In a lawsuit Apple filed Friday against OpenAI accusing the AI giant of trade secret theft, attorneys for Apple pointed to one specific design detail as the tip of the iceberg of a larger pattern of theft: its metal-finishing techniques.
You can feel it, can’t you? The smooth, premium finished metal on an Apple iPhone, laptop, or watch. In the lawsuit, attorneys for Apple essentially argue that the technique used to make that finish is the result of blood, sweat, and many years of Apple’s own research and development. They allege that through a coordinated pattern of misconduct at the institutional level, OpenAI is trying to do for hardware what it’s already done to art and the written word: take others’ work and pass it off as their own.
OpenAI denied the allegations.
“We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere,” OpenAI’s director of strategic communications, Drew Pusateri, wrote on social media.
Why metal matters
When it comes to Apple’s metal finishings, the lawsuit accuses OpenAI of using confidential Apple information to approach one of Apple’s manufacturing partners in order to have them carry out a specific metal-finishing technique and “misleading the partner to believe they had Apple’s permission to do so,” per the suit, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
It’s more than just the technique that’s at stake, though; it’s the sum of Apple’s innovation, the suit argues.
Unlike Apple’s competitors “who buy off-the-shelf parts,” Apple has invested in its own cutting-edge manufacturing techniques, attorneys write. They say Apple has designed and customized its own proprietary machinery used in its suppliers’ factories to protect the design and development of current and future products.
It hasn’t been cheap or easy, and the lawsuit alleges some of Apple’s former employees who are now at OpenAI are trying to take that work with them so their new company can do it cheaper and more easily.
“Apple has invested hundreds of billions of dollars and decades of effort in developing this information and keeping it confidential,” Apple’s attorneys write. “A competitor with access to it could bypass years of independent research and development, skip the capital expenditure required to build genuine expertise, and bring products to market faster and at lower cost—harming the value of Apple’s investments. Rather than investing what legitimate development would require, OpenAI has turned to trade secret misappropriation to free ride off Apple’s decades of innovation.”
In other words, through a pattern of alleged theft of trade secrets, Apple says OpenAI is trying to bypass years of R&D to break into hardware by riding someone else’s coattails. Think of a student trying to pass off ChatGPT essay slop as their own original piece of work instead of doing the critical thinking and writing for themselves. Only now, the stakes are the future of two of the most important companies in the U.S.
Apple says that collectively, its confidential product development, manufacturing, supply chain, technology research, and other innovations constitute “one of the most valuable intellectual assets in all of American business,” and that they enable the company to “bring new products with unique features to consumers at extraordinary speed and scale.”
In the suit, Apple accuses OpenAI’s chief hardware officer, Tang Yew Tan, who was once Apple’s vice president of product design for iPhone and Apple Watch, of emailing himself information about Apple’s suppliers and using Apple’s confidential information to gain access to even more insider knowledge.
It also accuses Chang Liu, a former Apple senior system electrical engineer, of stealing his Apple laptop and accessing confidential hardware-related files about things like unreleased products and technical specifications. And it alleges he coached other former Apple employees on how to copy confidential Apple files.
Apple’s attorneys accused OpenAI of stealing Apple’s trade secrets and confidential information “at every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners.” As a result, the attorneys said, “OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets.”