Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform. That includes things like Windows Phone, Fire Phone, all the glasses, Humane, etc.
As much as everybody hates on OpenAI for chaotic management, they did buy Jony Ive and are presumably giving him everything he wants to build a platform for them. Even though it probably only buys them a 20% chance of success, they haven't doomed the project by underestimating what it takes budget-wise.
And they blew it. Maybe they blew it by not realizing that even long time Apple employees could get arrogant about security. Or maybe it was a loose ethical environment in general. Whatever is it the root or the problem, they set billions of dollars on fire maybe tens of billions, by being unnecessarily cute about Apple proprietary information when they could've been above reproach. They had the resources to hire all the right people with the right knowledge and probably already had them on board.
At this point in his career, Jony Ive is best suited for doing deep dive studies on the corner-radius of new products. And even then, you might as well just default it to that of an ipad, because that seems to be his preference for all things, including $650k Ferraris.
AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. This week ChatGPT, next week Claude. The real value is and going to be in hardware - as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race.
I increasingly see AI investment, generally speaking, as a lost cause. It has very little chance to pay off.
Yup. Model capabilities seem to keep converging quickly, not leaders breaking away for long.
Frontier labs are racing towards SaaS commoditization at incredible speed. And while there might possibly be $Trillions in productivity gained from their use, there's no reason to think those gains get captured by the model makers or inference providers at this point.
Maybe the Claude or ChatGPT desktop apps will dominate as the new MS Excel, but that's hard to do without already having locked the whole market into Windows.
There's virtually no platform play available to them.
> AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit.
That might be true in tech-savvy industries -- but in non-tech industries where the biggest software purchase might be the office suite or the ERP, inertia means the GSuite shops stick with Gemini, and the Exchange/Office 365 shops stick with Copilot.
At least from some smaller marketing companies I know that isn't necessarily true. They often have Gemini or Copilot and Claude nowadays and before Claude it was ChatGPT.
The moat is way smaller than with Office or Gsuite because they feed data into the chat interface and it gives them an answer. The moat for Gsuite and Office is higher because you have to move all your data and reorganize it. Oh and everyone has to learn how to use the new software clients.
Just out of curiosity, what is the change and how are you measuring its rate?
From no internet to internet the change is pretty profound. But my job is already very automated for the most part. It's true AI might automate it a bit more, but it's not like I'm going from zero automation to full on automation. That's not nothing, and it is worth something, but it's also not internet from no internet level of change either.
The trick is antitrust style bundling. The massive pile of documents and processes tied to GSuite is a moat which makes it hard to switch to something like o365. Since a company might effectively be locked into GSuite (the primary product), if Google forces companies to buy Gemini (the secondary product) by bundling it with GSuite, they've given themselves a moat in the LLM space using their document/email moat from GSuite.
This is essentially what Google has done, and it's a shame the US is so weak on enforcing antitrust laws.
I'm just happy we get to reap the rewards "for free" (i.e open models are slowly becoming usable, and the winner of the arms race will definitely stand on the shoulders of their competitors that didn't make it)
I'm privy to dozens of people working on this problem every day and I imagine there's many more people working on this problem out of sight. I'm bullish on this idea, but it's going to be a slow burn.
> they did buy Jony Ive and are presumably giving him everything he wants to build a platform for them
If they hired Jony Ive to build a "platform" they will be very disappointed. He has no experience in doing that. They hired him to design a device, probably comment on the UI (if there is any, though I don't think he is qualified to direct either UI personally).
Aside from that, yeah, they royally screwed up here. Either by hiring unsavory people who think this acceptable behavior and/or by not managing/supervising them.
I've said it before on this topic: this goes _way_ past non-competes and the like. If you learn a novel method for doing something you are free (in my book) to recreate it at another company. You are not free to steal code/designs/etc verbatim and you are absolutely not ok to encourage people you are poaching (poaching is fine itself) to steal secrets/ideas on their way out. Also the whole "lying to a manufacturer to say Apple gave OpenAI permission to use the same proprietary technique" is really gross.
> Either by hiring unsavory people who think this acceptable behavior and/or by not managing/supervising them.
Is there any reason to think this is roque employees doing something? We know Altman is ethically challenged. It is equally or even more likely that management welcommed employees to doing this.
I maintain that if Humane wasn’t arrogant as hell and had just put a screen on their device, theyd have been PERFECTLY placed to become the open-platform AI Phone
Hell they might’ve been bought by OpenAI for billions instead of… HP lol
> Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform.
Ahistoric jibber jabber. Microsoft gave it their very best shot with Windows Phone. Facebook renamed the entire company to make VR happen. These companies have shoved everything they got into making these platforms, and their fate would not have been different if they had been given another billion.
Platforms are hard to make, and wanting it bad enough is not enough to make one.
Stealing from the one company that has managed to court success makes a lot of sense. They are the only company with any successful experience.
Fair enough, but I'd point out that, unlike Second Life, Meta didn't buy pants. If you want a chronicle of wasted spending regarding Microsoft and mobile devices, Google "Tomi Ahonen."
They also succeeded in the monumental task of making VR look boring.
VR platforms are an escapist's dream: you can be anything you want doing whatever you want. And how did they show off their fantasy world machine? They did office meetings in avatars of their real life selves.
Just spend one night in VRChat and everything Meta did will look like Plato's cave shadows.
A decade ago Uber seemed poised to be the big tech powerhouse. Maybe not a platform per se (certainly not an ecosystem as other companies had it) but a major provider of software for all kinds of verticals beyond their core business. What happened to that?
Uber managed to make the business by lobbying so hard. In some countries they broke the regulation of tax drivers and made the environment like wild jungle. Now, people don't feel "safe" anymore for random Taxis and prefer Uber in many places.
Yes, but how do we know specific manufacturing processes weren’t in employee contracts like, “If you leave Apple you can’t utilize the invisible weld process invented here for the iMac.”
I mean regardless of whether it’s a trade secret, you’re going to know how to do specific things that can’t be protected against copying.
There are no practical laws against understanding the laws of physics, chemistry, and metallurgy when it comes to anodizing.
Legally, no. Reasonably, for purposes of discussion, I think it has. The “LOL” dumbfuck who airlifted files into OpenAI isn’t particularly ambiguous [1].
It is ambiguous still at this stage though. There's no proof he used this info at his job or that he was directed to take it by anyone (he may have thought it helpful to his career in a way OpenAI never asked for or even invited).
LOL Liu hasn’t—to my knowledge—been fired. When OpenAI was notified of his conduct, they didn’t confidentially settle. Instead, OpenAI’s legal went cold on Apple.
It’s not legally certain. But you really have to stretch the facts to make this seem ambiguous.
The court of public opinion is a thing, and the onus isn't on us to not trust a rich tech bro to not be an unethical person. That's on them to fix their image + avoiding jail time.
The rest of us are allowed to rightfully laugh at them.
This could be a blessing in disguise for OpenAI. This mess was conducted under Altman’s watch—it could be an opportunity to Kalanick him.
The Board could elevate Altman to Chairman emeritus or something, choose a new CEO and settle with Apple. That will probably involve shutting down the hardware project and clawing back comp from its employees who helped make this mess.
Why are we taking Apple’s side here? They made accusations, nothing had been proven yet.
Who is to say Apple employees (at Apple) haven’t been vibe coding or asking gpt for technical topics? Also, funny timing from Apple - there is a lot of PR and optics riding on this lawsuit.
FT frames this as some aggressive escalation tactic, but document retention letters are extremely standard practice. At this point they're basically a formality, as any former Apple employee at OpenAI really ought to know by now that they could get dragged into this. Hold letters can be aggressive if you send them before you've even filed a complaint, but if anything, Apple is late to the party with these.
They’re not late to the IPO party, which was postponed by OpenAI, It may turn out that that was a mistake. OpenAI probably should’ve gone ahead, particularly in light of the pending court case.
Something similar happened to me when I left Microsoft for Apple (I moved from the Visual Studio team to the Xcode team). MS spent six months trying to prove I'd taken "industry secrets" with me. I hadn't. The entire thing felt like a personal attack and was extremely stressful.
It sounds like, in this case, Apple has hard proof that documents were stolen.
This seems like an important post. It looks like these letters are occasionally used to as a tactic, and i can see how such a tactic can really scare employees in a country where legal bills can climb really fast.
> in a country where legal bills can climb really fast
Honest question: Are there countries where this is not the case? I'd be interested to read more about how that manage that. If it's some sort of "protecting the little guy"-type thing or a general suppression of legal costs. Or maybe I'm reading too much into your comment.
It is more that labor protections in most of the industrialized world actually mean something, such that this sort of behavior is generally not even to be considered an option by an employer.
Doesn't that mean that if you have a slam dunk case you can get a super expensive lawyer just to run up costs as much as possible? Hell, could you ask your friend to be your legal representative and have him charge you a gorillion dollar in legal fees? Then when you win you split the loot?
They did. That said, I don’t know how much “defending” they had to do given that I was never even told what, exactly, I was supposed to have stolen. But, like I said, it was both surprising and anxiety inducing.
> It sounds like, in this case, Apple has hard proof that documents were stolen.
I believe some articles mentioned about employees bragging to their former colleagues about accessing documents. Also I believe they lied to Apple about being employed elsewhere so they can continue using their access and hardware, etc.
If these are correct, the whole OpenAI playbook is very dirty, and I won't pity them a bit.
Apple also has server logs that track these former employees downloading confidential docs. It doesn't prove that they shared them over to OpenAI, but Apple has pretty solid proof that the former employees saved them without authorization.
I'm not a lawyer, but I would also guess they need to "flip" these folks against OpenAI and get them to cooperate in the lawsuit against the actual folks with big pockets. I think they're essentially alleging a conspiracy by OpenAI and they need as many examples as possible to make the case that this was a pattern and standard practice, not just one or two idiots acting on their own.
So if I'm a former Apple employee and I get one of these scary letters, I'm asking my attorney if I could get out of a lawsuit by sharing any information I have about any potential OpenAI shady practices.
You shouldn't ever willingly give up information to a plaintiff if it could implicate you. If the information exists, it's going to come out in discovery. Admitting to theft of trade secrets is probably not going to help you, it's not like the cops offering you immunity for turning state's witness.
You talk to a lawyer and do what they say, not what Apple demands of you. No one but a judge can demand anything of you.
Apple must have hard evidence on this. I can’t believe they would take it this far without already knowing they are going to win. If they have to fire a huge chunk of their hardware employees it’s going to throw their IPO plans into chaos.
They literally do have hard evidence. They have records of an employee (Chang Liu) who left for OpenAI copying dozens and dozens of files off of their server after he left.
Also, Apple confronted OpenAI about LOL Liu. OpenAI’s response wasn’t to fire him, conduct an investigation and confidentially settle with Apple. It was to go cold.
You are getting downvoted because, I guess, people didn't read who the defendents who are getting sued, and that it literally starts with sueing two employees:
CHANG LIU, TANG YEW TAN, OPENAI
FOUNDATION f/k/a OPENAI, INC., OPENAI
GROUP PBC, and IO PRODUCTS, LLC f/k/a IO
PRODUCTS, INC.,
> these are letters to individuals about the existing lawsuit with OpenAI, not new lawsuits against individuals
My guess is these employees weren’t chosen randomly. If they refuse to coöperate with Apple, they’ll get personally sued as well.
And the reality of the matter is, given Altman’s public persona and reputation, there is a good chance an AG somewhere starts looking at whether these folks broke any laws.
They can easily be found to have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, like this is a slam dunk. Highly possible too seeing the massive public hatred against companies like OpenAI. DAs like easy political wins too and what better win than sticking it to OpenAI and its lackeys?
Might have to make some phone calls to my local representatives now...
Definitely not randomly chosen--Apple would have chosen people it believes may have evidence that relates to the case. It's a legal request to preserve that data.
But it doesn't follow at all that Apple is threatening to sue them. A long time ago, in an unrelated case, I got a letter like this because I was in the room when a certain decision was made and happened to have some notes about that meeting. But there was no chance I would be sued. I wasn't the decider, and was basically a third-party involved.
They will find out what Altman really cares about, my guess at this point, he only cares about the impending IPO throwing baggage overboard (new hires), probably won’t be a problem in the end.
The accusations are incredibly clear/defined (and serious!) and have a very simple burden of proof. These things either happened or they didn’t, and they have material evidence or they don’t. It’s incredibly unlikely that they filed such big, concrete accusations without concrete proof to back them up.
And while I am far from an Apple fan boy, yes a lot of big corporations file frivolous lawsuits but Apple typically does not engage in that behavior against other companies. Also bear in mind that open AI is a huge name so there is a public/political element that goes along with this for Apple. There are going to be a lot of people who do not want Apple to win this regardless of how true their claims are and will figut like hell to protect openAI
You see how that’s an entirely different kind of legal action, right? It’s a resistance to regulation, which is entirely different than this accusation of malfeasance.
I think it is clear that if Apple were going to deal with OpenAI on that level, they already would have. What they wanted for their AI products is a measure of control over their destiny that OpenAI clearly did not want to give them that badly. It's also pretty clear that Apple is willing to work with arch-rivals to supply components of their products, both software and hardware, but values consistency alongside trustworthiness.
This stuff happened years ago, right? Something tells me that discussion has already happened, and they went with Google.
Besides: Apple is a "real" company that will definitely still be around in five years. They've already fumbled Siri multiple times. IMO Google was certainly the right choice for actually executing well on Apple's own terms for the foreseeable future.
You’re underestimating how much Apple Legal goes after anyone and everyone they feel a slight wrong sniff about.
I know some insane stories that will never be publicly disclosed for one reason or another, and…it’s not a legal team I’d ever want to cross paths with.
It’s also not the first time Apple has cried wolf at employees leaving the company to do bigger and better things, while trying to take responsibility for their successes.
Oh, in that case, I just happen to have some insane stories that will never be publicly disclosed, and every one of my stories rebuts every one of your stories.
Then share some of those insane stories with sources I guess. Because this seems to directly contradict my understanding of Apple (post-Jobs in particular).
I do not love Apple, as I said another comment I am so far from an apple fanboy, but frivolous lawsuits against other companies is not really typical for them. Also, these accusations are far from frivolous and they either have proof or they don’t. It would be very strange for them to file this thinking they would win with some sort of gray area argument
It's interesting that you say they must have hated each other, but assume only Ternus is acting on that. What makes you think Tan's hatred of Ternus or animosity toward Apple for picking Ternus over him didn't lead Tan to do the alleged behavior?
Maybe a naive take, but if there's one team in a large corporation that does not bend to "the CEO(-to-be) wants it", that is the Legal team. Particularly when the ask is a lawsuit of this scope and relevance, and potential costs (of all kinds). The head of Legal can just hint to the board how expensive (in all senses) the vendetta would be and the CEO is likely "not to be" anymore, or "to be temporary".
Weird take. With as much evidence as they have (unless they're just wildly fabricating everything in their lawsuit complaint, which... really? All Apple's lawyers are just making up claims in court documents? Sounds very career-ending, why would the lawyers do that?) they would be complete idiots not to sue.
These letters are simple "If you have evidence related to this lawsuit, you must preserve it" letters. And entirely routine in this kind of action. There are more of them than in most cases, because this is such a big case. But the gist is entirely routine.
Tim Cook is the current CEO. Tim Cook is doing this. Any assertion otherwise is 100% wrong.
John Ternus doesn't become CEO until September 1st. If you think that this is still John Ternus' play, Tim Cook is still the one in charge and signed off to start this, meaning "Tim Cook would never have started this" is still 100% wrong.
Based on the previous thread, Apple seems to have damning evidence of wrongdoing by the (ex)employees before-and-after they left their positions at Apple: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48865019
Seems very similar to Google/Waymo winning its case against Uber (ex-Googler Anthony Levandowski) stealing corporate data.
Apple has the employees' emails history, the server access logs, etc. Really don't see Apple pursuing this unless they had a mountain of evidence against them.
Generally speaking, I think Apple tends to win on anything related to ex-employees. I am not sure if this is normal across Big-Tech. But surely is for Apple.
Depending on what is at stake. Example the one with Nuvia and Qualcomm I believe they just settled.
I don’t think Cupertino will settle for stock. I think they’ll demand cash and an agreement that OpenAI abandon or reboot their hardware project. In the meantime, Apple gets an open kimono into everything OpenAI has planned.
This could actually be the fuckup that kills OpenAI as an independent company. The threat of a cash judgement gums up not only an IPO, but also debt-based fundraising. (We equity guys are idiots, so we’ll probably keep writing cheques until the market turns.)
Why would Apple settle? They probably want the same outcomes of the Waymo v Uber trial that forced Uber out of the market. Apple's accusations imply that every part of OpenAI's hardware effort has been tainted with Apple's trade secrets and is therefore illegitimate. They also have more money than God so they can keep the suit going as long as they want.
This is an interesting point here. Due to having infinite money already, that's a possible dynamic we might see. OAI admits "Yup, obviously you got us. Let's write a check." And Apple might just respond "Nah, we are obviously going to win at trial, the legal fees don't bother us a bit, and honestly we don't really need the money, we'd rather destroy you as heavily as possible, for some combination of making an example out of all the criminals involved, plus there's a tiny chance you could threaten us someday considering you hired 'our boy' Jony Ive to build hardware."
Uber was not forced to leave the self driving car market by Waymo's litigation. The litigation ended in February 2018 and Uber left the market in December 2020.
They will just settle if a settlement gets them what they want for less than fighting this to legal completion would cost them (on a risk-adjusted basis).
It's insane to cross Apple. In the worst case Apple could take the ChatGPT app down like they did to Fortnite. They are probably waiting for discovery to find out how high this goes.
IIRC Apple have been allowed to remove Fornite from the Apple Store, they just fall foul of the EU Digital Markets Act / DMA (?) when also blocking the Epic Games Store as a route to add/sideload it.
Removing ChatGPT due to ToS violations seems like it would be ok.
Looks like a bunch of OpenAI employees involved in the theft are going to see prison time and nobody is going to hire them other than shady startup founders who will probably ask "is this guy going to steal from me "
I think this is a good reminder that no company is going to put their neck out for you. IF you go above and beyond whether, whatever the carrot is on the end of the stick you chase, you are only good as what you give back.
Never stay loyal or go all out for your employers, I think the new gen z are far more wiser. It's simply not worth it and I don't feel guilty for working three different employers via remote. Would they get mad and fire me if they found out? Sure. But then I'd just replace them with the next one.
YOU are the only person you should be loyal to. Don't steal for companies, don't lie for companies, don't work extreme hours for some "startup equity" that won't mount to shit (note those are extremely rare)
Collect your pay check, do the minimum, if possible find more pay checks.
How can I say this…? Some companies come across like a neon sign flashing "EVIL!".
It's been nothing but warning signs from this company for at least a year now. I'm so happy to have nothing to do with them (having deleted my account a year or so ago).
Their marketing dept is going to have to really dig to get them out of this hole they've made for themselves.
The idea that I would trust any device they might roll out that is as personal as a personal AI assistant… It's no better than Meta and their creepy glasses.
Yeah, no thanks.
EDIT: I don't mind the downvotes—it means I touched a nerve—whether I am on the right or wrong side of the issue is not as interesting.
Apple, for its flaws, has not lost my trust with regard to my personal data—Meta and others are likely to never gain that back. OpenAI continues to do things to signal that they will not have that trust with me as well.
- U.S. Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit Accuses Apple of monopolizing
smartphone markets and anticompetitive behavior.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-apple-monopolizing-smartphone-markets
- EU Commission DMA breach The European Commission found Apple in breach of
the Digital Markets Act regarding steering rules.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-finds-apple-and-meta-breach-digital-markets-act
- Epic Games injunction sanctions Court rules Apple defied App Store order
regarding external payment links.
https://apnews.com/article/69b16572d2b2c990f6b69d4bbad9b57b
- EU €1.8B App Store fine Fined for abusive music-streaming rules and
preventing cheaper alternative information.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_1161
IPHONE PERFORMANCE AND "BATTERYGATE"
- Apple Will Finally Pay for Throttling iPhones (WIRED) Apple settled the
throttling lawsuit for up to $500 million (without admitting guilt).
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-batterygate-settlement-payments-finally-coming/
RIGHT TO REPAIR AND PARTS PAIRING
- The End of Parts Pairing? Almost (iFixit) On how software component linking
forces warnings and loses functionality.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/100266/the-end-of-parts-pairing-almost
- Self-Repair Programme Critique (Right to Repair Europe) Critiques
serialization, remote authorization, and part restrictions.
https://repair.eu/news/apples-self-repair-programme-is-not-the-right-to-repair-we-need/
- France is Fighting to Save Your iPhone from an Early Death (WIRED) Regarding
France's probe into planned obsolescence and parts pairing.
https://www.wired.com/story/right-to-repair-apple-france/
PRIVACY AND SURVEILLANCE
- Apple to pay $95 million to settle Siri privacy lawsuit (Reuters) Lawsuit
alleging accidental Siri recordings and sharing with third parties.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-siri-privacy-lawsuit-2025-01-02/
- Apple's CSAM On-Device Scanning Critiques (EFF) The Electronic Frontier
Foundation's critique of Apple's plan to scan photos on-device (later
dropped).
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-different-about-encryption-opens-backdoor-your-private-life
LABOR CONDITIONS IN SUPPLY CHAINS
- Apple Reveals Supply Chain, Details Conditions (Reuters) Early reporting on
audit findings of child labor and work violations.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk/apple-reveals-supply-chain-details-conditions-idUSTRE80C1KV/
- Rights Group Says Apple Suppliers in China Broke Labor Laws (Reuters)
Reports of excessive overtime and labor violations in Chinese factories.
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/rights-group-says-apple-suppliers-in-china-breaking-labour-laws-idUSBRE85R0EF/
TAX PRACTICES
- State aid: Ireland gave illegal tax benefits to Apple worth up to €13
billion (European Commission) The EC ruling that Ireland gave illegal tax
benefits to Apple, later upheld.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_16_2923
I’ll defend batterygate. If you know anything about batteries (especially the tendencies of those in that era), the actions taken by Apple were reasonable, though they should have considered the light in which throttling would be taken. The claim against them was valid but I don’t think the actions were ever malicious.
> Apple knew a supplier was using child labor but took 3 years to fully cut ties (yahoo.com)
Apple routinely terminates relationships with suppliers when they identify abusive practices, sometimes they’re slow about it.
> Apple's Cooperation with Authoritarian Governments (jessesquires.com)
> Apple removes nearly 100 VPNs used by Russians to bypass censorship (elpais.com)
Apple obeys local laws
> Apple's Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA (open-web-advocacy.org)
Apple chooses to maintain control over a specific implementation detail of their platform that a handful of nerds object to.
> Apple defined ICE as a "protected class" in blocking anti-ICE apps (boingboing.net)
The claim made in this headline is just straight up false.
I don’t know, I don’t think their less-than-ideal behaviour is anywhere bad enough to reasonably be described as “evil”. Otherwise, we’re probably all evil.
A list of very normal capitalistic practices. Borderline, sometimes ruthless, sometimes opportunistic. Evil is enabling genocide in Myanmar, which Meta provenly did.
Evil is voluntarily steal millions of artworks for your own benefit, which OpenAI has provenly done.
Etc…
What about the kids they intentionally get driven to suicide by keeping the blue bubbles for no other reason than child indoctrination due to bullying from other kids.
My first reaction was that it was ridiculous, or at least hysterically framed. But the claim is that the whole point of the bubble colour thing, from Apple's perspective, is to take advantage of status games among (largely) kids. If that's true, then it's probably fair to hold Apple partially responsible for the predictable negative consequences. I'd be surprised if something so silly was actually decisive in the worst cases, but I guess if this is playing out among millions of kids, it may be having outsized effects occasionally.
Yes it was more of a jest than a critique, the comment didn't explicitly say which one it was. In this case, it seems quite clear that Apple has a case.
You're right—I didn't mean to suggest they've never sued competitors. Some companies are just known to be litigious—I've never put Apple in that bucket. (And maybe I have blinders on. It's certainly fair to blame me for being biased.)
In Samsung’s case, they are evil buy something from them, and you are dead to them after the sale mind you, that probably would be the case with many Korean and Chinese companies too.
Wait until it comes out that OpenAI stole trade data through their deal with Atlassian. Seems inevitable. The company is fundamentally criminal in nature.
I’m a huge fan of Apple but this kind of thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Regardless of whether OpenAI poached some of their talent or is the one in the wrong, Apple has such a massively dominant hardware business (some might say monopoly level in some areas) that for them to be publicly acknowledging how scared they are of OpenAI…it’s just…pathetic.
They’re a $5T company and can’t muster up the motivation to get in the game and compete in the next computing frontier.
Apple fanboys will invent some narrative about them swooping in with the best product as a laggard and claim it’s always their strategy, but I see zero evidence they have the capacity to do that anymore.
The Siri situation is just absolutely pathetic and no amount of bad press about OpenAI is going to change the fact that Apple neglecting Siri for a decade now has been a big F-U to their customers.
You may want to read the related articles first. I'm personally quite anti-Apple on several fronts, but the evidence so far seems damning if it holds up in court.
This isn't just them being scared of a competitor because they're able to outperform Apple, according to Apple they have proof of an active plan not just to poach talent, but to get that talent to syphon out information as they leave, as well as former employees keeping Apple hardware and using it to access confidential information. If what Apple claims is true, this is straightforwardly illegal. Could Apple be lying? Maybe, but that's a very risky move.
It totally could be illegal, and I don’t care. Those laws exist to entrench dominant incumbents, and make our economy less dynamic.
The history of Silicon Valley and most of its innovation come from this kind of thing, and we eliminated non-competes in California for exactly this reason.
Apple having a serious competitor in hardware would be a good thing for consumers all over the world.
Apple’s overzealous secrecy culture starts to become insidious once you become such a dominant force in the marketplace.
At what point do we allow their innovations to bleed into the rest of humanity and lower their margins so humanity doesn’t pay out a 60% tax to them anymore. I think they’ve made enough profits for investors at this point. Id be happy if my Apple stock went nowhere if it meant 20 other companies could grow and innovate new products off the back of it.
Also, I’ve observed a rhetorical trend among the “anti-bigness” crowd towards defining “monopoly” down:
“You may think a monopoly is an overwhelmingly dominant position as a supplier of a good or service, but that’s just naive popular economics! Acshually, according to the latest economic theories (by economists who share our politics), a monopoly is any firm that is big enough to have market power—like pricing power—to do things that can harm a competitor unfairly.”
Blue bubble discrimination so bad that android users are the vast majority of incels. Even if that’s not technically a monopoly breaking up Apple would materially increase USA birthrates. Unironically!
So the ex-employee has to pay up or something, whats this got to do with OpenAI the company, seems like desperate attempt to slow down the company that will likely take Apple market share for dropping the ball on AI, they should look inwards rather than lashing out litigiously.
OpenAI the company really is as scummy as they come and that is probably why Apple gave them nothing unlike Microsoft, the Chinese model makers are currently proving that ultimately there is no moat around AI. Every day the cost of entry, software and hardware wise keeps getting smaller.
Note: The only thing Google got out of Apple was a one billion dollar refund on an existing search engine agreement, AI real value in the future is as a new addition, to the existing programming stack or toolkit used by programmers. That value does not add up to spending $1 trillion dollars on capex.
If Apple spends any big money in the next 2 to 4 years, they had better spend it on bringing the design and engineering of memory in-house to the Apple Silicon Group and TSMC.
https://archive.ph/3J3iw
Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform. That includes things like Windows Phone, Fire Phone, all the glasses, Humane, etc.
As much as everybody hates on OpenAI for chaotic management, they did buy Jony Ive and are presumably giving him everything he wants to build a platform for them. Even though it probably only buys them a 20% chance of success, they haven't doomed the project by underestimating what it takes budget-wise.
And they blew it. Maybe they blew it by not realizing that even long time Apple employees could get arrogant about security. Or maybe it was a loose ethical environment in general. Whatever is it the root or the problem, they set billions of dollars on fire maybe tens of billions, by being unnecessarily cute about Apple proprietary information when they could've been above reproach. They had the resources to hire all the right people with the right knowledge and probably already had them on board.
As far as I can tell Ive's expertise isn't "build a platform".
All they seem to have gotten out of it is some creepy blogpost:
https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/
At this point in his career, Jony Ive is best suited for doing deep dive studies on the corner-radius of new products. And even then, you might as well just default it to that of an ipad, because that seems to be his preference for all things, including $650k Ferraris.
AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. This week ChatGPT, next week Claude. The real value is and going to be in hardware - as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race.
I increasingly see AI investment, generally speaking, as a lost cause. It has very little chance to pay off.
Yup. Model capabilities seem to keep converging quickly, not leaders breaking away for long.
Frontier labs are racing towards SaaS commoditization at incredible speed. And while there might possibly be $Trillions in productivity gained from their use, there's no reason to think those gains get captured by the model makers or inference providers at this point.
Maybe the Claude or ChatGPT desktop apps will dominate as the new MS Excel, but that's hard to do without already having locked the whole market into Windows.
There's virtually no platform play available to them.
> AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit.
That might be true in tech-savvy industries -- but in non-tech industries where the biggest software purchase might be the office suite or the ERP, inertia means the GSuite shops stick with Gemini, and the Exchange/Office 365 shops stick with Copilot.
At least from some smaller marketing companies I know that isn't necessarily true. They often have Gemini or Copilot and Claude nowadays and before Claude it was ChatGPT.
The moat is way smaller than with Office or Gsuite because they feed data into the chat interface and it gives them an answer. The moat for Gsuite and Office is higher because you have to move all your data and reorganize it. Oh and everyone has to learn how to use the new software clients.
There is a time window when it will flip. When Internet came along, we had a number of businesses that did not survive over the next years.
This time, it is different with AI. The rate of change is significant.
Just out of curiosity, what is the change and how are you measuring its rate?
From no internet to internet the change is pretty profound. But my job is already very automated for the most part. It's true AI might automate it a bit more, but it's not like I'm going from zero automation to full on automation. That's not nothing, and it is worth something, but it's also not internet from no internet level of change either.
I think you don't understand moat - that's not a moat.
The trick is antitrust style bundling. The massive pile of documents and processes tied to GSuite is a moat which makes it hard to switch to something like o365. Since a company might effectively be locked into GSuite (the primary product), if Google forces companies to buy Gemini (the secondary product) by bundling it with GSuite, they've given themselves a moat in the LLM space using their document/email moat from GSuite.
This is essentially what Google has done, and it's a shame the US is so weak on enforcing antitrust laws.
> as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race
China is obviously in the GPU/RAM race. Heard of Huawei, Moore Threads, Lisuan Tech, CXMT?
I'm just happy we get to reap the rewards "for free" (i.e open models are slowly becoming usable, and the winner of the arms race will definitely stand on the shoulders of their competitors that didn't make it)
> The real value is and going to be in hardware
Unless someone comes up with a brilliant optimization strategy or new hardware that renders all that inefficient Nvidia crap overnight.
I'm privy to dozens of people working on this problem every day and I imagine there's many more people working on this problem out of sight. I'm bullish on this idea, but it's going to be a slow burn.
Forgive me, but what does Jony Ive know about building platforms?
being an exec at apple for decades you probably pick up on a few things, even if they're beyond your department
The Luce seems to disprove that, at least in his case.
The car that has sold out in almost every market outside the US?
Aren't there like a hundred of them? And yeah, sure, it'll obviously be a collector's item. Provides no evidence to this discussion.
I believe "Luce" is correctly pronounced "Apple Car"
It's the Apple Watch Edition of cars.
It’s the Apple Watch Edsel of cars.
Not really, hubris is a real thing and not just a plot point.
Small nit.
> they did buy Jony Ive and are presumably giving him everything he wants to build a platform for them
If they hired Jony Ive to build a "platform" they will be very disappointed. He has no experience in doing that. They hired him to design a device, probably comment on the UI (if there is any, though I don't think he is qualified to direct either UI personally).
Aside from that, yeah, they royally screwed up here. Either by hiring unsavory people who think this acceptable behavior and/or by not managing/supervising them.
I've said it before on this topic: this goes _way_ past non-competes and the like. If you learn a novel method for doing something you are free (in my book) to recreate it at another company. You are not free to steal code/designs/etc verbatim and you are absolutely not ok to encourage people you are poaching (poaching is fine itself) to steal secrets/ideas on their way out. Also the whole "lying to a manufacturer to say Apple gave OpenAI permission to use the same proprietary technique" is really gross.
> Either by hiring unsavory people who think this acceptable behavior and/or by not managing/supervising them.
Is there any reason to think this is roque employees doing something? We know Altman is ethically challenged. It is equally or even more likely that management welcommed employees to doing this.
I maintain that if Humane wasn’t arrogant as hell and had just put a screen on their device, theyd have been PERFECTLY placed to become the open-platform AI Phone
Hell they might’ve been bought by OpenAI for billions instead of… HP lol
> Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform.
That's why Apple used open-source software to build a kernel.
And why they used third party developers to develop the ecosystem of applications.
> And why they used third party developers to develop the ecosystem of applications.
Isn't that the very definition of a platform?
I don't think Jony Ive has this skillset either. They might make a very nice device (I'd expect it to be polarising).
the rot starts from the top.
sama plays loose with the truth. so likely the employees are gonna follow their boss in cutting corners.
you see it everywhere in gvt/large organizations - if you come from a poor country - if the president is corrupt - the whole gvt gets corrupted.
> Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform.
Ahistoric jibber jabber. Microsoft gave it their very best shot with Windows Phone. Facebook renamed the entire company to make VR happen. These companies have shoved everything they got into making these platforms, and their fate would not have been different if they had been given another billion.
Platforms are hard to make, and wanting it bad enough is not enough to make one.
Stealing from the one company that has managed to court success makes a lot of sense. They are the only company with any successful experience.
Fair enough, but I'd point out that, unlike Second Life, Meta didn't buy pants. If you want a chronicle of wasted spending regarding Microsoft and mobile devices, Google "Tomi Ahonen."
> Meta didn't buy pants
They also succeeded in the monumental task of making VR look boring.
VR platforms are an escapist's dream: you can be anything you want doing whatever you want. And how did they show off their fantasy world machine? They did office meetings in avatars of their real life selves.
Just spend one night in VRChat and everything Meta did will look like Plato's cave shadows.
I don't know. Some of it did seem like short attention spans and not enough perseverence. But what do I know being far from an insider.
What does that have to do with employees stealing documents?
A decade ago Uber seemed poised to be the big tech powerhouse. Maybe not a platform per se (certainly not an ecosystem as other companies had it) but a major provider of software for all kinds of verticals beyond their core business. What happened to that?
Most of Uber's "platform" seemed like pet projects that engineers used to justify promotions, and then were quietly abandoned.
Uber managed to make the business by lobbying so hard. In some countries they broke the regulation of tax drivers and made the environment like wild jungle. Now, people don't feel "safe" anymore for random Taxis and prefer Uber in many places.
Many of them left and turned into startups around that tech, like Temporal.
Yes, but how do we know specific manufacturing processes weren’t in employee contracts like, “If you leave Apple you can’t utilize the invisible weld process invented here for the iMac.”
I mean regardless of whether it’s a trade secret, you’re going to know how to do specific things that can’t be protected against copying.
There are no practical laws against understanding the laws of physics, chemistry, and metallurgy when it comes to anodizing.
> There are no practical laws against understanding the laws of physics, chemistry, and metallurgy
Except there are. It’s why clean-room design [1] is a thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
Your comment assumes they have stolen some propietary info or trade secrets but it hasn't been determined yet that they have, no?
> it hasn't been determined yet that they have
Legally, no. Reasonably, for purposes of discussion, I think it has. The “LOL” dumbfuck who airlifted files into OpenAI isn’t particularly ambiguous [1].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-11/openai-en...
It is ambiguous still at this stage though. There's no proof he used this info at his job or that he was directed to take it by anyone (he may have thought it helpful to his career in a way OpenAI never asked for or even invited).
> There's no proof he used this info at his job
LOL Liu hasn’t—to my knowledge—been fired. When OpenAI was notified of his conduct, they didn’t confidentially settle. Instead, OpenAI’s legal went cold on Apple.
It’s not legally certain. But you really have to stretch the facts to make this seem ambiguous.
The court of public opinion is a thing, and the onus isn't on us to not trust a rich tech bro to not be an unethical person. That's on them to fix their image + avoiding jail time.
The rest of us are allowed to rightfully laugh at them.
> And they blew it
This could be a blessing in disguise for OpenAI. This mess was conducted under Altman’s watch—it could be an opportunity to Kalanick him.
The Board could elevate Altman to Chairman emeritus or something, choose a new CEO and settle with Apple. That will probably involve shutting down the hardware project and clawing back comp from its employees who helped make this mess.
Why are we taking Apple’s side here? They made accusations, nothing had been proven yet.
Who is to say Apple employees (at Apple) haven’t been vibe coding or asking gpt for technical topics? Also, funny timing from Apple - there is a lot of PR and optics riding on this lawsuit.
FT frames this as some aggressive escalation tactic, but document retention letters are extremely standard practice. At this point they're basically a formality, as any former Apple employee at OpenAI really ought to know by now that they could get dragged into this. Hold letters can be aggressive if you send them before you've even filed a complaint, but if anything, Apple is late to the party with these.
They’re not late to the IPO party, which was postponed by OpenAI, It may turn out that that was a mistake. OpenAI probably should’ve gone ahead, particularly in light of the pending court case.
Would they have had to disclose a known Apple lawsuit threat in the IPO disclosures? If so that might explain the delay...
Also Apple could have filed the litigation right before the IPO and after a IPO announcement. OpenAI doesn't get to decide when Apple sues them.
> They’re not late to the IPO party, which was postponed by OpenAI, It may turn out that that was a mistake
Isn’t that precisely what being late to the party means? You should have showed earlier?
Typo for ‘now late to the party’ prob.
Something similar happened to me when I left Microsoft for Apple (I moved from the Visual Studio team to the Xcode team). MS spent six months trying to prove I'd taken "industry secrets" with me. I hadn't. The entire thing felt like a personal attack and was extremely stressful.
It sounds like, in this case, Apple has hard proof that documents were stolen.
This seems like an important post. It looks like these letters are occasionally used to as a tactic, and i can see how such a tactic can really scare employees in a country where legal bills can climb really fast.
> in a country where legal bills can climb really fast
Honest question: Are there countries where this is not the case? I'd be interested to read more about how that manage that. If it's some sort of "protecting the little guy"-type thing or a general suppression of legal costs. Or maybe I'm reading too much into your comment.
It is more that labor protections in most of the industrialized world actually mean something, such that this sort of behavior is generally not even to be considered an option by an employer.
Yes, the US is actually unique in this position. It even has it's own name the "American Rule."
In every other country, the loser pays the winner's legal fees.
Doesn't that mean that if you have a slam dunk case you can get a super expensive lawyer just to run up costs as much as possible? Hell, could you ask your friend to be your legal representative and have him charge you a gorillion dollar in legal fees? Then when you win you split the loot?
> It sounds like, in this case, Apple has hard proof that documents were stolen.
Honestly, the proof is the least surprising part -- Apple's been paranoid about leaks for decades, even when the stakes have been lower.
Did Apple help defend you against those claims during the six months?
They did. That said, I don’t know how much “defending” they had to do given that I was never even told what, exactly, I was supposed to have stolen. But, like I said, it was both surprising and anxiety inducing.
> It sounds like, in this case, Apple has hard proof that documents were stolen.
I believe some articles mentioned about employees bragging to their former colleagues about accessing documents. Also I believe they lied to Apple about being employed elsewhere so they can continue using their access and hardware, etc.
If these are correct, the whole OpenAI playbook is very dirty, and I won't pity them a bit.
Apple also has server logs that track these former employees downloading confidential docs. It doesn't prove that they shared them over to OpenAI, but Apple has pretty solid proof that the former employees saved them without authorization.
I'm not a lawyer, but I would also guess they need to "flip" these folks against OpenAI and get them to cooperate in the lawsuit against the actual folks with big pockets. I think they're essentially alleging a conspiracy by OpenAI and they need as many examples as possible to make the case that this was a pattern and standard practice, not just one or two idiots acting on their own.
So if I'm a former Apple employee and I get one of these scary letters, I'm asking my attorney if I could get out of a lawsuit by sharing any information I have about any potential OpenAI shady practices.
You shouldn't ever willingly give up information to a plaintiff if it could implicate you. If the information exists, it's going to come out in discovery. Admitting to theft of trade secrets is probably not going to help you, it's not like the cops offering you immunity for turning state's witness.
You talk to a lawyer and do what they say, not what Apple demands of you. No one but a judge can demand anything of you.
That's overly dramatic.
At this point, the assumption would be that they are a non-party witness.
So, beyond not destroying any potential evidence, you might as well tell them to shove it.
It is not overly dramatic to suggest getting a letter like this is INCREDIBLY scary.
Apple must have hard evidence on this. I can’t believe they would take it this far without already knowing they are going to win. If they have to fire a huge chunk of their hardware employees it’s going to throw their IPO plans into chaos.
They literally do have hard evidence. They have records of an employee (Chang Liu) who left for OpenAI copying dozens and dozens of files off of their server after he left.
That's not enough though. He could have been acting rogue or for some other reason. That alone won't win in court
Among 40 ex Apple employees come on at least five or six of them probably crossed the line in their enthusiasm to get the big bucks.
If it was a small number, four or five total, maybe, but not 40.
Also, Apple confronted OpenAI about LOL Liu. OpenAI’s response wasn’t to fire him, conduct an investigation and confidentially settle with Apple. It was to go cold.
"acting rogue" but faced no action from OpenAI after this came to light
What do you mean "this far"? How far is this?
Corps lose law suits all the time. They always have to go whatever "this far" is before it happens, surely?
>How far is this?
If I am understanding your question, they went so far as to sue their employees.
Is this uncommon when it comes to corporations? Sue the people who (allegedly) did the thing?
You are getting downvoted because, I guess, people didn't read who the defendents who are getting sued, and that it literally starts with sueing two employees:
CHANG LIU, TANG YEW TAN, OPENAI FOUNDATION f/k/a OPENAI, INC., OPENAI GROUP PBC, and IO PRODUCTS, LLC f/k/a IO PRODUCTS, INC.,
There are two individuals being sued, but many more received letters.
Parent is being downvoted likely because their statement implies the “dozens” receiving letters are individually being sued, but that’s not the case.
Filing lawsuits against ex-employees is going pretty far. Not good PR for Apple if their claims are wrong.
Companies often file frivolous lawsuits against other companies. It’s much rarer to throw frivolous lawsuits at individuals.
Just to be clear, these are letters to individuals about the existing lawsuit with OpenAI, not new lawsuits against individuals.
> these are letters to individuals about the existing lawsuit with OpenAI, not new lawsuits against individuals
My guess is these employees weren’t chosen randomly. If they refuse to coöperate with Apple, they’ll get personally sued as well.
And the reality of the matter is, given Altman’s public persona and reputation, there is a good chance an AG somewhere starts looking at whether these folks broke any laws.
> If they refuse to coöperate with Apple, they’ll get personally sued as well.
This isn't law and order and that's not how civil litigation works.
They can easily be found to have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, like this is a slam dunk. Highly possible too seeing the massive public hatred against companies like OpenAI. DAs like easy political wins too and what better win than sticking it to OpenAI and its lackeys?
Might have to make some phone calls to my local representatives now...
Definitely not randomly chosen--Apple would have chosen people it believes may have evidence that relates to the case. It's a legal request to preserve that data.
But it doesn't follow at all that Apple is threatening to sue them. A long time ago, in an unrelated case, I got a letter like this because I was in the room when a certain decision was made and happened to have some notes about that meeting. But there was no chance I would be sued. I wasn't the decider, and was basically a third-party involved.
They will find out what Altman really cares about, my guess at this point, he only cares about the impending IPO throwing baggage overboard (new hires), probably won’t be a problem in the end.
Apple lawyers have a reputation for doing their homework
The accusations are incredibly clear/defined (and serious!) and have a very simple burden of proof. These things either happened or they didn’t, and they have material evidence or they don’t. It’s incredibly unlikely that they filed such big, concrete accusations without concrete proof to back them up.
And while I am far from an Apple fan boy, yes a lot of big corporations file frivolous lawsuits but Apple typically does not engage in that behavior against other companies. Also bear in mind that open AI is a huge name so there is a public/political element that goes along with this for Apple. There are going to be a lot of people who do not want Apple to win this regardless of how true their claims are and will figut like hell to protect openAI
"Apple typically does not engage in that behaviour against other companies" - Meet Rossman. He'll tell you all about that and individuals too.
They also have a new CEO at the helm.
Effective Sept 1
I do not know a lot about Apple's litigation against other companies, but Apple did file numerous largely unsuccessful challenges to the EU's DMA.
You see how that’s an entirely different kind of legal action, right? It’s a resistance to regulation, which is entirely different than this accusation of malfeasance.
Makes you wonder if they’ll settle for bargain-basement token prices for Apple Intelligence.
I think it is clear that if Apple were going to deal with OpenAI on that level, they already would have. What they wanted for their AI products is a measure of control over their destiny that OpenAI clearly did not want to give them that badly. It's also pretty clear that Apple is willing to work with arch-rivals to supply components of their products, both software and hardware, but values consistency alongside trustworthiness.
This stuff happened years ago, right? Something tells me that discussion has already happened, and they went with Google.
Besides: Apple is a "real" company that will definitely still be around in five years. They've already fumbled Siri multiple times. IMO Google was certainly the right choice for actually executing well on Apple's own terms for the foreseeable future.
You’re underestimating how much Apple Legal goes after anyone and everyone they feel a slight wrong sniff about.
I know some insane stories that will never be publicly disclosed for one reason or another, and…it’s not a legal team I’d ever want to cross paths with.
It’s also not the first time Apple has cried wolf at employees leaving the company to do bigger and better things, while trying to take responsibility for their successes.
Oh, in that case, I just happen to have some insane stories that will never be publicly disclosed, and every one of my stories rebuts every one of your stories.
I can only wonder what percentage of human conceptual abilities are expended on rebuttal.
Then share some of those insane stories with sources I guess. Because this seems to directly contradict my understanding of Apple (post-Jobs in particular).
I do not love Apple, as I said another comment I am so far from an apple fanboy, but frivolous lawsuits against other companies is not really typical for them. Also, these accusations are far from frivolous and they either have proof or they don’t. It would be very strange for them to file this thinking they would win with some sort of gray area argument
I worked at Apple for a few decades. My comment was not meant to be cryptic as much as it was to say: their legal team is very very hands on.
As you could imagine, I’m not sharing any specific information.
This is John Ternus having a beef with Tang Tan. It’s widely known they both competed for the role of CEO. Tim Cook would never have started this.
It shows a level of pettiness and arrogance which I never expected to see from Apple.
I can’t put myself in the mind of John, but he clearly hated Tang.
From outside and with a parent’s perspective this looks like my kids throwing a tantrum.
John must be thinking he is the new Steve Jobs (Steve would definitely do this)
It's interesting that you say they must have hated each other, but assume only Ternus is acting on that. What makes you think Tan's hatred of Ternus or animosity toward Apple for picking Ternus over him didn't lead Tan to do the alleged behavior?
Maybe a naive take, but if there's one team in a large corporation that does not bend to "the CEO(-to-be) wants it", that is the Legal team. Particularly when the ask is a lawsuit of this scope and relevance, and potential costs (of all kinds). The head of Legal can just hint to the board how expensive (in all senses) the vendetta would be and the CEO is likely "not to be" anymore, or "to be temporary".
Widely known where?
Tang was never mentioned as a candidate in anything I read over the past few years. He wasn't an SVP.
Weird take. With as much evidence as they have (unless they're just wildly fabricating everything in their lawsuit complaint, which... really? All Apple's lawyers are just making up claims in court documents? Sounds very career-ending, why would the lawyers do that?) they would be complete idiots not to sue.
The alleged crime sounded childish. Appeal to rule of law, enforced by the court system is necessary for a fair business enviornment.
Sending the notification letters is probably petty though.
These letters are simple "If you have evidence related to this lawsuit, you must preserve it" letters. And entirely routine in this kind of action. There are more of them than in most cases, because this is such a big case. But the gist is entirely routine.
Tim Cook is the current CEO. Tim Cook is doing this. Any assertion otherwise is 100% wrong.
John Ternus doesn't become CEO until September 1st. If you think that this is still John Ternus' play, Tim Cook is still the one in charge and signed off to start this, meaning "Tim Cook would never have started this" is still 100% wrong.
This comment is really strange and reads like disinformation
Agreed Steve would do this
But the iPhone is the most valuable consumer hardware product on the planet, and the accusations here is “conspiracy to steal” essentially.
Is it really that petty? Apple should be okay with theft of valuable secrets?
Apple comes down hard on employees who merely leak to the press. Taking internal documents to a competitor is not going to be fun.
OpenAI only exists due to the theft of content created by others.
If Apple’s accusations prove to be true, it just means that OpenAI is consistent.
I think that it's quite clear in the digital era that you can't steal bits that are free to copy.
Predictions on who wins? Does Apple actually have a winnable case or are they just throwing a wrench in things?
>Does Apple actually have a winnable case
Based on the previous thread, Apple seems to have damning evidence of wrongdoing by the (ex)employees before-and-after they left their positions at Apple: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48865019
Seems very similar to Google/Waymo winning its case against Uber (ex-Googler Anthony Levandowski) stealing corporate data.
Apple has the employees' emails history, the server access logs, etc. Really don't see Apple pursuing this unless they had a mountain of evidence against them.
Generally speaking, I think Apple tends to win on anything related to ex-employees. I am not sure if this is normal across Big-Tech. But surely is for Apple.
Depending on what is at stake. Example the one with Nuvia and Qualcomm I believe they just settled.
Oh the irony if Apple can get a larger OpenAI stake than Microsoft.
I don’t think Cupertino will settle for stock. I think they’ll demand cash and an agreement that OpenAI abandon or reboot their hardware project. In the meantime, Apple gets an open kimono into everything OpenAI has planned.
This could actually be the fuckup that kills OpenAI as an independent company. The threat of a cash judgement gums up not only an IPO, but also debt-based fundraising. (We equity guys are idiots, so we’ll probably keep writing cheques until the market turns.)
> This could actually be the fuckup that kills OpenAI as an independent company.
I wonder if they’ll be the Lehman Brothers of this bubble
It would be very strange for Apple’s legal department to send out formal letters filled with claims on a lark.
Not really, just slowing down a potential competitor could still be worth it.
I don't think they would consider OpenAI a potential competitor, unless OpenAI has trade secrets of Apple.
That's never been Apple's playbook with lawsuits at least.
Apple is not the company that makes this sort of thing just for fun.
Also, they don't have a directly competing business with OpenAI, so slander doesn't make sense.
I think this is genuine.
Both parties will just settle.
Apple already caught former employees accessing the Apple internal network with unreturned laptops after termination that’s pretty much game over.
Why would Apple settle? They probably want the same outcomes of the Waymo v Uber trial that forced Uber out of the market. Apple's accusations imply that every part of OpenAI's hardware effort has been tainted with Apple's trade secrets and is therefore illegitimate. They also have more money than God so they can keep the suit going as long as they want.
This is an interesting point here. Due to having infinite money already, that's a possible dynamic we might see. OAI admits "Yup, obviously you got us. Let's write a check." And Apple might just respond "Nah, we are obviously going to win at trial, the legal fees don't bother us a bit, and honestly we don't really need the money, we'd rather destroy you as heavily as possible, for some combination of making an example out of all the criminals involved, plus there's a tiny chance you could threaten us someday considering you hired 'our boy' Jony Ive to build hardware."
Uber was not forced to leave the self driving car market by Waymo's litigation. The litigation ended in February 2018 and Uber left the market in December 2020.
I think it’s fair to argue that Uber’s self-driving efforts never recovered after that trial.
Cause and effect can be delayed.
They will just settle if a settlement gets them what they want for less than fighting this to legal completion would cost them (on a risk-adjusted basis).
https://archive.ph/zoUde
I wonder what Jony Ive is thinking about his partnership at the moment.
I wonder if he knew.
https://archive.is/3J3iw
Among 40 greedy humans would several of them get too happy/carried away and copy sensitive information and take it somewhere else probably…
It's insane to cross Apple. In the worst case Apple could take the ChatGPT app down like they did to Fortnite. They are probably waiting for discovery to find out how high this goes.
Well, the EU won't allow it.
IIRC Apple have been allowed to remove Fornite from the Apple Store, they just fall foul of the EU Digital Markets Act / DMA (?) when also blocking the Epic Games Store as a route to add/sideload it.
Removing ChatGPT due to ToS violations seems like it would be ok.
Maybe.
Depends if they hate Apple or OpenAI more.
Apple has a decade of beef with EU.
OpenAI has a lot ot catchup on the EU hate scale.
Eu person: neither. We'd rather have the Chinese.
Yeah, I feel like given two bad choices the EU’s tendency would be to go with a third, worse option.
Looks like a bunch of OpenAI employees involved in the theft are going to see prison time and nobody is going to hire them other than shady startup founders who will probably ask "is this guy going to steal from me "
I think this is a good reminder that no company is going to put their neck out for you. IF you go above and beyond whether, whatever the carrot is on the end of the stick you chase, you are only good as what you give back.
Never stay loyal or go all out for your employers, I think the new gen z are far more wiser. It's simply not worth it and I don't feel guilty for working three different employers via remote. Would they get mad and fire me if they found out? Sure. But then I'd just replace them with the next one.
YOU are the only person you should be loyal to. Don't steal for companies, don't lie for companies, don't work extreme hours for some "startup equity" that won't mount to shit (note those are extremely rare)
Collect your pay check, do the minimum, if possible find more pay checks.
How can I say this…? Some companies come across like a neon sign flashing "EVIL!".
It's been nothing but warning signs from this company for at least a year now. I'm so happy to have nothing to do with them (having deleted my account a year or so ago).
Their marketing dept is going to have to really dig to get them out of this hole they've made for themselves.
The idea that I would trust any device they might roll out that is as personal as a personal AI assistant… It's no better than Meta and their creepy glasses.
Yeah, no thanks.
EDIT: I don't mind the downvotes—it means I touched a nerve—whether I am on the right or wrong side of the issue is not as interesting.
Apple, for its flaws, has not lost my trust with regard to my personal data—Meta and others are likely to never gain that back. OpenAI continues to do things to signal that they will not have that trust with me as well.
… so… you’re talking about OpenAI or Apple?
Ha ha. Worked at Apple for over two decades—would not have stayed at a company I thought was evil for that long.
A bully at times? I wouldn't argue with that.
> Ha ha. Worked at Apple for over two decades—would not have stayed at a company I thought was evil for that long.
Maybe, just maybe, you are also evil?
A quick search:
APP STORE, COMPETITION, AND MARKET CONTROL
IPHONE PERFORMANCE AND "BATTERYGATE" RIGHT TO REPAIR AND PARTS PAIRING PRIVACY AND SURVEILLANCE LABOR CONDITIONS IN SUPPLY CHAINS TAX PRACTICESI’ll defend batterygate. If you know anything about batteries (especially the tendencies of those in that era), the actions taken by Apple were reasonable, though they should have considered the light in which throttling would be taken. The claim against them was valid but I don’t think the actions were ever malicious.
None of this seems like it could reasonably be described as evil.
How about these?
Apple knew a supplier was using child labor but took 3 years to fully cut ties (yahoo.com)
52 points by notRobot on Jan 1, 2021 | un‑favorite | 5 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25607386
Apple's Cooperation with Authoritarian Governments (jessesquires.com)
468 points by ig0r0 on March 31, 2021 | un‑favorite | 291 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26644216
Apple removes nearly 100 VPNs used by Russians to bypass censorship (elpais.com)
31 points by speckx on Oct 1, 2024 | un‑favorite | 3 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41712728
Apple's Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA (open-web-advocacy.org)
514 points by yashghelani on July 14, 2025 | un‑favorite | 383 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44557348
Apple defined ICE as a "protected class" in blocking anti-ICE apps (boingboing.net)
146 points by baobun 9 months ago 69 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45520407
https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/29/iphone-workers-forced-labor/
Let’s try:
> Apple knew a supplier was using child labor but took 3 years to fully cut ties (yahoo.com)
Apple routinely terminates relationships with suppliers when they identify abusive practices, sometimes they’re slow about it.
> Apple's Cooperation with Authoritarian Governments (jessesquires.com)
> Apple removes nearly 100 VPNs used by Russians to bypass censorship (elpais.com)
Apple obeys local laws
> Apple's Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA (open-web-advocacy.org)
Apple chooses to maintain control over a specific implementation detail of their platform that a handful of nerds object to.
> Apple defined ICE as a "protected class" in blocking anti-ICE apps (boingboing.net)
The claim made in this headline is just straight up false.
I don’t know, I don’t think their less-than-ideal behaviour is anywhere bad enough to reasonably be described as “evil”. Otherwise, we’re probably all evil.
Thank you for your work. You spent far more time debunking misinformation than fsflover spent spreading it.
Well, just enough evil to increase profit margins.
A list of very normal capitalistic practices. Borderline, sometimes ruthless, sometimes opportunistic. Evil is enabling genocide in Myanmar, which Meta provenly did. Evil is voluntarily steal millions of artworks for your own benefit, which OpenAI has provenly done. Etc…
Isn't polluting the environment evil? http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-airpods-repair-recycling-imposs...
That would describe mankind as a whole…
The cars that I’ve driven since 18, My contribution to the plastic problem over the years, etc.
The difference is Apple intentionally chose unrepairable design, despite much smaller companies offer repairable earplugs (See: PineBuds Pro).
What about the kids they intentionally get driven to suicide by keeping the blue bubbles for no other reason than child indoctrination due to bullying from other kids.
Sounds like a societal and parenting problem that Apple has nothing to do with.
My first reaction was that it was ridiculous, or at least hysterically framed. But the claim is that the whole point of the bubble colour thing, from Apple's perspective, is to take advantage of status games among (largely) kids. If that's true, then it's probably fair to hold Apple partially responsible for the predictable negative consequences. I'd be surprised if something so silly was actually decisive in the worst cases, but I guess if this is playing out among millions of kids, it may be having outsized effects occasionally.
These are quite heavy accusations. Do you have a source for your claim that this was the intention?
You ok bro?
wat
From what we know this far it’s quite easy to be on Apples side in this particular question, right?
Yes it was more of a jest than a critique, the comment didn't explicitly say which one it was. In this case, it seems quite clear that Apple has a case.
Especially since Apple has no history of doing this—suggests this is on another level of theft.
(I worked at Apple and am aware of little "theft" incidents that came and went. Obviously those little incidents never made the news cycle.)
How could you have worked at Apple during the entire Samsung lawsuit and say Apple has no history of suing competitors over IP theft?
You're right—I didn't mean to suggest they've never sued competitors. Some companies are just known to be litigious—I've never put Apple in that bucket. (And maybe I have blinders on. It's certainly fair to blame me for being biased.)
Because Apple didn't sue Samsung over IP theft. They sued them over copyright infringement.
It was actually patent infringement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electron....
apple tracks every binary you execute and run on macos and sends the hash of it to their systems. Do you consider that to be respecting your privacy?
> Some companies come across like a neon sign flashing "EVIL!".
This is a perception created by your choice of media.
In Samsung’s case, they are evil buy something from them, and you are dead to them after the sale mind you, that probably would be the case with many Korean and Chinese companies too.
Would never buy anything from Samsung.
Probably.
(HackerNews, FWIW.)
> don't mind the downvotes—it means I touched a nerve
Nope. You wrote an ambiguous blurb that then breaks guidelines by commenting “about the voting on comments” [1].
Try taking out the edit and change “this company” in the second paragraph to OpenAI.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
…and too late to edit my edit…
(Weird thing about HN.)
Agreed. Very wary of OpenAI these days.
Wait until it comes out that OpenAI stole trade data through their deal with Atlassian. Seems inevitable. The company is fundamentally criminal in nature.
Nag screen, as usual
I’m a huge fan of Apple but this kind of thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Regardless of whether OpenAI poached some of their talent or is the one in the wrong, Apple has such a massively dominant hardware business (some might say monopoly level in some areas) that for them to be publicly acknowledging how scared they are of OpenAI…it’s just…pathetic.
They’re a $5T company and can’t muster up the motivation to get in the game and compete in the next computing frontier.
Apple fanboys will invent some narrative about them swooping in with the best product as a laggard and claim it’s always their strategy, but I see zero evidence they have the capacity to do that anymore.
The Siri situation is just absolutely pathetic and no amount of bad press about OpenAI is going to change the fact that Apple neglecting Siri for a decade now has been a big F-U to their customers.
You may want to read the related articles first. I'm personally quite anti-Apple on several fronts, but the evidence so far seems damning if it holds up in court.
You can’t poach talent, because companies don’t own their employees.
You can steal trade secrets, which is what this case is about.
(If you’re going to suggest a full rewrite of IP and anti-trust law, you should at least have an understanding of the current situation.)
This isn't just them being scared of a competitor because they're able to outperform Apple, according to Apple they have proof of an active plan not just to poach talent, but to get that talent to syphon out information as they leave, as well as former employees keeping Apple hardware and using it to access confidential information. If what Apple claims is true, this is straightforwardly illegal. Could Apple be lying? Maybe, but that's a very risky move.
It totally could be illegal, and I don’t care. Those laws exist to entrench dominant incumbents, and make our economy less dynamic.
The history of Silicon Valley and most of its innovation come from this kind of thing, and we eliminated non-competes in California for exactly this reason.
Apple having a serious competitor in hardware would be a good thing for consumers all over the world.
Apple’s overzealous secrecy culture starts to become insidious once you become such a dominant force in the marketplace.
At what point do we allow their innovations to bleed into the rest of humanity and lower their margins so humanity doesn’t pay out a 60% tax to them anymore. I think they’ve made enough profits for investors at this point. Id be happy if my Apple stock went nowhere if it meant 20 other companies could grow and innovate new products off the back of it.
So we should "make our economy more dynamic" by encouraging IP theft which will simultaneously discourage genuine research & development?
it worked for China, no?
(and to develop 5G modem too)
In china's case it wasn't internal but external
In what case is apple a monopoly?
Some people think that being the exclusive supplier of iOS based devices is a “monopoly”.
Also, I’ve observed a rhetorical trend among the “anti-bigness” crowd towards defining “monopoly” down:
“You may think a monopoly is an overwhelmingly dominant position as a supplier of a good or service, but that’s just naive popular economics! Acshually, according to the latest economic theories (by economists who share our politics), a monopoly is any firm that is big enough to have market power—like pricing power—to do things that can harm a competitor unfairly.”
Us dummies will keep calling that competition.
McDonald's is the exclusive supplier of Big Macs and McNuggets. They're a monopoly.
One sells Big Macs... the other Mac minis... there must be a connection.
Clearly Apple and McDonalds has had a deep level of market collusion on Macs, the FTC should really get involved here and break up this Mac cartel.
In and Out Burger is an even bigger monopoly, the way they organize themselves is unfair to the rest of their competition.
They control the In and the Out? What other options does the competition have?
And they’re the exclusive fast food partner of Monopoly… so they have a Monopoly monopoly?
How deep does this rabbit hole go?
Blue bubble discrimination so bad that android users are the vast majority of incels. Even if that’s not technically a monopoly breaking up Apple would materially increase USA birthrates. Unironically!
So the ex-employee has to pay up or something, whats this got to do with OpenAI the company, seems like desperate attempt to slow down the company that will likely take Apple market share for dropping the ball on AI, they should look inwards rather than lashing out litigiously.
OpenAI the company really is as scummy as they come and that is probably why Apple gave them nothing unlike Microsoft, the Chinese model makers are currently proving that ultimately there is no moat around AI. Every day the cost of entry, software and hardware wise keeps getting smaller.
Note: The only thing Google got out of Apple was a one billion dollar refund on an existing search engine agreement, AI real value in the future is as a new addition, to the existing programming stack or toolkit used by programmers. That value does not add up to spending $1 trillion dollars on capex.
If Apple spends any big money in the next 2 to 4 years, they had better spend it on bringing the design and engineering of memory in-house to the Apple Silicon Group and TSMC.