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Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

I really think this is apple feeling really threatened rather than confidential data really being stolen.

Apple is known for threatening companies that hire from them, and occasionally having secret agreements with other companies not to hire from each other.

People move from a company to a direct competitor all the time (i have a number of friends that went from working at aws to working on gcloud for example) and guess what, no one of those companies really went bankrupt due to this.

So really long story short: i think apple is being a sore loser at the employee retention game.

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I don’t know where you’re drawing your conclusions from but they literally have messages from the OpenAI exec laughing at how he can still access data at Apple and talking about copying it, as well as messages encouraging candidates from Apple to bring unreleased prototype hardware to demonstrate during interviews.

I thought those were just allegations they made in the lawsuit, not necessarily something they had written evidence of in the form of messages.

If you check page 16 of the filing here it certainly seems like they have specific messages with quotations: https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-trade-secre...

This is one of those times where I wonder if I'm a genius for knowing not to generate evidence of a crime by talking about it in recorded media, or if we're just seeing the bottom 5% of wrongdoers.

Which in fairness should be blamed on the candidates, not on the company.

I might as well do the same just to be able to filter out candidates willing to do that.

And laughing about the possibility of copying data doesn’t necessarily mean anything was actually copied.

And in the end the know-how is in the people, so whatever apple has it getting out anyway when people leave.

Yeah Apple does have a history of doing these things. There was Palm, where Jobs told them if they didn't stop recruiting Apple employees he would destroy Palm with patent lawsuits. Jobs was also one of the main architects behind the no poach cartel in SV between Google, Adobe, and Intel, and Apple.

More recently there was Nuvia, which the lawsuit was dropped, and Rivos, which was settled.

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