Apple Suing OpenAI for Stealing Trade Secrets, Former Meta Director of AI on Muse Spark

**Akash Pasricha** (0:13)
Welcome, everyone, to The Informations TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Monday, July 13th. Before we get started, this is TITV's one-year anniversary week. We'll be coming to you from the Bay Area all week, filming special episodes in San Francisco and across Silicon Valley. Tomorrow is our 250th episode. You do not want to miss it. We have a jam-packed lineup. On today's show, Apple is suing OpenAI in a stunning development for the growing rivalry between these two companies. We'll bring on our Apple reporter to unpack the latest on that. We're then talking about Wall Street's biggest bet on blockchain yet with our crypto reporter, Stephanie Palazzolo, author of our AI Agenda Newsletter, is back from the big ICML AI Research Conference in South Korea. We'll chat with her about her key takeaways from the event, and we'll wrap things up with a conversation with the Lod Institute about the big themes that they're watching in AI research and their reaction to the latest big model releases. It's going to be a fun show, so let's get right on into it.
Apple is suing OpenAI, accusing the AI company of stealing company secrets. The lawsuit was filed Friday in the Northern District of California. I want to bring on our Apple reporter, Aaron Tilley, to break down what we know and where this is likely to go from here.
Aaron, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here.

**Aaron Tilley** (1:39)
Thank you.

**Akash Pasricha** (1:41)
Okay, big wall shoot. Tell us what's in it. Let's start there.

**Aaron Tilley** (1:47)
Yeah, so Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that there has been a systematic effort on behalf of OpenAI on the devices team to steal proprietary Apple knowledge related to product development, all the way to supply chain and manufacturing methods. So, this has been the allegations Apple's making is very serious.
The companies, the OpenAI is doing things in a very sneaky way. Apple alleges that OpenAI folks are purposely hiding their efforts in trying to bypass Apple's security. So, pretty serious allegations.

**Akash Pasricha** (2:39)
I want to go through some of the big allegations in here, but there are two people that are at the center of this lawsuit, Tang Tan and Chang Liu. Tell us about who they are and why they are so central to this lawsuit.

**Aaron Tilley** (2:55)
Yeah, so Tang is currently the chief hardware officer at OpenAI. He was a long-time, over two decades, Apple hardware engineer. Near the end, he led all of Apple's iPhone product development. So, very important person at Apple. He left in 2024
He co-founded IO Products alongside former Apple design chief Johnny Ive, and then OpenAI acquired it for $6.5 billion in stock last year. So, he leads all of OpenAI's device hardware projects. And then Chang is a little more of a younger, one of the younger employees, less seasoned, but very experienced engineers from Apple that OpenAI recently brought over.
He left Apple in January and joined to join OpenAI, so he's only been there for a couple of months. But yeah, Apple accuses him of bypassing Apple security and accessing Apple networks on an ongoing basis while employed at OpenAI.

**Akash Pasricha** (4:05)
And so the details in this lawsuit are pretty stunning. I mean, some of the details here, from what I recall, I mean, the idea that they asked people when they were interviewing for OpenAI, they were at Apple, they asked them to basically bring, or bring parts, components, I guess, of hardware to the OpenAI office. Am I recalling this correctly?

**Aaron Tilley** (4:30)
Yeah, they accused Tang of, during interviews, of requesting engineers to bring actual parts and do any sort of quote unquote show and tell.
So taking parts to these interviews, and then also accused Tang of asking about ongoing secret projects, using project code names and asking about updates for that. So yeah, using his already pretty substantial knowledge about Apple and kind of used to take more information out from current Apple employees.

**Akash Pasricha** (5:11)
So Aaron, I want to just take a step back here for a minute. You've been covering Apple for a long time. Apple has one of the most extensive supply chains, if not the most extensive supply chain, in technology today.
Have you ever seen a lawsuit like this? I mean, a show and tell? I mean, we'll get to what OpenAI is saying about this in a second. We'll get to that response. But you know, are these types of lawsuits, are they common in the hardware business? Have you seen anything like it?

**Aaron Tilley** (5:44)
There are echoes of previous lawsuits. For example, Apple went after a chip startup in 2019 called Nuvia. It was co-founded by former Apple engineers, and the company ended up recruiting a large number of Apple chip engineers. And Apple really didn't like that. They accused the company of sort of similar behavior.