In its lawsuit against OpenAI, Apple filed what it calls \u201cshocking evidence\u201d to bolster its allegations that former employees stole trade secrets for OpenAI\u2019s benefit. These new details emerged after the legal counsel for former Apple employee Chang Liu \u2014 who now works at OpenAI \u2014 handed over Liu\u2019s old Apple work laptop for investigation earlier this month.<\/p>\n
Apple now alleges that Liu used a confidential Apple circuit schematic in his work at OpenAI, as well as a tool that shares a name with an internal Apple engineering application. The company claims that OpenAI was \u201cwell-aware\u201d of Liu\u2019s access to Apple data, and that Liu enlisted OpenAI colleague Yu-Ting Peng to help destroy evidence in June when he learned that Apple was investigating him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe MacBook represents the very limited information Defendants provided so far (and only after weeks of delay), and shows Apple is not conducting \u2018fishing expeditions\u2019 but that its trade secrets are being used and evidence is being destroyed,\u201d the filing reads.<\/p>\n
While this new evidence is redacted from public view, past filings from Apple have included text messages from Liu \u2014 which he punctuated with \u201ccrying laughing\u201d emojis \u2014 showing he was aware that he still had access to Apple files.<\/p>\n
OpenAI has previously defended Liu by saying that he only accessed Apple files after he stopped working there in order to help former colleagues who asked for his assistance. \u201cApple now tries to shift the blame to \u2018residual access,\u2019 but they also don\u2019t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave,\u201d OpenAI wrote in a blog post earlier this month. <\/p>\n
But Apple claims that Liu had continued access because he \u201cexploited a rare, previously unknown authentication bug.\u201d<\/p>\n
TechCrunch has requested comment from OpenAI on Apple\u2019s newest allegations.<\/p>\n
Apple is seeking a preliminary injunction \u2014 a court order that would block OpenAI from working on hardware based on Apple\u2019s technology while the case is ongoing \u2014 as well as expedited discovery, a fast-tracked process for gathering evidence, since the company alleges that more former employees may also be implicated. <\/p>\n
According to Apple\u2019s initial filing, more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-2255009714.jpg?resize=1200,800″] In its lawsuit against OpenAI, Apple filed what it calls \u201cshocking evidence\u201d to bolster its allegations that former employees stole trade secrets for OpenAI\u2019s benefit. These new details emerged after the legal counsel for former Apple employee Chang Liu \u2014 who now works at OpenAI \u2014 handed over Liu\u2019s old Apple work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[226,62],"class_list":["post-2121452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-crawlmanager","tag-techcrunch-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2121452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2121452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2121452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2121452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}