Apple sends legal letters to about 40 OpenAI employees over trade secrets

Apple has sent personal legal letters to dozens of OpenAI employees who previously worked for the iPhone maker, as it gathers evidence for its claim that the AI company misappropriated its trade secrets. About 40 former Apple employees now at OpenAI received the letters, according to multiple people familiar with the matter — roughly 10 per cent of the 400 ex-Apple staff who now work there. Apple and OpenAI declined to comment.

What the letters demand

The letters direct recipients to preserve documents and communications and ask them to meet Apple’s lawyers. They followed a lawsuit filed the previous Friday accusing OpenAI and two employees of stealing secret hardware plans. Apple says the evidence attached to its filings is only the “tip of the iceberg”; OpenAI has said it takes the allegations seriously but is not aware of “any evidence that the complaint has merit”, and that it has “no interest” in other companies’ trade secrets.

The suit names only two individuals, including a top Apple device designer who is now OpenAI’s head of hardware. It does not name OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman or Jony Ive, Apple’s former design chief, who joined the company last year when OpenAI bought his studio io for $6.4bn.

The hardware dispute behind the case

Apple’s claim is that OpenAI’s entire hardware business is compromised by misappropriated trade secrets, complicating plans for a family of AI devices that OpenAI is developing with Apple’s former chief designer. The two companies once worked together to put OpenAI’s technology into Siri, but Apple has since partnered with Google on its latest assistant features. The litigation lands as OpenAI prepares for a much-anticipated initial public offering.

OpenAI’s first device is expected to be a palm-sized gadget for the home, closer to a smart speaker than a phone: no screen, but microphones and cameras that pick up audio and visual cues from its surroundings, plus an assistant able to draw on a user’s personal data. People familiar with the plans say the company did not expect to ship it this year even before the lawsuit, having wrestled with the assistant’s personality, privacy questions and the difficulty of finding chips powerful enough to run its models on a consumer device.