That lawsuit echoes Apple’s legal battles in the 2010s against various companies involved in making Android phones, the report said. Both cases revolve around allegations that a competitor stole Apple’s innovations. Apple accused Samsung of “slavishly” copying the iPhone with its own smartphones. Samsung denied these claims, and the companies settled in 2018 after an eight-year legal fight.
Additionally, both cases center around a perceived breach of trust by Apple, according to the report. Google’s CEO at the time of the Android lawsuits, Eric Schmidt, was part of Apple’s board while his company was developing Android.
Apple alleged in its new suit that “at every level … OpenAI has been stealing Apple’s trade secrets,” accusing two employees of OpenAI of taking part in the theft, the report said.
One of them is OpenAI Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan, a former Apple employee. The suit accuses him of soliciting trade secrets from Apple workers interviewing for positions at OpenAI, encouraging them to bring “actual parts” from Apple for “show and tell” sessions, according to the report.
However, bringing parts to an engineering interview is not out of the ordinary, as interviewers want prospects to discuss their work, the report said. Apple is now seeking discovery to gauge whether these parts were sensitive.
An OpenAI spokesperson said, per the report: “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”
In a post on social platform X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote: “I am not afraid of Apple, but I have tremendous respect for them.”
The suit came as the tech world scrambles to develop AI-powered devices that go a step beyond the smartphone, the report said. The winner of this race could play the same role Apple now plays in the consumer market.
Meanwhile, there “has been speculation about the sorts of devices OpenAI may be developing at least since the company acquired io, an AI device startup created in 2024 by former Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive and Apple designers Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan,” PYMNTS reported in April.
