OpenAI wants Apple’s trade-secrets case thrown out

OpenAI is not interested in a quiet settlement with Apple. The company has asked a federal judge to dismiss Apple’s trade-secrets lawsuit outright, in a filing that turns the accusation back on its accuser.

The case has been building for weeks. Apple sued OpenAI for stealing trade secrets, alleging that former employees carried confidential material with them and that OpenAI fished for more during recruiting interviews.

Also, more than 400 former Apple staff have joined OpenAI, a migration that has fed Apple’s suspicion as both companies race to build AI-powered hardware.

OpenAI’s 31-page motion is unusually pointed. It casts the suit as pretextual, arguing that Apple is using litigation to compensate for its own stumbles in artificial intelligence rather than to remedy any real theft.

Its central argument is about Apple’s own systems; OpenAI says Apple encouraged staff to use personal iCloud accounts for work and reviewed personal iMessages on company devices, blurring the line between corporate and personal data.

If information was commingled by Apple’s design, OpenAI argues, then material leaving with departing employees is a foreseeable result of Apple’s policies, not evidence that anyone stole anything.

 “Apple cannot transform the foreseeable consequences of its own systems and policies into evidence of theft,” OpenAI wrote, a line designed to reframe the entire dispute.

OpenAI has taken the fight public too. It published a blog post headed “Apple is getting this wrong,” insisting it never sought Apple’s secrets and accusing Apple of presenting a misleading timeline of events.

It has also gone on the offensive with evidence. OpenAI pointed to its own chats and emails to rebut the claim, and needled Apple by noting how often the word “fail” appears in its filing, a jab at Apple’s AI record.

The bad blood has history. The two were once partners, with ChatGPT wired into Siri, before that relationship curdled into a legal fight, turning collaborators into courtroom adversaries.

The talent war gives the case its heat. OpenAI has hired aggressively across the industry, and the flow of Apple engineers into its ranks is the raw material for Apple’s suspicion that knowledge, not just people, walked out the door.

Apple, for its part, is pressing harder. It has asked the court for a preliminary injunction to stop OpenAI from using any of the disputed information while the case proceeds, a sign it wants leverage now rather than later.

The stakes reach beyond this one suit. The lawsuit is already complicating OpenAI’s hardware ambitions and its march toward a public listing, casting a legal shadow over a company trying to project momentum.

OpenAI is fighting on more than one front. It recently sought to recover its legal fees from Elon Musk’s xAI in a separate trade-secrets clash, part of a pattern of aggressive courtroom posturing.

That other case offers OpenAI some encouragement. A judge recently threw out xAI’s trade-secrets claim against it, a precedent OpenAI will be keen to invoke as it argues Apple’s case is just as thin.

Whatever the judge decides, the dispute is unlikely to end quickly. Legal experts expect years of wrangling, with discovery threatening to expose sensitive hiring and security practices at both companies.

The deeper contest is over people. In a field where talent is the scarcest resource, the fight is really about whether a rival can hire away hundreds of your engineers and call it competition rather than theft.