OpenAI is now the one crying foul in its trade-secrets fight with Apple.
In a court filing submitted Wednesday, OpenAI accuses a former employee of taking more than 100 files tied to its product plans before leaving to join Apple. The company says the files included images of at least one unreleased device, plus supplier details, engineering data, and project documents. OpenAI alleges the employee sent the material to a personal account and later presented it to Apple leadership, including the vice president overseeing the company's Asia operations. The filing surfaced as part of an ongoing trade-secrets dispute between the two companies, one that until now had cast Apple as the accuser.
The reversal matters because it shows the OpenAI-Apple relationship is more adversarial than their public partnership chatter suggests. It also raises the uncomfortable question of how much insider product information moves between AI labs and hardware makers every time an employee changes jobs, a problem Silicon Valley has never solved with policy, only lawsuits.
Tech has seen this movie before, from Waymo's suit against Uber over self-driving files to Tesla's claims against former staff who joined Rivian, and it almost always ends in a settlement, not a verdict.