Apple is suing OpenAI over trade secrets allegedly carried out by former employees, and is seeking an injunction. OpenAI answered publicly, in a post titled 'Apple is getting this wrong', and attached the actual emails and messages: by their account, Apple's own people reached out to the departed engineer for help, and Apple's lawyers wrote to the wrong person.
- OpenAI published an official response to Apple's trade-secrets lawsuit, with attached emails and iMessage logs (03.08).
- In OpenAI's telling: Apple's lawyers wrote to the wrong person, an alleged conversation that never happened, and Apple employees who reached out to the departed engineer for help on their own.
- OpenAI calls the request for a preliminary injunction 'based on inaccurate information and unnecessary'. The account is one-sided - Apple will answer in court.
Two of the biggest companies in the world are no longer talking through press releases. They're talking through court filings and published private messages. That alone is news.
A text like that isn't written for the judge. It's written for the audience. I've seen from the inside how a moment like this gets built - you pull out the message log, put it under the text, and let the reader 'discover' what you've already arranged. It's done cleanly, but clean execution doesn't mean the full picture - we're seeing the emails OpenAI chose to show, in the order it chose to show them, while the other half of the story sits in a folder marked Apple.
Separately, the case says something about the moment we're in. The most expensive raw material in this industry is still people - and what they carry in their heads. Contracts, injunctions, lawsuits: all attempts to fence in knowledge that walks around on two legs.
'Leftover access' is the detail worth remembering here. An employee leaves, and the access stays open - at a giant like Apple, by the case's own admission. When someone hands you back the keys, you cut them off the same day. That's not bureaucracy. That's hygiene.