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Apple was the ringleader in the illegal anti-poaching agreements between SV companies a couple decades ago.

If Tony and Steve were friends, that's not Apple being cutthroat. Cue: the chapter about poaching from friends in Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things. If you cross that line and poach from your friends, expect to hear about it. Another example: https://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/1jgz...

I think it's notable that Apple is vague about what was actually stolen and what OpenAI has actually received.

I read into these PR blasts, lawsuits that Apple is sour about losing employees to higher salary opportunities, and is likely using lawsuits instead of higher salaries to retain them.

I'm no OpenAI apologist here, but I appreciate this perspective. Apple definitely played their timing right for maximum pre-IPO damage. It gives them tremendous negotiating leverage on a possible settlement which could give them a chunk of OpenAI.

Also: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...

Jobs had something to prove though. He was kicked out, brought back, he definitely wanted to ensure his legacy. But while I don't agree with it, I think it's harder to be an ethical company that makes it to a billion than a non ethical one. When shareholders are involved you don't have a choice really.. You're obliged to maximize their earnings.

> Apple is cutthroat in business too.

Sure. Also, don't care. Lets focus on the devil currently doing harm.

cutthroat vs blatantly breaking the laws and manipulating employees to break laws ...

Tangentially related, but I was rewatching the old iPhone 3G keynote recently, and you wouldn't believe who made an appearance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X5xOI_qu9I&t=1649s

God, I still cringe every time I see that.

I wonder why so many ex apple followed this particular path of Kool Aid? or maybe this says more about how the rank and file are just as susceptible to kool aid as any average Silicon Valley schmuck

If he really wants to be Steve Jobs he needs to get a woman pregnant the 'traditional' way and then abandon his child, but later proceed to name an expensive product after the child. Which I don't think is on the table as an option for Altman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs

But how is he doing at the 'ranting and yelling tirades at his staff' metric? That's also a known characteristic of Jobs.

If OpenAI is willing to encourage people to commit literal crimes on their behalf as clumsily as we've seen evidence of, why would they hesitate to try and shift opinion on a site like this? Plus there has always been a bitter contingent of devs that hate the terms of getting on the App Store, and people who hate any hardware they can't fully control from the NAND up.

The outcome shouldn't depend whether they had "poor" security anyway. If I leave my front door locked, it might increase the chances I get robbed, but it doesn't make robbing me legal.

If your best defense is "it was easy" you're probably not in a legally great position...

That is both a yikes (towards Apple) and very unethical (towards OpenAI and the engineers who did this). Why do people do these things? Do you have no shame that you might have a harder time landing future jobs if you're perceived as someone who might sell out your future employer on a whim and steal proprietary information?

> is there any glass house he won't go to?

The one containing his children, only the nanny goes there.

Maybe Apple will buy Open AI at a rock bottom price after this lawsuit.

I've used chatGPT voice conversation tech since Sept 2023 and was expecting the new Siri to match the user experience. The new Siri is far far away from matching chatGPT's voice tech. The new Siri is smarter and can now answer your question for anything yet it's SLOWer and you can not have a full conversation with it. I continually have to say "Hey Siri," to continue the conversation on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. Yet with the chatGPT app I can have a full conversation making me think Open AI's voice conversation tech is light years ahead of the new Siri.

In fairness, that's an incredibly glaring MDM problem that was always going to blow up like a landmine if Apple didn't address it. I'd expect the macOS MDM policy to cover this if Apple was actually concerned about IP leakage.

“It’s your fault we stole your trade secrets”

Could be any of the usual big names I'd suspect? Box, something from Atlassian, or maybe some home rolled thing on top of S3 or GCP?

Why are you both-sidesing this?

Apple is doing it right, simple high level statements.

OpenAI is acting like a teenager posting screenshots of literal texts and being overall petulant.

This is open and shut. The mature company will win this.

This, and the books, and the government contracts, and the distillation… It’s like that one friend who complains how drama always finds them and they are clueless why.

"If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither, pound the table."

It's 2026; we can probably update "pound the table" to "pound social media"

The whole affair and the blog post feels like proxy signal to potential investors from OpenAI that they have now developed/acquired tech that is worth enough to grab Apple's attention ?

I mean, they are dealing with it in the courts, right? This is the press picking up on public court filings https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/73602437/49/apple-inc-v...

Seems to be Altman's playbook, just like how he got the CEO job back.

It's OpenAI still trying to maintain control of the narrative while they burn to the ground. For years they haven't really delivered while bullying anyone who doesn't have an "AI strategy".

The media is happy to stoke the flames.

> Both sides should learn to remain silent and work the case through legal channels.

This isn't a "both sides" situation.

OpenAI is posting drama blog posts. Apple isn't doing that.

"Apple says" in the headline here actually means: Apple filed for a preliminary injunction with the court and since that is a public record we are reporting the contents of it.

>Both sides should learn to remain silent and work the case through legal channels.

Why? Apple surely doesn't want to and why should they?

The only time I did that, the company I was leaving begged me to take one of their corp laptops with me so I could offer "consulting" to them on the side. I never called them on their plausible deniability, I just said I felt that would be a conflict of interest and they shut up real fast.

I agree it feels scary from the employee's perspective, but at least in this case, it doesn't seem like it would've been difficult to avoid: simply return your work devices when handing in your badge:

> [...] multiple former Apple employees now working at OpenAI reached out to discuss returning Apple-issued work devices they kept when they left Apple.

By not doing that you effectively just cry "sue me", this is stupidity on the employee's part (or malice). Oh and maybe don't take "screenshots of confidential documents".

These guys are pushing boundaries knowingly.

A good company also doesn’t want you to take IP bc it creates the liability.

I really think this is apple feeling really threatened rather than confidential data really being stolen.

Apple is known for threatening companies that hire from them, and occasionally having secret agreements with other companies not to hire from each other.

People move from a company to a direct competitor all the time (i have a number of friends that went from working at aws to working on gcloud for example) and guess what, no one of those companies really went bankrupt due to this.

So really long story short: i think apple is being a sore loser at the employee retention game.

It's not hard if you are honest

People in silicon valley do this every day. California has a lot of laws to protect employees. Companies need tangible proof of a violation, not just "this guy had vague company IP in his head".

> I [...] imagine for some employers that makes you a red flag

Maybe. It also advertises a moral flexibility that is high in-demand here in America. Clearly OpenAI has no scruples entertaining a turncoat of this scale, I can believe that businesses will be lined up out the door to hire these people.

If Apple had published all of the details/data publicly, then they publicly could.

But that is not the claim, and no one is even pretending that that's what happened.

What on earth does this opinion have to do with anything?

this reads like a blind comment

What was so great about Scott Forstall?

> But in practice every tech interviewee and every company doing interviews today (including Apple) can be charged with most of what Apple is alleging.

No it can't. I've worked for a bunch of tech companies large and small and interviewed for way more, and I have literally never seen this.

What Apple is alleging is not normal at all, nor is your interview experience. I've literally never even heard of anything like you describe, presenting architecture diagrams of your previous work? That's such a huge red flag, and these companies are opening themselves up to similar lawsuits. The fact that you describe multiple companies requesting this is genuinely shocking to me.

The allegation is that OpenAI explicitly requested that people bring and explain actual prototypes ("show and tell"), and downloading files from iCloud Drive after quitting Apple to join OpenAI. What you're describing is not even remotely on this level.

You're making assumptions that aren't supported if you read the actual lawsuit.

One of the things mentioned was specific metal finishing techniques for manufacturing.

The implication being at least some of this is to do with OpenAI making consumer hardware, as designed by Ives.

A lot of the legal action is a warning to current employees who may have been considering doing the same.

Apple is large. People free stronger allegiance to their cultural and ethnic groups than their companies. They just don’t want to get in trouble.

That secretive culture died over a decade ago. Everything gets leaked now.

Why do think they would want to be vindictive? The point is to prevent leaks, leaving lapses is exactly counter to that goal.

Apple leaks like a sieve. The extreme secrecy culture is a pointless drag on productivity, maintained long past its usefulness for the sole benefit of the execs practicing their Steve Jobs "one more thing" keynote cargo cult.

Please don't assume the entire AI industry behaves like OpenAI

OpenAI has been talking about making hardware for a while now, and most likely they are going to attempt a smartphone.

This should be shown in court, first, to avoid predictable blowback around making a weak-appeal.

I feel like OpenAI is attempting to obscure the public sentiment trend. And that are willing to taint a jury pool by releasing evidence.

I assume then, that OpenAI is "feeling" or has determined it is perceived negatively by the public, in general. They may be seeking to influence their talent pipeline, to reduce inbound constraint they predict are coming from a lack of perceived trustworthiness of OpenAI.

Seems inappropriate for OpenAI to post this public-appeal, to me.

yeah that is pretty crazy, who is even the intended audience? This seems like something they'd be discussing with their legal team instead of blogging about it. To me, these kinds of public outbursts are just making their hole deeper.

IP disputes between some of the richest corporations on the planet don't get a lot of sympathy in the court of public opinion anyway. Even if they did, what difference does it make? There isn't a sheriff or DA with a public face that has to make a decision here.

I mean... who has control over OpenAI's web page? No self-respecting PR firm would do something like this. And Counsel must be hopping mad.

Wow. This makes Apple seem like amateur hour. The case should be dismissed with prejudice.