they get caught, but apparently they get caught so rarely that it's worth it.
Everywhere I've ever worked, if I went to management and said "hey, I've got some files from my last job, if you want to see them," they would say "absolutely not, please get rid of them RIGHT NOW," and probably fire me.
But, I don't work in Silicon Valley.
I work for a Silicon Valley headquartered company and would expect the same.
It's people who hold these beliefs who commit these acts. They're so convinced everyone around them is depraved, usually–at least in part–through personal experience, that they don't stop to consider the alternative.
"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
- Steve Jobs
Great artists steal ideas, not a painting off a gallery wall.
Well their whole model is a stolen art collection :)
Why not both? Three cheers for escape artists!
When you are bulk copying data off your former employer's network share, that is a lot more than "stealing ideas".
Having a certain type of finish on the metal is an idea. Tricking someone into using Apple’s exact trade-secret finishing technique is copying. Making a new, even better technique, that’s so good the general public forgets about Apple and thinks you’re the new benchmark… that’s the kind of stealing that quote is talking about.
Yes, and if you analyze the finished metal and put in the work to reverse engineer it, fine, have at it. That's not even theft. If Apple really wanted to keep it completely secret forever, they can't sell it, so thats the risk they accept.
But thats very different than scheming to steal actual property, which these files are.
The concept of applying some kind of Apple-ish texture finish to metal is an idea. A research-heavy, highly specific, finely tuned, multiple step, trade secret, brand signature metal finishing technique is a painting.
Kinda seems like OpenAI didn’t actually have that idea or the ability to execute it, if they had to go to apple’s supplier and lie to them to get them do it.
Funny thing, Steve Jobs is the only source that attributes this quote to Picasso, and it seems very likely he made it up.
The idea behind the quote most likely came from T.S. Eliot: Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
Every single time.
If someone calls himself open, you should know who it is and what to expect.
Generally speaking, companies retaining a competitive advantage with each other is good for their investors but bad for the public. It's usually to the public's benefit for employees to share knowledge, it makes goods and services cheaper and more available.
If "eliminate all IP law" is your preference then that's fine but it isn't a reason to commit crimes while we have these laws.
IP law can be a thing while maximizing transparency by not including trade secrets as a concept.
Civil disobedience.
Civil disobedience involves flagrantly and publicly and obviously violating the law so you can be arrested to draw attention to whatever issue you have with the law. If you’re breaking the law and trying to get away with it, that’s just criminality and isn’t honorable or respectable.
We have the laws, but I don't have to feel outraged when regular people undercut the oligarchs and those people's interests align with my own.
Apple will lose this because they didn't do the due diligence to do basic protection against this.
Apple doesn't have a history of losing lawsuits.
Apple does have a history of settling out-of-court after claiming disproportionate damages. NSO Group and Corellium come to mind.
As a counterpoint, why should a “metal finishing technique” be proprietary? Lying to the vendor that Apple said it’s ok is obviously wrong, but an employee taking that knowledge in their head doesn’t seem wrong to me. We have moved past the age of indentured apprentices and the freemasons.
Because Apple paid to produce that knowledge? It's good that people can spend a lot of time and money developing new knowledge and then for some period of time they get to exclusively reap the rewards of doing so.
Do you mind if I MITM all of your work output, your emails, your code, your messages, and attach my name to it and then receive your paychecks in exchange for my work?
> Because Apple paid to produce that knowledge? It's good that people can spend a lot of time and money developing new knowledge and then for some period of time they get to exclusively reap the rewards of doing so.
You’re describing patents?
Trade secrets. A legally recognized thing, and legally protected.
And NDAs. I may develop a non-patentable technique. That doesn't mean I can't share it with you under NDA and, if you breach said NDA, enforce it.
I'm describing "intellectual property," patents being only one way to legally protect such property.
To me, the fraud is the issue. If the person actually has the knowledge to spec out the whole technique, then sure, they can ask for it. But if they just said "give me what you give Apple" or describes it in detail and the vendor says "no I only will give that when Apple says they're okay", I don't see anything wrong with that either.
My reading is that the employee did not know the method but only of its existence.
It must have some sort of value if OpenAI went through the trouble to get access to it.