Two of the biggest names in technology are heading to court. According to the account, Apple has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot, accusing it of building its push into consumer hardware on trade secrets that were illegally taken from Apple, in a dispute that pulls the rivalry between the established tech giant and the artificial intelligence firm into open legal conflict.
At the center of the case are two people who used to work at Apple. According to the account, the two former employees left for OpenAI, were hired by that company, and then effectively continued to access internal information at Apple, with the lawsuit naming not only the corporation but also the individuals said to have carried the material across to a competitor.
One of them was singled out in particular. According to the account, a former Apple electrical engineer named Chang Liu, who went on to work at OpenAI, held on to his work laptop and did not return it after leaving the company, and it was that device, Apple says, that gave him a way to exploit loopholes and reach information he should no longer have been able to see.
Apple framed the alleged conduct in blunt terms. According to the account, the company said the two former employees had taken part in a coordinated program to steal secret information from Apple, describing OpenAI's nascent hardware business as resting on the shakiest of foundations and as being rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets.
OpenAI has pushed back firmly on the accusations. According to the account, the company denied the allegations in the lawsuit, saying that it has no interest in the trade secrets of other companies and that the case has not knocked its plans to release consumer hardware off track, with its first products still expected to be shown before the end of the year. The dispute lands at a busy moment for the company, which recently prevailed in a separate case brought against it by Elon Musk and has been weighing a possible stock market listing.
The company set out the legal grounds for its claim. According to the account, Apple is suing for breach of an intellectual property agreement and for misappropriation of trade secrets in violation of the Defend Trade Secrets Act, the federal law that governs the theft of confidential commercial information in the United States, raising the prospect of a hard-fought courtroom battle.
The stakes are tied to OpenAI's ambitions beyond software. According to the account, OpenAI, the most prominent artificial intelligence company and the maker of ChatGPT, has been moving into the hardware business, and last year it acquired I.O., a hardware startup founded by Johnny Ive, the designer behind the iPhone, another Apple name that surfaces in the story.
Those hardware plans are expected to take shape soon. According to the account, OpenAI's products are expected to be unveiled before the end of the year and could go on sale as soon as next year, and observers say the case could carry significant legal consequences, testing how far the protection of corporate secrets extends at a moment of intense competition to develop artificial intelligence.