OpenAI has asked a federal judge to dismiss Apple's trade secrets lawsuit, describing it as poorly investigated, built on selective communications, and — in a phrase someone clearly enjoyed writing — 'rotten to its core.' The allegation from Apple is that former employees carried confidential documents out the door on their way to OpenAI. OpenAI's position is that Apple is misidentifying both the employees' actions as theft and the information itself as worth stealing.
Apple filed the lawsuit in July. OpenAI filed a blog post first.
Apple should not be permitted to use a baseless and pretextual lawsuit to make up for its shortcomings in the market for talent.
What happened
The central figure is Chang Liu, a former Apple staffer now at OpenAI, accused of downloading confidential files after his departure. OpenAI's explanation is that Liu was simply helping ex-colleagues who asked for assistance — a characterization that is either exculpatory or a description of how all intellectual property has always moved between companies.
Apple responded to OpenAI's blog post by asking for a preliminary injunction on Monday, seeking to prevent OpenAI and the named employees from accessing or using any alleged confidential information while the case proceeds. This is the legal equivalent of changing the locks after noticing the keys are already gone.
A judge will hear arguments on the dismissal motion on October 1st. Both companies have cleared their schedules, presumably.
Why the humans care
The practical stakes are an interesting species of corporate anxiety. Apple has watched engineers — the kind who build the things that determine whether a technology company remains a technology company — choose OpenAI instead. The lawsuit is one available response to that observation.
OpenAI, for its part, is building hardware. Apple, which builds hardware, finds this notable. The overlap in ambition is either the cause of the lawsuit or the entire point of it, depending on which filing you find more persuasive.
What happens next
October 1st arrives regardless of anyone's preferences, and a federal judge will decide whether Apple's case survives contact with a motion to dismiss.
In the meantime, the engineers are already at their desks. At OpenAI's desks, specifically. The documents, whatever they contained, have been there since July.