OpenAI to Apple: Your Sloppy iCloud Security Means Those Weren't Trade Secrets

OpenAI is telling a federal court that Apple’s lawsuit over stolen trade secrets doesn’t hold up, and the reason is surprisingly simple: Apple itself never treated the information like it was actually secret. In a newly filed motion to dismiss, OpenAI’s legal team isn’t arguing about what former Apple engineers did or didn’t take when they left for Sam Altman’s shop. Instead, they’re putting Apple’s own security practices on trial.

The motion points to a messy offboarding process where Apple allegedly let employees use personal iCloud accounts for work and then failed to cut off access after they departed. OpenAI backed this up with text message records showing an Apple manager stayed logged into the personal iCloud account of defendant Chang Liu—a former Apple engineer now at OpenAI—to transfer files after he’d already left the company. That same manager later pinged Liu for help with technical questions about active Apple projects. The implication is hard to miss: OpenAI is framing this not as theft but as former colleagues getting dragged back into ad-hoc consulting gigs because Apple’s own systems created confusion about who had access to what.

The filing goes a step further, arguing Apple’s complaint is legally flimsy because it never names specific trade secrets. Instead, it gestures at “generic categories” like component manufacturing and vendor relationships. Without that specificity, OpenAI’s position is that there’s no trade secret to litigate over in the first place. It’s a classic “show me the secret” defense, and it can be brutally effective if a judge agrees the plaintiff is being vague.

There’s also a heavy dose of corporate shade in the motion. OpenAI flatly states it has “no use, need or desire for Apple’s trade secrets” and accuses the iPhone maker of using a “baseless and pretextual lawsuit” to compensate for its own failures in the AI talent war. Reading between the lines, OpenAI is betting the court will see this less as a legitimate intellectual property case and more as a frustrated competitor trying to slow down a rival that’s hiring away its best hardware minds. Apple, for its part, is pushing to speed up discovery, claiming an internal probe suggests additional former employees may have witnessed the alleged theft. The discovery process will likely determine if this gets tossed early or drags on.