OpenAI accuses ex-employee of taking over 100 confidential files to Apple
Unreleased product allegedly pitched to Apple executives months earlier, firm that calls its tech too dangerous to share cannot keep its own files home
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OpenAI has accused a former employee who joined Apple of taking more than 100 confidential files tied to an unreleased product, according to a new court filing. Reuters, citing the filing, reports that the employee later presented the product to senior Apple executives — several months ago.
The filing states that OpenAI is "very concerned that its trade secret and confidential information is now circulating inside Apple, where Apple engineers can shape Apple's upcoming products based on OpenAI's confidential and innovative work." As evidence of where Apple is heading, OpenAI points to HomeView, the AI home hub Apple released the same week — a device marketed as a consumer product that now doubles as an exhibit in the dispute.
Apple denies the claims. The company says it has found no evidence to support them and follows established procedures to prevent new employees from bringing confidential data from earlier employers into the organisation. Its lawyers add a detail with consequences: the two personal phone numbers OpenAI identified do not match the numbers the employee used for his work at Apple — which raises the question of whether Apple ever received or controlled the data at all. US District Court Judge Edward Davila has partially approved Apple's request to obtain digital evidence from OpenAI.
The filing lands in a difficult stretch for OpenAI's internal security. The company recently reported finding a hidden listening device planted in one of its San Francisco offices and called in the FBI; the suspect was identified as its own engineer. For two years, OpenAI has told Washington that its technology is too dangerous to entrust to anyone else. The recent record suggests the more immediate threat walks out the front door with a laptop. Frontier-model talent shuttles between a handful of American companies, and what an engineer knows travels with the engineer — in this case, if the filing holds, as more than 100 files on an unreleased product.
The judge will now determine what OpenAI must hand over. Apple's defence, for now, rests on two phone numbers that never matched anything the employee used at the company.