Yeah, based on their track record (I mean, even their name is a bad joke at this point) I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Turns out there's downsides to conducting yourself with little integrity.
> Apple now tries to shift the blame to “residual access”, but they also don’t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave.
I have been fixated on this topic for some time. Most people behave in a regulated and lawful manner to be on safer side. They do not trespass into some ones home just cause the owner happened to leave the door open.
Companies are using LLMs to hack into other organizations and giving it a spin about agent escaping the sand box. I am surprised how the impacted organizations are not filing lawsuits for damages unless they themselves have something to hide, (probably their reputation). Interestingly from what I remember there is a law that binds the public companies to reveal any intrusion, unless I am missing the names of impacted companies by LLM agent great escape has not been revealed fully.
>> Based on their track record this lawsuit is not unexpected at all.
Their track record, and the narcissistic tone where they talk so confidently about how they are morally superior companies than others, and all they care about is public good.
What really matters is the claim that Apple never raised those issues in the lawsuit with them. OpenAI claims the emails prove this, but to me all the emails prove is Apple sent an email that said “please see the attached letters”. We don’t know what is in the attachments but I imagine those were the relevant issues they raised.
Moreover OpenAI says, “[Apple] now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information”, but the transcript they cite seems to me to show the opposite? It’s Chang Liu asking for someone to help him copy data. The part where Apple employees reach out is later and it’s not for copying data to a hard drive… it’s basically “who should I talk to about this project?” Which makes sense because when he was contacted it was after he left (so he wouldn’t have access to data)
Can someone please tell me what am I missing? None of this makes sense with what they’re saying. The fact that the lawyer emailed the wrong person is moot if they caught it and resolved it days later.
Full self driving teslas on the moon any day now. AI data centers in space! We’re all going to be rich! What a whacked out timeline where this is the richest man.
Setting aside the presented evidence, it feels weird for somewhat emotionally charged complaining like this to go on an official company blog. Companies are generally pretty tight-lipped about active litigation outside court documents, right? This just seems a bit amateurish, down to the title. Is public opinion about this case so important to them?
Yea that’s what strikes me as weird too. I had to look up at the web site bar to really confirm this was OpenAI and not some employee blog site. Particularly, the whole Asian last name bit was so shoehorned in to imply Apple is racist I guess? Not something I have seen in a statement from a company like OpenAI. Just weird energy. Also, that text exchange made Apple look like a fun place to work.
I mean we've had Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress make various below-the-belt comments about their competitors and other companies, something tells me that they're not the only CEO who acts in such a childish manner.
I'm sure saner heads like their legal people would prevail at some point, but until then...
Is public opinion important to an industry whos future depends on datacenters being built for hundreds of billions of dollars, while the people all around them, whos utilities get more and more expensive in no small part because of datacenter buildouts, experience a constant cost of living crisis...
Yeah this is the cloest a corporate company can get to drunk texting their ex at 3 am and reiterating how it wasn't their fault. But I mean its OpenAI, it loves drama
Haha omg what if someone at openai prompted a model to write this and the model could only come up with this unhinged version. It reads like a 3am manic text fest cuz that's what the model figures it should be.
Not buying it. In the end, OpenAI will throw these people under the bus and settle out.
I'm not Apple's biggest fan either (I got super upset when they conveniently wiped out all information about the person comiting suicide in one of their conference rooms and TMZ caught the police line and the sherif said "there is a gun, next to a dead person, we can't say much at the moment" and that was it). But it is unlikely that Apple would depriortize its brand on a fake story.
Not buying it. In the end, OpenAI will throw these people under the bus and settle out.
I think you're right, but let's not forget that Apple's goal isn't to protect themselves or to get a fat payout here. Their goal is to make their current employees less likely to leave for an offer at a company like OpenAI. This suit is telling everyone Apple employs "Hey, if you leave and we can find anything that looks a bit dubious, we're happy to screw you over."
Apple aren't a loving and caring company that nurtures people. They're as ruthless as the next trillion-dollar unicorn.
When I look at the imessage conversation, one thing strikes me: that guy looks to be using the same icloud account he used when working for Apple with OpenAI. Is he using his own personal account? Why do both Apple and OpenAI allow that in the first place, this look so amateur. I would have assumed each company would have opened a different account for him and locked him when leaving.
Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
Apparently Apple encourages their employees to use their personal iCloud accounts for company information, because their own OS doesn't support one iPhone, multiple iCloud identities.
Apple can give employees an iphone which will have an iCloud account in apples’s corp domain and can be used only for work. Many other companies do this.
Always found it odd that Apple don't let you have a second separate business profile to switch your phone to for work - especially when you don't necessarily want to be bringing browser history/personal apps into your workplace or wifi. Having your iphone locked to your personal account also hobbles their continuity features if you work on a business computer with its own work account (as most businesses do).
Facebook is equally bad on this front - requiring you to use your personal account to administrate business pages (don't even get me started on how they forced large businesses to use a custom 2FA method they then phased out - locking people out of their personal accounts forever).
Either with a single local account that accesses multiple Google accounts, or multiple local accounts. Though this is device specific, it may be disabled by your manufacturer/provider.
As mentioned elsewhere though, an enrolled phone is an enrolled phone so corporate wiping will wipe the entire phone and not just the profile.
It's been a while, but at a previous job (maybe 8 years ago) I was responsible for managing mobile devices and using Blackberry's MDM suite, you could have segregation of personal and private data, where you couldn't move data from one "container" to the other, including clipboard data.
I'm out of the loop now, though.
Android did have better support at the time, but if I remember correctly, devices that had a work managed profile on them could still be completely wiped, including the personal/private container.
A bit of a pain, but I've always preferred (where possible) to have separate work and personal devices.
Yeah, I had an Android phone at work with separate personal/work profiles, but using the phone to begin with required one main account that had to be my personal. Might've been possible to remove after, but I was afraid to mess with it.
Wouldn't want one phone to be both personal and work though. They owned it, idk if I could've put my own sim in without unforeseen issues, it could've been wiped like you said, and it ofc got wiped when I quit.
I've heard multiple times directly from Apple employees that there is no way to login to iCloud on your work machine using a company-controlled account. Many people create new Apple ID's which they only use while working there, but others just use their personal iCloud accounts. You are, of course, not supposed to store company data in iCloud. But thanks to Apple's own efforts, it's difficult to use a Mac without being logged into iCloud (for example if you want to use the App store), and some data can easily spill into the iCloud account.
If accurate, it is of course patently absurd that Apple has left this an unsolved problem.
This is what gets people subpoena'd and their entirely private messages scrutinised. Happened to a lot of people, including a friend of mine who's affair became a matter of public record after his company was investigated for anti-trust issues. Super unprofessional and legally dangerous.
I keep two phones, one for work, another for private life, and also two laptops for the same reason. The support for multi-identity is very inconvenient on apple[1], and very poor with whatsapp, signal and, really, most apps except for Google's. Shame, really, considering how well funded Apple and Meta are, and how little effort would be needed to implement the 80% of what people need: the ability to chat using different identities, without touching the rest of the OS wiring.
[1] on macos, its possible to create users with multiple apple id associations, but not on iphone
> Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
This doesn't seem out of line with common practices at other big tech firms. If you go work at Meta, your personal Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp/Oculus accounts become intrinsically linked to your work login identity (though a few employees created a secondary account on of all those to prevent this).
Although there are better controls than there used to be, it's not all that uncommon for sensitive work data to leak through this linkage into the public products...
Did employees get official approval to create secondary accounts?
-
Someone went on Reddit to ask if they really had to use their personal Facebook account to manage the company page as they said their boss pushed back against the idea, saying, “Do you think when Disney manages their Facebook page that Disney marketing execs have to use their personal Facebook accounts?”
And it seemed like the answer may well have been yes. There must be some value to Zuckerberg in tying it all together.
Google allowed iMessage until a few years ago, when they banned all non-work messaging apps for exfiltration reasons. But you can still sign into a personal iCloud, which iirc you need to do for certain Mac App Store apps that are corp-approved.
On the phone with some App Store support person I was told they don't like people having multiple Apple IDs. That's why I use my personal one for work as well.
Correct, because other companies are not in a position to certify the security of iCloud meeting their own standards. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Apple trusts Apple more than other people trust Apple.
>They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.
I find it bizarre that they felt the need to specify "Asian". What does that have to do with anything?
They are definitely trying to get you to think that Apple (the company perhaps single-handedly responsible for developing Chinese manufacturing) is racist
Many years ago, back when I was a junior, I wrote something like this to my manager, complaining about another employee who has wronged me. I eventually decided not to send it because it just seemed so unprofessional.
Wild that a company this big would post this on their official, public blog.
Yep, that's exactly what i thought at first look. This looks like one of those "letting-steam-off" mails you bin after thinking it through after cooling off.
Odd, regardless, OpenAI is spreading itself too thin, trying to fight wars on the enterprise, consumer, and hardware fronts, and will likely end up losing them all.
Does US law prevent (or frown upon) defendant from publicly publishing evidence, even when the plaintiff publicly published the accusation and their evidence first? If so, how is the defendant supposed to protect their public reputation when a lawsuit is ongoing for years? Or maybe I’m missing your point on what wouldn’t be looked upon kindly?
This feels like a trumpian tantrum from someone at openai. If they’re innocent, just win the lawsuit. Is this quibbling over details supposed to win the public over? Because afaik the public doesn’t know or care about this, and publicizing it just makes it worse.
Corporate posting in the weeks immediately surrounding a legal case or ruling impacting tech companies is definitely my favorite brand of written text. Despite not paying full attention to EU legislation, I get reliably notified by Google about every tiny bit of antitrust from them posting a "Google brings millions into the EU's [field they are getting hit with antitrust in] ecosystem" vagueblog about it.
What is this kind of unprofessional blog-style rant doing on OpenAI’s website? Shouldn’t this be settled between the two companies themselves rather than trying to play the court of public opinion?
Besides, I have absolutely no idea what this is about or whether I should care.
> Apple also accuses Tang Tan of trying to get and use their trade secrets. However, Tang has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies.
> Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets.
“They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.”
How shitty you must be as a company to go out and write this. Kindergarteners have better public policy. I have not seen any gathering of people (other than Trump's whole whatever that circus is called) this openly and easily tell lies. Gathering non profit funds then becoming for profit, Being built to do open source development and not shipping one result, going to the congress and saying "I'm not making any profit of this company" and rigging the world's economy... Now this shit "hey I was the nice person! I said nice things to Apple, look these are facts"
Reading through this, Apple seems even more interesting. It's strange that they relied on the iCloud access of a former employee (Chang Liu), which seems like a flaw in Apple's system. And it's also odd that Apple's legal team confused an Asian surname and sent the email to the wrong person.
So from the public's perspective, this only makes it look like Apple is lying.
By choosing to present direct evidence to the public rather than fighting in court, OpenAI seems to be framing Apple as a legacy company. In most cases like this, information is selectively released to favor the party releasing it. Based on what we've seen, this looks like an attempt to reframe their own wrongdoing as OpenAI's technology theft.
This is fascinating.
Looking at the overall picture, which side do you think has the advantage?
From what I can see, it looks like O
Personally, I think whether Apple's technology was copied or not, the real issue is that OpenAI's internal AI architecture and training data have been exposed to the outside.
Both sides will take a hit regardless of who wins, but they'll probably throw money at the media to make sure it doesn't blow up too much.
Apple has always marketed itself as 'privacy, security, and perfection,' but this shows just how sloppy they really are—though the public will never know. OpenAI will probably be the same. Looking at cases like this, it seems like how a company manages the media is what really matters.penAI is the one at a disadvantage, which is probably why they released this evidence to the public
Can’t trust anything OpenAI says anymore. Seems like they’ve been acting in bad faith for far too long. Feels like a company run by ruthless lying sociopaths. And I used to be a fan and a customer. Not anymore.
What a fucking a joke - throw some cheap shots in there trying to stir things up by pointing out they were Asian
Everything I read about OpenAI makes me dislike them more and more - really can’t stand that company’s culture - I have “friends” who work there and it makes complete sense
> we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets. We’re much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.
The veiled implication here is hilariously petty. This entire document is hilariously petty. And apparently, ignorant of the news cycle.
This does not build more trust in OpenAI. If it's-totally-a-misunderstanding and Apple-should-have-communicated-better is the best they can offer, well, good luck in court.
Also a completely meaningless statement. Essentially “You didn’t need to file because your lawsuit is wrong” er… yea of course you’d say that or there wouldn’t need to be a lawsuit.
Apple is getting everything wrong these days. I am so disappointed after buying a Mac mini M4 last year how everything is sandboxed and behind insane numbers of security layers. I will be moving to Linux as soon as my wallet allows it.
They built their whole business model on stolen data and act surprised when another company has zero trust in them.
Based on their track record this lawsuit is not unexpected at all.
I have been fixated on this topic for some time. Most people behave in a regulated and lawful manner to be on safer side. They do not trespass into some ones home just cause the owner happened to leave the door open.
Companies are using LLMs to hack into other organizations and giving it a spin about agent escaping the sand box. I am surprised how the impacted organizations are not filing lawsuits for damages unless they themselves have something to hide, (probably their reputation). Interestingly from what I remember there is a law that binds the public companies to reveal any intrusion, unless I am missing the names of impacted companies by LLM agent great escape has not been revealed fully.
Their track record, and the narcissistic tone where they talk so confidently about how they are morally superior companies than others, and all they care about is public good.
Moreover OpenAI says, “[Apple] now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information”, but the transcript they cite seems to me to show the opposite? It’s Chang Liu asking for someone to help him copy data. The part where Apple employees reach out is later and it’s not for copying data to a hard drive… it’s basically “who should I talk to about this project?” Which makes sense because when he was contacted it was after he left (so he wouldn’t have access to data)
Can someone please tell me what am I missing? None of this makes sense with what they’re saying. The fact that the lawyer emailed the wrong person is moot if they caught it and resolved it days later.
I would expect them to start out with something like Apple is suing us for yada yada yada, but instead it reads like the diary of a hurt teenager.
Its insane this is coming from a company with as much scope as openai. Scope may not be the right word.
Yep, down to the pages of iMessage screenshots
If you noticed Sam Altman's latest posts he moved to all lower case, including "I", which I see as due to the same reason
They literally have communication experts sitting there, breaking their heads over how to influence the public opinion in the company’s favor.
I guess they learned it from Elon: if people like you, they’ll just hold your stock forever, even if you don’t make much money.
Is that the Elon lesson? I see him behave terribly and suffer little consequence. Much like his political buddies.
I'm sure saner heads like their legal people would prevail at some point, but until then...
...yeah, that's a tough one...
I'm not Apple's biggest fan either (I got super upset when they conveniently wiped out all information about the person comiting suicide in one of their conference rooms and TMZ caught the police line and the sherif said "there is a gun, next to a dead person, we can't say much at the moment" and that was it). But it is unlikely that Apple would depriortize its brand on a fake story.
RIP https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Ed_Mackowiak - Apple’s statement is linked there (and the bit about the woman in the Wiki might be outdated per TMZ correction https://www.tmz.com/2016/04/27/apple-campus-body-found-cuper... )
I think you're right, but let's not forget that Apple's goal isn't to protect themselves or to get a fat payout here. Their goal is to make their current employees less likely to leave for an offer at a company like OpenAI. This suit is telling everyone Apple employs "Hey, if you leave and we can find anything that looks a bit dubious, we're happy to screw you over."
Apple aren't a loving and caring company that nurtures people. They're as ruthless as the next trillion-dollar unicorn.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/apple-...
Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/03/confidential-appl...
So yeah.
Facebook is equally bad on this front - requiring you to use your personal account to administrate business pages (don't even get me started on how they forced large businesses to use a custom 2FA method they then phased out - locking people out of their personal accounts forever).
https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin/multi-user
Either with a single local account that accesses multiple Google accounts, or multiple local accounts. Though this is device specific, it may be disabled by your manufacturer/provider.
As mentioned elsewhere though, an enrolled phone is an enrolled phone so corporate wiping will wipe the entire phone and not just the profile.
I'm out of the loop now, though.
Android did have better support at the time, but if I remember correctly, devices that had a work managed profile on them could still be completely wiped, including the personal/private container.
A bit of a pain, but I've always preferred (where possible) to have separate work and personal devices.
Wouldn't want one phone to be both personal and work though. They owned it, idk if I could've put my own sim in without unforeseen issues, it could've been wiped like you said, and it ofc got wiped when I quit.
If accurate, it is of course patently absurd that Apple has left this an unsolved problem.
I keep two phones, one for work, another for private life, and also two laptops for the same reason. The support for multi-identity is very inconvenient on apple[1], and very poor with whatsapp, signal and, really, most apps except for Google's. Shame, really, considering how well funded Apple and Meta are, and how little effort would be needed to implement the 80% of what people need: the ability to chat using different identities, without touching the rest of the OS wiring.
[1] on macos, its possible to create users with multiple apple id associations, but not on iphone
This doesn't seem out of line with common practices at other big tech firms. If you go work at Meta, your personal Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp/Oculus accounts become intrinsically linked to your work login identity (though a few employees created a secondary account on of all those to prevent this).
Although there are better controls than there used to be, it's not all that uncommon for sensitive work data to leak through this linkage into the public products...
-
Someone went on Reddit to ask if they really had to use their personal Facebook account to manage the company page as they said their boss pushed back against the idea, saying, “Do you think when Disney manages their Facebook page that Disney marketing execs have to use their personal Facebook accounts?”
And it seemed like the answer may well have been yes. There must be some value to Zuckerberg in tying it all together.
Yes.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/03/apple-icloud-sharing-ex...
We’ve always been asked to use our personal Apple account to install apps used for work.
Which has happened. Bonkers configuration.
I find it bizarre that they felt the need to specify "Asian". What does that have to do with anything?
A substantial amount of evidence in Apple's complaint isn't addressed, but what's shown here throws a decent amount of shade and doubt.
I have my popcorn ready for discovery. I hope it gets to that point, and I hope it proceeds to trial...
Wild that a company this big would post this on their official, public blog.
Models are a lost cause anyway - https://open.substack.com/pub/taikhooms/p/why-openrouter-can...
It's in court already, fight it there. Even if you win public opinion with your point of view you can still lose in court.
Assuming the exhibits aren't sealed they're publicly available as soon as they're entered by the court during trial.
If they're sealed there's probably a good reason they shouldn't be published until the trial is over (or ever in some cases)
Besides, I have absolutely no idea what this is about or whether I should care.
I think they are hoping what they did with Elon will work with Apple.
> Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets.
Well, I guess that settles it, then! Case closed.
Seriously, what is point of this?
On a serious notes, this seems like a desperate attempt to sway public opinion, but hey, Apple is no saint either. This will be a fun season.
Keep your garbage for the court.
PR is not a moat buddy.
So from the public's perspective, this only makes it look like Apple is lying.
By choosing to present direct evidence to the public rather than fighting in court, OpenAI seems to be framing Apple as a legacy company. In most cases like this, information is selectively released to favor the party releasing it. Based on what we've seen, this looks like an attempt to reframe their own wrongdoing as OpenAI's technology theft.
This is fascinating.
Looking at the overall picture, which side do you think has the advantage?
From what I can see, it looks like O Personally, I think whether Apple's technology was copied or not, the real issue is that OpenAI's internal AI architecture and training data have been exposed to the outside.
Both sides will take a hit regardless of who wins, but they'll probably throw money at the media to make sure it doesn't blow up too much.
Apple has always marketed itself as 'privacy, security, and perfection,' but this shows just how sloppy they really are—though the public will never know. OpenAI will probably be the same. Looking at cases like this, it seems like how a company manages the media is what really matters.penAI is the one at a disadvantage, which is probably why they released this evidence to the public
What a fucking a joke - throw some cheap shots in there trying to stir things up by pointing out they were Asian
Everything I read about OpenAI makes me dislike them more and more - really can’t stand that company’s culture - I have “friends” who work there and it makes complete sense
The veiled implication here is hilariously petty. This entire document is hilariously petty. And apparently, ignorant of the news cycle.
This does not build more trust in OpenAI. If it's-totally-a-misunderstanding and Apple-should-have-communicated-better is the best they can offer, well, good luck in court.
Is also rather funny when hiring HUNDREDS of their engineers.