It gets even worse. The person not only kept the laptop and used an exploit to download confidential Apple documents, they bragged about it to a contact who was still working at Apple who was also feeding him information:

> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI. He also maintained a relationship with Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng, an Apple employee who continued to give him updates on Apple's projects, vendor decisions, and engineering details. When Liu learned he still had access to Apple's systems, he texted Peng "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny."

This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.

Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.

Doing it at a the company that most aggressively enforces secrecy is even crazier.

I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession. It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.

Relevant articles in IEEE Code of Ethics:

3. to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist;

4. to avoid unlawful conduct in professional activities, and to reject bribery in all its forms;

From NSPE Code of Ethics for Engineers:

III.4.b. Engineers shall not, without the consent of all interested parties, participate in or represent an adversary interest in connection with a specific project or proceeding in which the engineer has gained particular specialized knowledge on behalf of a former client or employer.

https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8 https://www.nspe.org/career-growth/nspe-code-ethics-engineer...

Culture issue. From How to Apply to Y Combinator[1] by Paul Graham:

"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

> we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.

1: https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html

The crucial part of why non-competes are gross is that they're trying to enforce what you do after someone stopped receiving anything from the past employer. If someone is helping competitors when still working somewhere, or actively taking stuff from their past employer after they've left, then yeah, of course that's dumb and should be punished. But there's no reason a non-compete clause is needed for that!

> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.

Reminds me of how Sam Altman told the board that a safety reviewer had approved one of their AI models when the reviewer had done no such things.

It seems to be a common trait of the AI people to just brazenly violate the law. It’s like a requirement for working at openAI is to think rules don’t apply to you because you’re so smart.

What does the financial compensation need to be for an engineer to actually do this? I'm gonna assume that if you work at Apple and are being recruited by OpenAI, you are not a dummy. Then you probably know that doing something like this runs the risk of you getting sued by a trillion dollar company.

If I had a potential employer ask me to do this, I would reply "oh hell fucking no", withdraw my application, and notify my companies security, legal and HR teams.

But then again it's easy to have the moral high ground when you're not staring down an offer that will completely change your and your families lives. I'm sure most employees probably thought what I'm thinking until they are looking at a 7 figure offer.

> Non-competes and the like are gross but what's described here isn't just "bring your expertise to OpenAI" it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.

Most of what happened in this case is straight-up illegal and other parts can be covered by NDA. No need for non-competes to prevent any of this.

Sure, “Trade Secret” non-competes are usually a pretext employers use to keep low-wage workers under their thumbs, but protecting bonafide trade secrets is their only sorta legitimate use, IMO. The world would be better if they were illegal, but letting engineers disperse confidential information from their last employer wouldn’t be the beneficial part.

> it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.

Thank you for recognizing this. As much as the developer community has come out against companies non-competes in the past, we should come down on even harder on one of our own stealing, because this does the most harm against the case against non-competes. It's grosser in the sense that one company doing a foul thing is bad, but ideally people can band together and work to dismantle the foul thing. But a person legitimizing the foul thing is the greater harm.

Remember it's apple lawyer words, not established facts.

> emailing themselves

These are supposedly our brightest minds..

Yeah every job transition I’ve managed I was straightforward and some new employers instructed me to do so.

It’s weird too, these people’s history will show up on job sites and etc, people will find out… fast.

The examples seem clumsy and amateurish.

Claims in a lawsuit always seem very favorable towards their side or else they wouldn’t have filed. The truth usually ends up more in the middle.

This isn’t the first time something like this happens and I always wonder how are these seemingly smart people earning good money so dumb.

The out of court settlement, OpenAI will pay Apple , with no recognition of guilt... will be in the billions, but 100 times smaller than the business advantages they will get from it.

Its the cost of doing business and OpenAI knowns it.

Should we believe that OpenAI is not stealing secrets of companies using their models?

I hope Apple crushes openAI in this lawsuit and everyone who leaves for OpenAI and bag of cash instead of their dignity and honor is made known.

Non-competes are awful. But enforceable protections for trade secrets makes perfectly good sense.

Two very different things!

How do we know this wasn't Apple's plan all along? A double agent of sorts isn't a new concept.

> Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan.

That's one of the dumbest things one can do while on their soon-to-be ex-employer's network.

AirDrop you mean lol? Anyone can now have a local LLM make a QR code based data transfer script

make sense since they stole all of humanity knowledge for their gain

Every single time.

If someone calls himself open, you should know who it is and what to expect.

How did he keep laptop?

Companies take cultural cues from leadership. When you have a puffed-up sociopath who has never accomplished anything but lying his way to the top, this is what you get.

I'm both infuriated and worried that such a flim-flam man has put himself at the center of the U.S. stock market.

As a counterpoint, why should a “metal finishing technique” be proprietary? Lying to the vendor that Apple said it’s ok is obviously wrong, but an employee taking that knowledge in their head doesn’t seem wrong to me. We have moved past the age of indentured apprentices and the freemasons.

Apple colluding on no poaching agreements was far worse and more damaging. So I don’t feel bad for them.

Generally speaking, companies retaining a competitive advantage with each other is good for their investors but bad for the public. It's usually to the public's benefit for employees to share knowledge, it makes goods and services cheaper and more available.

This may be just one bad employee, i.e., Mr. Tan. Your quoted sentences say OpenAI did such and such, but it may all be just Mr. Tan. That's not to say OpenAI is not responsible because they are supposed to give strong guidance to new hires that they are not to bring any confidential information from their former employer.

Apple will lose this because they didn't do the due diligence to do basic protection against this.

And Apple is a company built on anti trust violations[1].

Every company that sees it profitable to break the law and pay a fine seems to do it. There are no “good guys”.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/apple/659296/apple-failed-complianc...

Okay, yup, this line of reasoning has me removing agents from my personal machines. I was enjoying the convenience and waved that internal niggle away with a vague feeling of "they would never exploit this", but you're right, I needed that wake up call.

> Apple have deep enough pockets that they can actually sue OpenAI but I bet OpenAI are surprised they got caught.

Maybe? But more likely their 'surprise' will be that it's actually happened, because the people doing this kind of thing must surely know it's wrong and won't be telling their bosses, and/or their bosses definitely won't be passing that info up the chain. Just like movies, 'plausible deniability'.

Everyone is deluding themselves if they think their enterprise privacy contracts with these frontier model companies (especially in CA) aren't reading and processing their private data

Don't matter to people who look at codex as a way to replace employees

That was a wild read.

[dead]

If only it was just copyright violation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji

IP infringement is not theft. There’s a whole “you wouldn’t download a car” meme about this.

Intellectual property has always been a made up idea that has been abused for years by big companies far in excess of its societal value. I’m not sad that the force of IP restrictions seems to be weakening, but I am surprised to see so many people in tech that previously were pretty lassez faire on IP to suddenly take it so seriously now that it’s become a useful means to criticize AI companies with.

Ignoring patent law has done great things for 16th century continental Europe and more recently China. Rent-seekers and ladder kickers shouldn't always be respected, they'll slow down societal advancement to a crawl if you let them. The question is whether the gains these AI companies are making from their transgressions are overly privatized.

Unlike Uber and Airbnb that did break local laws and got away with it because people wanted their service (and also deep pockets for handling litigation and encouraging politicians to see your way), training an ai is generally not theft.

If I read a physics textbook and now I know some physics do I perform a theft when I use it practice or teach someone else?

unrelated, but I love the writing style of this comment

Obviously they are looking at your IP and code. Anthropic trains on your data regardless of you opting out, I know that one for certain. There's no coincidence they "keep your data temporarily despite opting out" - because they wash it in legal loopholes. There is no opt out. These companies WILL steal your business. Only a matter of time before they are sued as well.

This is way overstated.

OpenAI will certainly launch devices. It is to be seen how competitive they are and how much product market fit they achieve.

OpenAI also has better data retention policies relative to Anthropic on SOTA models.

Good point. If these are the ethical standards they go by, who’s to say they’re abiding by any standards to keep my data private.

Use local hardware if you can people! Chatbots are a luxury anyway and the local ones are catching up. You don't need the fanciest bells and whistles. Don't believe the narrative that you're "falling behind" if you're not using the latest model 20 hours a day.

My guess it winds up like the old FAT joke about Android.

OpenAI also has infinite money, and the graph for money/lawyering gets clamped well below what OpenAI can afford. It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.

Well OpenAI is offering equity to the US Government (and who knows who else privately) Tim Apple famously refused to bring manufacturing back to the US when the current president asked and play hardball on infosec. While this is a civil case, increasingly judiciary seems to be an extension of the executive. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

This is when I wish Jobs was still in charge of Apple. I never quite liked him, but I like Altman way less. And Jobs would CRUCIFY the whole openAI team for this. It would be beautiful to watch.

For real. If Apple can prove half of this complaint, OpenAI need to be jumping straight to "how can we settle this immediately." Can you imagine how much fun Apple lawyers would have taking this to a jury trial? Especially considering overall Apple knows that the public overall vaguely likes Apple and distrusts "AI" companies for, hmmm... (alleged) IP theft.

I'm also wondering about all these involved ex-Apple people who decided to pivot to crime, it seems like OpenAI has to fire all of them, no? Because how do you just keep them, knowing that they're all basically tainted, and that Apple will be coming back to sue you again for anything that seems "inspired" by Apple products or tech.

What a massive cock-up for whoever (Tan?) is at the top of this conspiracy, to think this was worth the risk, and to have not known that the chances of getting caught going this far outside the legal boundaries were less than 100%.

Is there any other AI company with as much controversy as this company?

- ~murdered~ (dead) employee who's mother is on a anti-sam hate campaign - ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company - conflict of interest with Microsoft

Despite Anthropic's bad press, they haven't been as dishonest as this company.

I hope they can pull it off.

That said, silicon valley is full of stories where people brazenly stole from company A to start company B and pretty much got away with it.

EDIT: this is the one I remember:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems%2C_Inc....

What kind of repercussions will OpenAI face?

OpenAI will just put the employees involved under the bus. They can claim the information acquired wasn't used for OpenAI's benefit or authorization especially since the device isn't actually out yet.

Apple should buy OpenAI

The same can be said about Apple. Several companies have complained about them taking a meeting with apple, presenting their product, only to have Apple then rip it off and build it in house. To say nothing of sherlocking.

I’m not one to defend huge companies, but OpenAI is a huge company.

It’s possible this kind of behavior is endorsed throughout, or it’s possible it’s limited to this specific group.

We know nothing beyond what Apple has alleged.

This is only like the 12th reason not to trust OpenAI. The culture starts from the top

You can trust Apple. I mean they openly lied to a judge last year under oath, but you can trust them.

This thread is certainly achieving Apple's PR goals

Meh. Consider that you had no choice and no say that your data out there, both present and historic as mined, aggregated and analyzed by data collectors, was used as a training set for the LLMs. I think you’re a tad too late with your warning. They’re already thieves and they know it. And they know you can’t and won’t do anything about it.

> A company that behaves like this in one area, cannot be trusted in any area.

A company locking down their phone platform cannot be trusted with their laptop OS.

Discovery is the entertainment for the rest of us.

this will settle before it gets to discovery I bet

> I don't see why they'd accept a settlement.

glances at Kushner's $1 billion OpenAI investment through Thrive Capital

Are you sure they won't settle? Apple settled their case with NSO Group, even though they were (and still are) hacking iPhone handsets. Seems to me like Apple is happy to settle cases that interfere with their political ambitions whenever America's government asks them to stand down.

If Apple's protectionist treatment is predicated on non-interference with other protected companies like OpenAI, maybe they will be motivated to settle out of court.

If OpenAI is this shady culturally then all kinds of dark secrets could come out.

They just released 5.6 to great fanfare with benchmarks showing even their weakest model (Luna) supposedly smoking Fable. Having used it a couple hours I'm certain this is a lie, and I'm now curious what else is.

“Don’t over plan your life. Be open to the wonders and opportunities that present themselves,” Tan said.

[sharing reflections on his journey from MIT graduate to Apple executive to OpenAI Chief Hardware Officer as part of the Distinguished Speaker series hosted by the School of Engineering]

[https://thetech.com/2025/10/30/tang-tan-openai]

not even the first time https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/iyo-sues-former-eng...

Edit: this was a year ago

who knows, maybe he had giant gambling debts or other addiction(s) or bad real estate investments and/or lost half of it all to an ex-wife first. things that Jony might be readily aware of. assuming there is more than a kernel of truth to this - and i can't imagine not, the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account - it doesn't surprise me that Tan was a criminal, it's that he was such a bad criminal

Reminds me of the (infamous) eBay sellers back in the days who collected perfect ratings for a couple of years just to suddenly turn into scammers, pulling off what was known as a "long con" or "exit scam."

Where do you think he learned it? While working at Apple from them doing the same type of thing.

I would think programmers would at least verify a bug before announcing a bug. Lets hear both sides of the story before judging.

And how many years of being passed over for promotions, I wonder.

Not that it justifies what he did for a moment but you can absolutely work somewhere for a long time and end up resenting it by the time you leave.

I don’t put my company’s IP on their servers, because I don’t trust them to not steal it.

That's also a bad look for any company who willingly hands its IP over

this time they stole from people who have the resources to fight back

It’s really unsurprising. Stealing IP is their whole business model.

what do you mean by "exact same thing"

This isn't about "poaching" employees (in our society people can work where they choose, they are not property of a feudal lord) and using their knowledge.

This is about ex-employees accessing Apple's internal fileshares. It's about instructing employees who were about to leave to take everything they could with them, and giving them training on how to evade Apple's offboarding security process.

Of course, this is essentially the basis of capitalism. Corporations are just people, folks, spread the knowledge and we all get richer.

The best corporations I worked at had people dedicated to reverse engineering competitor products and were deeply steeped in the market, the worst were those where product just cared about making their bosses happy.

Is the same clean room technique used for code bases.

Exactly!

    xAI argues the stolen data contains “cutting-edge AI technologies with features superior to those offered by ChatGPT”. The company claims this information could provide OpenAI with a “potential overwhelming edge in the race to dominate the AI landscape”.

I read that Apple warned them about a potential litigation in February so you could be correct.

I’d guess phone, anything else is too compute-constrained and just an accessory for them, plus has to pay 30% of subscriptions and can be disadvantaged strategically.

My money is on drone with missile pods.

Likely a device where the largest share of interaction pattern is through voice conversations and chats with the system to get it to do things for you: messages, email, etc.

It would have to run Android, and try to provide compatibility for existing apps in order for this to be a successful device.

I don't really know, but from what I've heard it sounded kind of like a wearable amazon echo. Because I guess reaching into your pocket for your cell phone is too big a lift? Kind of fits with OpenAI's MO of only selling things that lose money (AFAIK the Echo is still unprofitable?)

Maybe handcuffs, hee hee

An egg

the only ai device that makes any sense is a robot

Which equals fame and intrigue in the Trump era, big congratulations to Mr. Tan on his new found wealth

This is a drop in the ocean compared to what Anthropic does behind closed doors.

Apples billions are in cash

OpenAIs billions are in IOUs to Nvidia

OpenAI has concepts of money.

Only one has Actual Money™ and quite a lot of it.

Lawyers: rubbing hands together

Can you pay for lawyers with RAM, GPUs or IOUs for tokens?

Imagine comparing what apple has access to vs a deeply money losing firm

The jury ruled against Apple only on the issue of patents, and the claims of trade secret theft were dismissed. There doesn’t seem to be evidence that the Masimo employees who went to work for Apple brought any confidential information along with them.

Yeah I cannot feel any sympathy for either companies here.

They all do this exact thing, including Apple. OpenAI was just the last one to get caught.

And if OpenAI uses this hardware information to bring less locked hardware to the masses, wishful thinking I know, then more power to them.

If AI keeps improving, it is very important to make sure everyone gets at least a smidge of a chance of equal access to AI otherwise the income disparity will grow even more. And Apple is the last company in the world to think of the masses. They sell $1000 aluminium monitor stands: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-monitor-stand-price-re...