Apple expands its legal offensive against OpenAI, targeting dozens of its former employees

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Apple has sent personal legal letters to about 40 former company employees who now work at OpenAI, as part of gathering evidence to support its claim that the ChatGPT maker stole trade secrets. According to sources cited by the Financial Times, these letters demand that recipients preserve documents and communications, in addition to meeting with Apple's lawyers. That figure represents roughly 10% of the 400 former Apple employees currently working at OpenAI.

This round of letters comes just days after Apple filed a high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI and two employees, accusing them of stealing secret hardware plans. The lawsuit, filed the Friday before this article was published, names only two individuals: among them, a former Apple device designer who now heads OpenAI's hardware division. Neither OpenAI CEO Sam Altman nor Jony Ive—Apple's former design chief—are named as defendants in the lawsuit, even though Ive joined OpenAI last year when the company acquired his design studio io for $6.4 billion.

Apple has stated in its court filings that the evidence presented so far is only "the tip of the iceberg" regarding OpenAI's alleged conduct. For its part, OpenAI has responded that it takes the accusations seriously but is not aware of "any evidence that the lawsuit has merit," adding that the company has "no interest" in other companies' trade secrets.

The conflict comes as OpenAI works, precisely with Apple's former design chief, on developing its own devices. According to Apple's lawsuit, OpenAI's entire hardware business would be compromised by improperly appropriated trade secrets, which would create legal complications for the startup's plans to launch its own family of AI devices. OpenAI's first device is expected to be a palm-sized, portable gadget designed for the home, similar to a smart speaker. Its design does not include a screen but does include a microphone and cameras that would allow it to capture audio and video signals from its surroundings. The device would support an AI assistant capable of using the user's personal data and daily interactions. Even before Apple's lawsuit, OpenAI did not expect to begin shipping this device this year, as the company has faced difficulties balancing the assistant's usefulness with the risk of being intrusive, privacy concerns, and the challenge of finding chips powerful enough to run its models on a mass-market consumer device.

The dispute marks a significant rupture between two of Silicon Valley's most important names. The two companies had previously collaborated to integrate OpenAI's technology into the Siri voice assistant, but Apple has since partnered with Google, using its models as the basis for the ChatGPT-like voice and text assistant it unveiled in June. The lawsuit also poses a significant legal problem for OpenAI just as the company prepares for its highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO), since it calls into question the soundness of its hardware business at a crucial moment.

The fact that, shortly after filing the lawsuit, Apple's lawyers sent a wave of individual letters to a tenth of the company's former employees now working at OpenAI is, according to those familiar with the case, a sign of how broad and combative this legal confrontation could become. Neither Apple nor OpenAI wished to make further comments on the matter.