What’s next in Apple’s legal battle with OpenAI

The accusations in this Apple lawsuit against OpenAI are just astonishing

Because what do you mean OpenAI was instructing Apple employees to sneak out actual parts of

products to show off in job interviews? What do you mean someone was sending LOL messages to

colleagues about breaking into confidential Apple documents after they quit Apple? And what do you

mean? OpenAI was sharing details on how to evade Apple's security after they quit Apple. So much of

the corporate theft sounds so brazen and out in the open. How could folks do all this and not think

Apple would sue? Maybe they should have asked ChatGPT first. OpenAI responded to Apple's lawsuit

with the statement, we have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. And its CEO, Sam Altman

And said on X, I am not afraid of Apple, but I have tremendous respect for them

Just clearly not enough respect to use proper capitalization in a sentence

But I kid because this is Sam Altman, a guy who respects Apple so much, he wore this very respectable outfit at WWDC in 2008

The double popped polo collar talking about his lemon of an app called Looped

But maybe now he should be afraid of Apple because Apple is not shy about taking enemies to court

Apple loves a good courtroom battle to slow down the rivals. So let go over the most wild revelations from the lawsuit and what comes next Apple lawsuit points the finger at OpenAI for stealing Apple secrets by using current and former Apple employees Some of the wildest stuff is centered

around a former iPhone engineer named Chang Liu. The suit said he worked at Apple for eight years

and left for OpenAI. And when he left, he also took his company MacBook with him and never

returned it. He also kept access to confidential internal files, some bug he exploited

gave him backdoor access where he was able to download presentations and details around hardware

manufacturing and testing. And when he was at OpenAI, he kept in touch with an Apple employee

friend and he would chat with her and say, LOL, how funny it was to still access all of these files

And for months, Apple says he continued to get confidential information from that friend at Apple

He would tell her how to copy files without getting in trouble with security. But to avoid

getting caught, they both agreed it was better to move their convo to the app Line Messenger

And that friend, well, she also ended up getting a job with OpenAI this year. Another character in

this lawsuit is Tang Tan. He is the chief hardware officer at OpenAI, and he is personally named in

the suit. He has been working with former Apple design head Johnny Ive and CEO Altman on some big

new AI hardware project He spent 24 years keeping secrets at Apple and now he teaching people how to take those secrets according to Apple The filing says Tan would email himself info about Apple suppliers before he left the company

Apple alleges Tan would tell candidates to bring, quote, actual parts from Apple to their job interviews for show and tell sessions

Apple says in February it reached out to OpenAI to voice these concerns

and see if OpenAI would also investigate and correct the situation. Apple is just the latest company to sue OpenAI

And CEO Altman, well, he's tied to numerous stories of dishonest and deceptive business practices

And even CNET's parent company, Zip Davis, is suing OpenAI, alleging it infringed Zip Davis' copyrights in training and operating its AI systems

But Apple's lawsuit has a different twist. You see, it could reveal what secret products OpenAI is making right now

It's also shaping the future of how you use your iPhone. Remember in 2024, when Apple announced its partnership with OpenAI

that meant you could ask ChatGPT questions from your devices. Well, fast forward to this recent WWDC

and no one at Apple was talking about ChatGPT. Instead, we were talking about Google's Gemini

The lawsuit says more than 400 Apple employees now work at OpenAI

So yeah, the tensions are high between Siri and ChatGPT right now

But let's look at the big picture. Apple is about to get a new CEO Tim Cook is stepping away from the CEO job in September But you know on his way out he just firing shots so he can battle enemies in court and slow down this rival from launching

anything to threaten the iPhone. This may all sound familiar because Steve Jobs, Apple's past

CEO, once vowed to destroy Android, calling it a stolen product. Jobs said in Walter Isaacson's

biography, quote, I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this. Apple filed its first major patent

infringement lawsuit against Samsung, alleging it copied the iPhone design. And Apple ultimately

won its design and utility patent lawsuit. But the legal battle lasted seven years. And in 2018

the two tech giants reached a settlement. So how about now? What does Apple want in this battle

today? Well, it wants to destroy materials and redesign products that are using Apple tech

It wants a jury trial with financial damages, and it seeks to stop more Apple trade secrets from

getting out. And what do we get? Well, if there's a trial, it will uncover things like internal

emails to know what top executives knew. We may possibly know what hardware Johnny Ive has been

working on and if you used any of Apple's secrets to build it. It might be some time before new

details emerge, but until then there's plenty of Siri AI to play with on the public beta of iOS 27

out now, so I'll keep you posted until next week when there's one more thing to talk about in the

world of Apple