Apple v. OpenAI: Trade Secrets and Corporate Espionage

**Josh** (0:00)
Did OpenAI just steal the most critical secret hardware supply chain magic that Apple has been working on for the last couple of decades? The answer is probably yes, and it came in the form of this leaked text message saying, LOL, I found out I can access the network storage so funny from an Apple engineer who went over to OpenAI. Now, this Apple engineer, his name is Chang Liu, and he had a company MacBook that he kept after he left. And he found later on there was an authentication bug that left access alive even while he was at OpenAI. So he took this stolen laptop and downloaded over a thousand pages of confidential material covering a ton of unreleased products, engineering presentations, and technical specs on unreleased Apple hardware products. Now, who's the best hardware product maker in the world for consumers? It's Apple. And now OpenAI has this treasure trove of information that they have been using to build, allegedly, been using to build their new hardware device that we're tremendously excited about. So there is a lot of chaos going on in this story. But right now, the story is Apple is suing OpenAI and they have a lot of ammo to back this thing up.

**Ejaaz** (1:05)
And all of this comes off the back of OpenAI releasing GPT 5.6 this week. So they had so many ups and so many downs. But yeah, Friday, 10th of July, they got slapped with a lawsuit from none other than Apple claiming that they've stolen a bunch of trade secrets specifically around how they build the future AI hardware devices. And as we know, OpenAI has been working on quite a few of these devices rumored to be going online around February 2027 They acquired Johnny Ive's startup IO. Johnny Ive famously one of the chief product designers at Apple for around $6.5 billion. So it's a big deal for Apple to make this claim. Now imagine you are interviewing for a new job at OpenAI. Before going into your interview, they ask you to bring a piece of hardware from your current company, that being Apple, to show Intel during your interview, to show how the circuitry design works, to show how the engineering design completely works. In your interview itself, that's exactly what a 24-year veteran from Apple, ex-veteran, VP of Design, he designed the iPhone, he designed the iWatch called Tang U did at Apple. He is officially OpenAI's chief hardware design officer, and he's responsible for launching their future AI devices. There's another guy that you mentioned earlier, Josh, called Chang Liu. He's an eight-year electrical engineer from Apple who also left and happened to have a laptop which still had access to Apple's file system. So he stole a bunch of blueprints. This basically reads like some kind of dramatic movie.
I've got social network playing in my head, like from the meta kind of vibes, but this is a crazy lawsuit, if true. And if it does end up getting taken to the end of this case, there's a judgment placed on OpenAI, this could defer the launch of their AI hardware devices by as much as a year.

**Josh** (2:51)
It's pretty serious. And if you scroll down just a tiny bit, we'll see the three people named, or I should say, the two people that you just mentioned and one missing name. Now, we have Tang, we have Cheng, which sounds like a joke that these are the two people at the core of this lawsuit. But there is a third person who is notably not names, and it's Johnny Ive and his company LoveFrom, or I guess specifically IO here who already had a lawsuit filed against them for totally different reasons. If you remember, this image on screen when they made their big announcement that OpenAI was acquiring Johnny Ive's company IO for, I think it was like four or five billion dollars. They made this really nice announcement video, they published this blog post about it, and then immediately within the week, they got sued by another company named IO, and now they have to actually change their name.
That's a totally separate lawsuit, but notably Johnny is not named at all in this Apple lawsuit, and you have to ask the question, why? Well, I think one of those is like, could you imagine Apple suing Johnny? That would be the most diabolical headline ever. But perhaps the reality is that they actually didn't have a whole lot to do with this, and that a lot of the ownership of this problem comes directly from the OpenAI team and these two people, because from the sounds of it, the OpenAI team was very much aware of what was going on. In fact, they were building and actively poaching up to 400 people from Apple's design engineering and their production teams to help them build this new AI hardware infrastructure system.