> 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.
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.
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.
The concept of applying some kind of texture to metal is an idea. A research-heavy, highly specific, finely tuned, multiple step, trade secret, brand signature metal finishing technique is a painting.
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.
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.
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.
Google and Uber started as courtroom enemies, but probably had to commiserate some on Anthony Levandowski probably being the worst hire they both made.
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.”
Amazing character. Started as a regular robot-loving engineering kid, was in the right place at the right time and earned something like $140 million from Google, mostly from truly ludicrous performance bonuses, went to Uber for another giant payout, was worth nine figures. And sure, he was convicted for crimes, but he got one of those definitely-legitimate Trump pardons.
And then he managed to turn that into a negative $50 million net worth.
And also he briefly started a religion based around having an AI inventing a Christian god or something because his story wasn't crazy enough.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
>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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.</i>
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Since the 1980s?
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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...
Appalling.
It is but it is the Silicon Valley way and business way for many. Steamroll and do whatever it takes to win and be successful. Morals what are those?
Exactly. If ever there was a y'all deserve eachother situation, it is this.
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.
flagrant
"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!
"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.
a "metal-finishing technique" _is_ an idea.
joke
When you are bulk copying data off your former employer's network share, that is a lot more than "stealing ideas".
The concept of applying some kind of texture to metal is an idea. A research-heavy, highly specific, finely tuned, multiple step, trade secret, brand signature metal finishing technique is a painting.
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.
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.
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.
Well their whole model is a stolen art collection :)
Why not both? Three cheers for escape artists!
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.
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.”
Amazing character. Started as a regular robot-loving engineering kid, was in the right place at the right time and earned something like $140 million from Google, mostly from truly ludicrous performance bonuses, went to Uber for another giant payout, was worth nine figures. And sure, he was convicted for crimes, but he got one of those definitely-legitimate Trump pardons.
And then he managed to turn that into a negative $50 million net worth.
And also he briefly started a religion based around having an AI inventing a Christian god or something because his story wasn't crazy enough.
> And also he briefly started a religion
I always assumed this was a tax-avoidance scheme
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.
> Steve declared thermonuclear war on Google because Android re-skinned to use BUTTONS.
Was there ever a point in time where Google was not the default search engine on iOS?
Yes, briefly: https://qz.com/apple-google-yahoo-search-engine-safari-antit...
> 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.
Nintendo?
Overconfidence. These people think they are much smarter than others to be caught.
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.
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.
Companies don't get to be worth billions of dollars without doing something unethical.
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.
I work for a Silicon Valley headquartered company and would expect the same.
INT 18 WIS 3 is a terribly dangerous build in this world.
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.
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.
seemingly smart is the key here. intelligence doesnt make up for ethics.
Yeah but it isn't just unethical, it's also deeply stupid -- you will be caught.
And I'd question the intelligence also. I don't think employment at FAANG means a lot in that regard.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Trade secrets. A legally recognized thing, and legally protected.
I'm describing "intellectual property," patents being only one way to legally protect such property.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m going to defer to the five-year president of Y Combinator’s interpretation of what those values really meant.
Don’t be such an idiot simp for billionaires who don’t give a shit about you
wat
pretty sure PG and sama had a pretty serious falling out because it turns out sama is a complete snake
but you know, go off king (or whatever)
Every single time.
If someone calls himself open, you should know who it is and what to expect.
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.
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?
Some people care about justice in general?
Also, normalizing stealing IP is only going to have bad consequences for everyone.
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.
"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.
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?
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".
>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.
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.
I think you’ve made an extreme leap in your interpretation of the comment you’re replying to…
> 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.
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!
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.
The companies are based in California, so regular non-competes are irrelevant. This is solely about IP theft.
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.
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 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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
You can trust Apple. I mean they openly lied to a judge last year under oath, but you can trust them.
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...
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.
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.
Probably among many reasons for the switch to Gemini for their band aid AI until they get theirs were they want/need.
Altman showing how desperate he is to get into hardware. He knows local models that supplement models in chip are the end of OIA
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.
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
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.</i>
This is going to be interesting.
Only because both companies have access to billions and infinite lawyers.
Imagine comparing what apple has access to vs a deeply money losing firm
The “nuclear bomb vs coughing baby” meme comes to mind.
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.
I would guess these days Apple probably has more lawyers than engineers.
Lawyers: rubbing hands together
OpenAI has concepts of money.
OpenAI investors have concepts of money. OpenAI has its investors’ money.
I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
2026 Wimpy would be an effective serial entrepreneur.
Apples billions are in cash
OpenAIs billions are in IOUs to Nvidia
Only one has Actual Money™ and quite a lot of it.
Can you pay for lawyers with RAM, GPUs or IOUs for tokens?
probably the real reason why Apple opted Gemini over ChatGPT
Changing suppliers is potentially the reason why Apple’s AI strategy was so delayed.
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.
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.
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.
Can't wait for the inevitable bailout and US tax dollars to pay for this!
Bailout of OpenAI? Doubt it, unless Trump and Musk have some sort of falling out (again).
Super stupid actions by these ex-employees LMAO
These people think OpenAI can/will protect them?
This season of Silicon Valley is getting spicy
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.
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.
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?
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?"
There's rumors they've been planning a phone.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/29/everything-we-know-abou...
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.
> 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?
Some more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48865019
The threads have now been merged, it seems.
WOW so these companies really are stealing enterprise data to make competing products! Fucking slimy! How can anyone trust them now?
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
Since the 1980s?
> 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.
>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.
Ah, somehow I missed that even though it was included in the quote I copied. Thanks!
Not just any employee. A 24 year veteran and at the time of departure the VP of design for the iPhone and Apple Watch
> 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.
> 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.
Stop trying to cram your "P" into "AI".
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?
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.