OpenAI said no to Apple’s claims about stealing trade secrets on Monday. They said Apple didn’t prove that any secret information was taken by workers.
“This whole fight is a mess that Apple created. It is trying to blame people,” OpenAI said in a document filed late Monday in US District Court in San Jose, California.
Apple took action against OpenAI and two former Apple workers, Tang Tan and Chang Liu, in July. They accused them of taking information about hardware design, how things are made, and how supplies are handled. This is happening as the maker of ChatGPT tries to get into consumer devices.
The AI company, which is run by CEO Sam Altman, says Apple is using the lawsuit to stop a rival and stop employees from leaving. OpenAI has hired about 400 workers from Apple for its hardware project, the two companies have said in court documents.
California law allows employees to freely move between rivals, OpenAI said.
The lawsuit represented an escalation of tensions between the two companies, which just two years ago forged a partnership intended to boost ChatGPT’s reach and help Apple gain a firmer footing in AI. The relationship quickly soured as competition in the AI industry intensified.
In its lawsuit, Apple argued that OpenAI’s hiring of Apple employees was part of the AI lab’s strategy to learn a competitor’s secrets. Apple said Tan and Liu both accessed Apple files after they left the company.
OpenAI said on Monday that Apple encourages its employees to use personal iCloud accounts to access Apple work documents and perform their work functions, making it difficult for departing employees to separate company information.
OpenAI said Apple’s policy of escorting departing employees from its premises does not give them enough time to return company devices, transfer internal files back to the company or hand over responsibilities.
In the filing, Liu said any access to Apple documents after his departure was done to help former Apple colleagues locate files or answer questions related to Apple work. He said Apple employees repeatedly contacted him for assistance after he left.
Tan, who spent 24 years at Apple, said he returned Apple prototypes before departing and only retained confidential materials, including an employee departure checklist that was not confidential.
Employees can leave a company, like Apple, that has struggled to adopt AI and move to a startup that builds innovative products, OpenAI wrote. Apple may not like those choices.. It cannot claim those choices are unlawful, and it cannot use its own sloppy procedures to blame others for its own mess.
