OpenAI says Apple's trade secrets lawsuit is "aggressive and oddly personal"
Ars Technica Jamie John, Financial Times ● Covered by 4 sources
OpenAI just publicly slammed Apple's trade-secret lawsuit as "careless" and weirdly personal. It says it never wanted Apple's secrets and thinks Apple's just spinning a narrative.
OpenAI didn't hold back on Monday night. In a blog post responding to Apple's month-old lawsuit, the ChatGPT maker called the case "careless, aggressive and oddly personal," a phrase that reads less like a legal filing and more like a diss track aimed squarely at Cupertino.
The dispute traces back to Apple's original complaint, which accused OpenAI of lifting confidential hardware designs while the startup was quietly working on its own AI-focused consumer gadgets. Apple didn't just claim ordinary competitive overlap; it alleged actual theft of trade secrets tied to devices it hasn't even shipped yet. OpenAI's response was blunt: "We do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets."
What's notable here isn't just the denial, it's the tone. OpenAI accused Apple of tossing out vague accusations without real specifics, and suggested the whole thing is less about protecting IP and more about controlling the story as OpenAI edges into hardware territory Apple has long considered its own backyard. That's a pointed jab at a company that rarely gets publicly called out by rivals, let alone by a five-year-old AI lab that's rapidly becoming one of Silicon Valley's most talked-about players.
The timing matters too. OpenAI has been increasingly open about wanting to build physical AI devices, a space Apple has dominated for two decades. Sam Altman has hired away Apple's own design legend Jony Ive to help lead that effort, so the personal history here runs deeper than a typical corporate spat. Apple suing over alleged design theft right as OpenAI pushes into consumer hardware looks, at minimum, like a company trying to draw a line in the sand before a serious competitor shows up.
Neither side has offered much in the way of hard evidence publicly, and this is still early in what looks like a drawn-out legal fight. But the rhetoric alone tells you how seriously both companies are taking the stakes of who gets to define the next era of personal computing hardware.
My take
Calling a lawsuit "oddly personal" in a public blog post is a power move, not a legal argument, and it tells you OpenAI is playing this fight in the court of public opinion as much as in an actual courtroom. Apple built its brand on secrecy and control, so it's almost poetic that the company most likely to sue over stolen design ideas is the one that just watched its own design chief walk out the door to help build a rival's hardware dreams. Expect more mudslinging before any actual evidence surfaces.
Read more about this at: Ars Technica
