OpenAI tells the court Apple’s trade-secret case is “a mess of Apple’s own making”

OpenAI has told a federal court that Apple created the conditions it is now describing as theft. “This dispute is a mess of Apple’s own making, and it is trying to blame everyone else,” the company said in a filing lodged late Monday in the US District Court in San Jose, according to Reuters.

The filing responds to the lawsuit Apple brought in July, which accused departing employees of taking hardware designs to OpenAI, including prototypes that were allegedly shown during job interviews. OpenAI denies that it took any Apple trade secrets.

The original complaint was unusually detailed for a trade-secret case, describing prototypes that Apple said were produced during what it characterised as show-and-tell interviews.

Those allegations make for a striking story, although proving that information was actually misappropriated is a different matter.

OpenAI’s defence focuses less on what individual employees may have done and more on how Apple managed its own data.

The company argues that Apple encouraged employees to use personal iCloud accounts for work and monitored personal messages on company devices, creating a boundary between corporate and personal information that was never particularly clear.

“Apple cannot transform the foreseeable consequences of its own systems and policies into evidence of theft,” OpenAI argued in its motion to dismiss in August. Monday’s filing follows the same argument, but with considerably stronger language.

The defence is unusual because OpenAI is not necessarily disputing that work-related information may have ended up in personal accounts. Instead, it is challenging what that movement of information means.

If employees were using personal accounts for work because Apple allowed or encouraged them to do so, OpenAI argues, the presence of company information in those accounts could be the predictable result of Apple’s own policies rather than evidence that employees deliberately took it.

OpenAI has made much the same argument outside the courtroom, publishing a post titled “Apple is getting this wrong” in which it denies ever seeking Apple’s secrets and accuses the company of presenting a misleading timeline.

Taking the dispute into public view adds another dimension to the case, particularly when neither side appears to be treating this as a dispute that will simply disappear from public attention.

Whether the argument holds up legally is a separate question. Trade secret law generally considers whether a company took reasonable measures to protect confidential information, which means Apple’s policies around employee devices, accounts and data could become an important part of the case rather than merely background to it.

At the centre of the dispute is a fight over talent. OpenAI has been recruiting hardware engineers for the family of devices Greg Brockman has confirmed the company is developing, while Apple remains one of the deepest pools of consumer hardware expertise in the industry.

Engineers with experience designing products at Apple’s scale are precisely the people an ambitious new hardware programme would want to hire.

California’s employment laws make that competition harder to challenge directly. Non-compete agreements are largely unenforceable in the state, meaning companies generally cannot stop employees from joining a competitor simply because they possess valuable knowledge.

If Apple wants to prevent the transfer of confidential information, it has to make that case through trade secret law rather than through restrictions on where former employees can work.

The dispute also comes at a particularly sensitive moment for Apple. The company has dominated consumer hardware for decades, but a credible AI-native device could represent the first meaningful challenge to the role the iPhone has played in the personal technology market.

OpenAI is trying to build exactly that kind of product, and some of the people working on it learned their trade inside Apple.

The lawsuit is already affecting OpenAI’s plans regardless of how the underlying claims are ultimately resolved.

TNW reported that Apple’s case has been disrupting OpenAI’s hardware programme, creating delays and complications for a project that is already strategically important to the company.

Apple has also asked the court to restrict OpenAI’s access to the material at issue through a preliminary injunction. That is a more aggressive procedural step than simply pursuing damages, because Apple would have to establish, among other things, that it is likely to succeed on the merits of its claims.

OpenAI has recently faced a similar trade-secret dispute from the other side. A judge dismissed xAI’s case against the company, and OpenAI has since pointed to that outcome while seeking to recover its legal costs from Elon Musk’s company.

Discovery could become particularly uncomfortable for Apple. If OpenAI’s defence puts Apple’s internal data practices at the centre of the case, those policies and the way they were implemented could themselves become evidence.

That creates an awkward situation for a company whose public positioning has long placed privacy and data protection at the centre of its products.

Both companies have reasons to avoid letting the dispute drag on indefinitely. Apple has its hardware business and confidential designs to protect, while OpenAI is trying to build a new hardware business of its own and prepare for a potential public listing.

A settlement would remove some of the uncertainty for both sides, although the tone of the latest filing suggests that neither is particularly close to backing down yet.

For now, the court filings are where the dispute is being fought, and OpenAI’s latest response is noticeably more confrontational than its earlier arguments.

Describing Apple’s lawsuit as a “mess of its own making” suggests that OpenAI is prepared to challenge not just the allegations themselves, but the way Apple handled the information at the heart of the case.