Apple is getting this wrong
openai.com
openai.com
I would expect them to start out with something like Apple is suing us for yada yada yada, but instead it reads like the diary of a hurt teenager.
Its insane this is coming from a company with as much scope as openai. Scope may not be the right word.
The companies can suck and their product can do amazing things at the same time.
I posted this in another comment but this was weird: https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/
I think the pendulum will then swing back to the expectation that companies act and behave like adults rather than cringy kids trying to be cool.
Yep, down to the pages of iMessage screenshots
For the first reason alone, it's worth it when you can.
If you don't know what's going on, this blog post is nonsensical and makes OpenAI look weird.
If you do know what's going on, you'll immediately notice they don't address 80% of the stuff Apple is accusing them of, which makes OpenAI look dishonest.
It just seems incredibly unprofessional and ill-considered.
Specifically Thoughts on Flash, but there were probably more such press releases.
[0] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/steve-job...
It's always suspect when one side tries to argue their case in the court of public opinion.
Frankly, it's a big red flag for me and immediately casts suspicion on said party. I mean, do you think you're going to lose in court and so you're trying to get out ahead of that?
Posting this is insane in the sense of "What will posting this possibly improve for OpenAI?"
It's not going to change the court case. It's not going to impress professional adults.
I guess... teenage reddit users with too much time on their hands who are fans of OpenAI? Though struggling to see how that demo would care about a theft of trade secrets case.
Whatever executive decision-making thread led to this being released needs to be recalibrated. I'd expect >13 year old maturity from a company even 1/10 the size of OpenAI.
"OpenAI is so inept at system isolation that it accidentally hacked Huggingface" seems like a more important PR fire to put out. (Whether or not that breach was artificially manufactured)
...you expected more from OpenAI leadership? Based on previous incidents this seems kinda par.
Just not clear who is…
They literally have communication experts sitting there, breaking their heads over how to influence the public opinion in the company’s favor.
I guess they learned it from Elon: if people like you, they’ll just hold your stock forever, even if you don’t make much money.
But... it turns out that professional people and consulting companies who have years of experience in a subject area might have something to offer. Who knew?!
Regular companies have people that talk to the media or maybe run some ads. OpenAI is trying to have in-house media.
For a frontier lab it’s striking just how much energy (and dough) goes into this.
You’re right of course that PR exists elsewhere, but that obviously true assertion misses the finer details of how PR works at OpenAI. In doing so it functions as a thought-terminating cliché.
Is that the Elon lesson? I see him behave terribly and suffer little consequence. Much like his political buddies.
This guy from Weil claims to be representing you. For some reason, he is lying about speaking with me on the phone. I don't know who he is and we have never spoken.
I don't know what the point of his lie is, but could you please confirm if he is actually representing you, and if so, whether you have other counsel you can use. I don’t think interacting through him is appropriate given this behavior.
--- So, a lawyer emailed the wrong person. That's it. And they use that as a peg to hang their whole case on. I guess GPT 6 thought this was the real smoking gun!
If you noticed Sam Altman's latest posts he moved to all lower case, including "I", which I see as due to the same reason
Moreover OpenAI says, “[Apple] now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information”, but the transcript they cite seems to me to show the opposite? It’s Chang Liu asking for someone to help him copy data. The part where Apple employees reach out is later and it’s not for copying data to a hard drive… it’s basically “who should I talk to about this project?” Which makes sense because when he was contacted it was after he left (so he wouldn’t have access to data)
Can someone please tell me what am I missing? None of this makes sense with what they’re saying. The fact that the lawyer emailed the wrong person is moot if they caught it and resolved it days later.
- Leaving employee (LE) needs a USB stick to copy data off their Mac to give to their Manager (MA) so someone at Apple still has access
- After LE left, MA has access to LE Mac and iCloud to still access some data
- At some point, LE asks MA to sign out off LE's iMessage account on that Mac as they suspect they'll get OpenAI-related messages soon and don't want Apple/MA to see them
- Eventually, MA deletes the Apple files in LE's iCloud
But they're also quite explicit and repeat the directive (including during the exit interview) about removing Apple files from your account when you leave, and logging out of iCloud from the Apple devices you leave behind.
Also:
> At some point, LE asks MA to sign out off LE's iMessage account
You can sign out remotely, so this would've been stupid of everyone involved.
Then again, this whole situation demonstrates a level of stupidity from supposedly competent people that I wish I could say was unbelievable. Add "Making a public post about a topic under litigation" under that category too.
And it gets more ridiculous when you realise Apple makes the software, the hardware, the OS, and the cloud services.
I... really question the rationale here.
occam's razor...
Probably a Jobs-era vibe about work-life unification.
So it's plausible they wanted MA to check for and delete the files first, then sign out.
I'm not kidding.
So 90's…
Now seeing the worlds most powerful organisations act like children doesn't surprise me at all.
I'm sure saner heads like their legal people would prevail at some point, but until then...
They have no chance to win the court case, so public opinion is the only thing they have left to fight for.
...yeah, that's a tough one...
Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/03/confidential-appl...
So yeah.
Facebook is equally bad on this front - requiring you to use your personal account to administrate business pages (don't even get me started on how they forced large businesses to use a custom 2FA method they then phased out - locking people out of their personal accounts forever).
Apple is then "just" monitoring the corporate user account for security reasons, it was the employee who decided to use the same account for private purposes...
I'm guessing it's the same reason they don't offer multiple accounts on iPad. They would rather you bought more devices.
Testing/QA generate loads of them. I still remember one of mine: test_testerson@apple.com
https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin/multi-user
Either with a single local account that accesses multiple Google accounts, or multiple local accounts. Though this is device specific, it may be disabled by your manufacturer/provider.
As mentioned elsewhere though, an enrolled phone is an enrolled phone so corporate wiping will wipe the entire phone and not just the profile.
I'm pretty sure this is a thread about how you can't do things like that on iOS.
Regardless, its been a long time since I've had to use a personal device for work purposes and at the time Android seemed to only want to lock the entire phone down. If that is now fixed them thats great.
I'm out of the loop now, though.
Android did have better support at the time, but if I remember correctly, devices that had a work managed profile on them could still be completely wiped, including the personal/private container.
A bit of a pain, but I've always preferred (where possible) to have separate work and personal devices.
No, personally-owned devices with a work profile cannot be wiped remotely using mdm. But company-owned with our without personal profile can be wiped by a mdm.
Wouldn't want one phone to be both personal and work though. They owned it, idk if I could've put my own sim in without unforeseen issues, it could've been wiped like you said, and it ofc got wiped when I quit.
If accurate, it is of course patently absurd that Apple has left this an unsolved problem.
It is a sub-standard experience and it looks like it is only going to get worse as Apple pushes iCloud into more areas of macOS.
I don't know if it's in the terms but Apple definitely discourages this. In particular it won't let you setup a new account on the same phone number as an existing account.
This is better explained in The Information article (which is paywalled): https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-icloud-policy-.... Emphasis mine:
> When new employees join Apple, the company often issues them an iPhone and Mac and pays for an iCloud account with a large amount of online storage capacity. Crucially, during the onboarding process, Apple encourages new hires to use their preexisting personal Apple IDs with this iCloud account, through which their co-workers can share internal Apple documents and other files with them.
It is quite nerfed compared to a normal Apple account - for example the App store is effectively disabled and you need some MDM to be able to install or update apps. But otherwise, it allows me to not use my personal Apple account which was the main objective.
Edit for precision: I don't work at Apple. My point is that it is possible - I guess Apple doesn't want to manage these accounts, but it is not for lack of technical feasibility.
I don’t understand people that create separate Apple accounts for work.
I’ve always used my personal account on corp laptops, including MFAANG. It’s awesome being able to use side car on my personal machines, hand-off on my AirPods, or screen mirroring to my Apple TV during conference calls. What are you gaining from isolating your account? Why even bother making a fake account at all?
A friend of mine is a svp of something something and his corp was sued by antitrust regulators. One day police is at his doorstep - not even a legal letter - and they took his phone then and there. Super disruptive, considering one usually has a lot of MFA tied to the phone.
I keep two phones, one for work, another for private life, and also two laptops for the same reason. The support for multi-identity is very inconvenient on apple[1], and very poor with whatsapp, signal and, really, most apps except for Google's. Shame, really, considering how well funded Apple and Meta are, and how little effort would be needed to implement the 80% of what people need: the ability to chat using different identities, without touching the rest of the OS wiring.
[1] on macos, its possible to create users with multiple apple id associations, but not on iphone
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/03/apple-icloud-sharing-ex...
This doesn't seem out of line with common practices at other big tech firms. If you go work at Meta, your personal Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp/Oculus accounts become intrinsically linked to your work login identity (though a few employees created a secondary account on of all those to prevent this).
Although there are better controls than there used to be, it's not all that uncommon for sensitive work data to leak through this linkage into the public products...
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Someone went on Reddit to ask if they really had to use their personal Facebook account to manage the company page as they said their boss pushed back against the idea, saying, “Do you think when Disney manages their Facebook page that Disney marketing execs have to use their personal Facebook accounts?”
And it seemed like the answer may well have been yes. There must be some value to Zuckerberg in tying it all together.
Yeah, at orientation they told us it was an option. I don't recall more than a couple of people taking advantage - if you go to work for Meta you've probably made your peace with it already.
> “Do you think when Disney manages their Facebook page that Disney marketing execs have to use their personal Facebook accounts?”
There are various business portal things that separate a business page from just one user owning them, but you still login to a business page you manage via your personal account, regardless of size of business
Yes.
We’ve always been asked to use our personal Apple account to install apps used for work.
Which has happened. Bonkers configuration.
Wild that a company this big would post this on their official, public blog.
Just make sure this is on your computer and not in a Slack DM or draft email. Don't want to accidentally hit send.
This looks like a company that's in a downward spiral. They're doing anything they can to attempt to salvage their reputation, maybe because when the court date finally rolls around it might already be too late.
Public opinion matters, and narrative control is important if you don’t want to be perceived as “morally wrong company”.
There is no "non-company blog" that wouldn't have to trace it back to OpenAI for verification anyway.
This looks like a personal message to a specific audience, which may include the employees who are nervous about the company's positioning.
It's unusual, but this is a blog. It's literally a web log and this is something that is going on with the company.
I'm not Apple's biggest fan either (I got super upset when they conveniently wiped out all information about the person comiting suicide in one of their conference rooms and TMZ caught the police line and the sherif said "there is a gun, next to a dead person, we can't say much at the moment" and that was it). But it is unlikely that Apple would depriortize its brand on a fake story.
I think you're right, but let's not forget that Apple's goal isn't to protect themselves or to get a fat payout here. Their goal is to make their current employees less likely to leave for an offer at a company like OpenAI. This suit is telling everyone Apple employs "Hey, if you leave and we can find anything that looks a bit dubious, we're happy to screw you over."
Apple aren't a loving and caring company that nurtures people. They're as ruthless as the next trillion-dollar unicorn.
RIP https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Ed_Mackowiak - Apple’s statement is linked there (and the bit about the woman in the Wiki might be outdated per TMZ correction https://www.tmz.com/2016/04/27/apple-campus-body-found-cuper... )
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/apple-...
A substantial amount of evidence in Apple's complaint isn't addressed, but what's shown here throws a decent amount of shade and doubt.
I have my popcorn ready for discovery. I hope it gets to that point, and I hope it proceeds to trial...
It's in court already, fight it there. Even if you win public opinion with your point of view you can still lose in court.
Assuming the exhibits aren't sealed they're publicly available as soon as they're entered by the court during trial.
If they're sealed there's probably a good reason they shouldn't be published until the trial is over (or ever in some cases)
Or maybe it isn't and stuff really is complicated like OpenAI makes it sound like. Or maybe I am cynical enough to believe OpenAI made this public post as a legal way to collude and make sure all involved parties can get their stories aligned without having to do secret communication that could be tracked and used as evidence of collusion.
(This last one is truly an unfounded claim, and just there to complicate OpenAI's narrative but the point is I don't see the point in making this public).
I find it bizarre that they felt the need to specify "Asian". What does that have to do with anything?
That Vietnamese surname of Nguyen is formally written as Nguyễn in the current script, or as 阮 in the old adapted Hanzi script, and practically pronounced somewhere around "gwen". Most other EA countries tend to do equivalents of "阮" -> "gwen", and East Asian cultures generally prefer Last-First ordering, which tend to put more information in the first name, and so there are going to be tons of last names in Latin that end up being barely unambiguous to be a form of identification.
These can be a problem if email addresses are going to be formulated as e.g. "阮 必成" -> "Nguyễn Tất Thành" -> "Gwen Tat Than" -> "t.gwen@example.net", even if the surname is going to be that much long(although Nguyen in particular is just identical even in Vietnamese).
(Japan may be less affected thanks to having default 2+ char random surnames farmers made up in modernization efforts, but there are still the 灘(nada) highscool, the 津(tsu) city, etc etc that can be NLP problems)
Japanese has several advantages:
1. Both given names and surnames often use more than 2 syllables. This makes it more familiar to speakers of European languages, where multi-syllable words are no big deal.
2. English speakers find Japanese easier to pronounce and remember due to its simpler syllable structure and use of globally more common sounds compared to the other languages.
3. Unlike the other languages, Japanese names are always given in Given Name, Surname order in English media, while names from the other languages are inconsistently transcribed in either order.
4. Japanese is the "default" East Asian culture for the West in many ways, since it's the one that at least the US has most deeply engaged for the longest time. Many, many cultural exports that actually originated in China were introduced to the West via Japan with Japanese names. Also, Japan has been an advanced industrial economy since the late 1800s, while China only achieved that status a few decades ago.
5. Japanese transcription into Roman characters has remained consistent for a long time (helped by the simpler phonology). Chinese and Korean have been cursed with several incompatible transcription systems over the years - although Pinyin has been winning out for Chinese, there are still many names with legacy transcriptions, not to mention the other Chinese languages needing their own transcriptions. Vietnamese does exclusively use Latin characters, but the diacritics and unfamiliar pronunciation makes them harder to remember.
Upward of 40% Vietnamese have surname "Nguyen".
"Li" is quite popular in China.
Specifying "Asian last name" in this context is quite apt.
There's probably a little bit of that, but also simple carelessness.
I think back to the questionable things _I've_ done that _don't_ amount to data theft, but _should have_ caused someone to probably kick off an incident/investigation.. But they didn't.
- git cloning every repository in the company (who am I kidding, I do this in _every_ company
- airdropping stuff to my personal phone (my profile photo, but it could have been the aforementioned git repos)
- using sharedrop/similar services (to copy my RSS/news feeds, favourites bars) from my work laptop
- enumerated staff/ops dashboards/tooling to get shit done (think: enumerating the CRM before Lazarus and Lap$u$ made it cool)
I remember a manager during an internship telling me to do clean code because later I might have to reuse piece of code in further work experiences. It was the time when code was shared with zip and so or net shares.
At that time there wasn't that many "software shop" and it was just a way to do things in other company like hardware manufacturers. Obviously you would have been trusted not to take or disseminate or reuse company trade secret or coffee things like expected by your non competition clause in your contact anyway.
Since then, a lot of company became like "software production" company and developers are now considered like factory workers.
And in some way I would say that you are nowadays robbed of your code and there isn't even attribution anymore.
Look, in the 80/90s it was more common to know the name of the main dev of major companies, and their contributions were clearly attributed to them. But now you will very very rarely know the dev that did the code for anything. Top manager/architect/... Might be recognized but not really for their code contributions.
I actually recall the lead engineers in my department coming into work on their last day with a harddrive. The same people who had access to national databases, and production systems that impacted the majority of the country’s population. That simply wouldn’t happen today.
Although I’m not someone who’s dealing with PCB schematics or bleeding edge IP.
Besides, I have absolutely no idea what this is about or whether I should care.
I think they are hoping what they did with Elon will work with Apple.
It is extremely smelly that Apple doesn't isolate personal versus business accounts in its HR practices. Its also pretty lame that a multi-user operating system has been lobotomized to sell more hardware in that sense.
It almost feels as if they wanted the same clout received from the "Thoughts on Flash" Jobs article from nearly 20 years ago and thought ChatGPT could do better.
Lawyers would not have advised posting this.
OpenAI, even after raising this much capital, had never anticipated that something like this could happen yet keeps digging it's own grave.
At this point all that's left is for them to kiss and pay else they're done.
Apple vs OpenAI will be the war of legacies, trust and innovation.
Hubris.
With Trumps era, anything is possible
I mean, just look at Kim Dotcom or Aaron Schwartz.
They built their whole business model on stolen data and act surprised when another company has zero trust in them.
Based on their track record this lawsuit is not unexpected at all.
I have been fixated on this topic for some time. Most people behave in a regulated and lawful manner to be on safer side. They do not trespass into some ones home just cause the owner happened to leave the door open.
Companies are using LLMs to hack into other organizations and giving it a spin about agent escaping the sand box. I am surprised how the impacted organizations are not filing lawsuits for damages unless they themselves have something to hide, (probably their reputation). Interestingly from what I remember there is a law that binds the public companies to reveal any intrusion, unless I am missing the names of impacted companies by LLM agent great escape has not been revealed fully.
It doesn't sound to me like Apple is pursuing individuals that merely had company data on their computers but rather these individuals then went on to share said data with other individuals.
Their track record, and the narcissistic tone where they talk so confidently about how they are morally superior companies than others, and all they care about is public good.
Oops.
Rank 78, 248 points, +10hr, 244 comments
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Also, for coverage: FT picked this up, syndicated here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/openai-says-appl...
But Apple's motion states that their communications occurred "through the Line messenger app to avoid detection by Apple"
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...
It also does specifically state that they use that to avoid detection (and only between those two people) so they could have been using multiple communication mediums.
That document has a lot of more interesting stuff, however. They also talk about an "apple proprietary metal finishing process" made by a supplier - could they have tried to steal Liquid Metal?
edit: They also state this below which may have some more specifics on what technology is in question:
"Documents sufficient to show hardware development at OpenAI involving (1) bat- tery technology, including can size, flange specifications, and manufacturing toler- ances; (2) the metal finishing process, including surface preparation and anodization"
An Asian super-app with a few hundred million DAUs
> Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets.
Well, I guess that settles it, then! Case closed.
Seriously, what is point of this?
This is the kind of post I would expect from Matt at WordPress.
This looks like PR disaster to me, but of course I am only a pair of eyes and a brain without accelerated reinforcement learning.
The veiled implication here is hilariously petty. This entire document is hilariously petty. And apparently, ignorant of the news cycle.
This does not build more trust in OpenAI. If it's-totally-a-misunderstanding and Apple-should-have-communicated-better is the best they can offer, well, good luck in court.
Is also rather funny when hiring HUNDREDS of their engineers.
The addition that the last names are Asian is insane and just put there to make the opposite party look bad. Ironically, all it does is reflect the spirit of OpenAI.
Guys, just stop posting. Listen to your counsel.
What a fucking a joke - throw some cheap shots in there trying to stir things up by pointing out they were Asian
Everything I read about OpenAI makes me dislike them more and more - really can’t stand that company’s culture - I have “friends” who work there and it makes complete sense
> I think I’m going to have to hit the workday button before I’m complete. I just got a weird message that is making me nervous (see below), so I am going to go hit the workday button now.
https://openai.com/index/the-truth-elon-left-out/
https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/
https://openai.com/index/court-rejects-elon/
https://openai.com/index/response-to-nyt-data-demands/
https://openai.com/index/mental-health-litigation-approach/
(The Elon ones also have redacted screenshots as receipts.)
Indeed, they are litigating in the court of public opinion but let's not be naive to think that this is NOT what the other parties have also been doing.
Something about the line-height, fonts used, etc don’t look like a real iMessage chat.
Am I alone on this?
On a serious notes, this seems like a desperate attempt to sway public opinion, but hey, Apple is no saint either. This will be a fun season.
By choosing to release these receipts to the public instead of saving them for court, OpenAI is executing a very deliberate PR strategy. They are effectively framing Apple as a sloppy, legacy company. As with most corporate litigation PR, information is selectively released. Here, OpenAI is trying to reframe Apple's own operational failures as the root cause, rather than any actual technology theft by OpenAI.
Looking at the bigger picture, it's clear who is actually at a disadvantage: OpenAI.
Whether Apple's tech was copied or not is almost secondary. The real existential threat for OpenAI is the legal discovery process, which could expose their internal AI architecture and training data to the public (and to Apple). That risk is exactly why OpenAI is playing this out in the court of public opinion—to force Apple's hand.
Ultimately, both sides have a lot to lose. Apple has always marketed itself on 'privacy, security, and perfection,' but this incident pulls back the curtain on how sloppy their internal operations can be. OpenAI has their own black boxes to protect. In the end, this isn't about truth; it's a pure media management war to see who blinks first.
Why would that be relevant for a hardware project? Discovery doesn't mean carte blanche to dig around in arbitrary company secrets - and there's significant danger to Apple as well. Did Apple give corporate secrets gathered from the former OpenAI-Apple deal to Google for their Gemini integration, or for Apple's own AI?
What happens if someone is fired and had kept info only on their personal account that is highly valuable ? Or wants to steal corporate info?
I am not sure why that should matter. If company can handle BYOD model then they should solve that on hardware level - by issuing work phones (and other devices).
But OpenAI's allegation is that Apple doesn't do that, either out of incompetence or malice (to add legal uncertainty when their employees go to competitors).
I stopped right there. I am sorry but I can't deal with promo articles that begin with incorrect claims made.
Finally some proper gen-z representation. Maybe a Cluely-like office comedy web series next? I sense potential.
Keep your garbage for the court.
OpenAI: Sorry but your lawyer never really contacted us because he was incompetent and maybe even racist.
More entertaining than anything on TV /popcorn
Which makes me wonder, is it normal for giant corporations to very publicly lob lawsuits after just a couple of failed attempts to connect with the other party?
Sorry y'all, but this case will settle out of court for peanuts, OpenAI will still release their hardware (which very well might flop), and they'll still IPO.
“They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.”
PR is not a moat buddy.
Models are a lost cause anyway - https://open.substack.com/pub/taikhooms/p/why-openrouter-can...