Apple is getting this wrong

Is it normal for a company this big to make a public blog post like this with almost no introduction to what they’re on about?

I would expect them to start out with something like Apple is suing us for yada yada yada, but instead it reads like the diary of a hurt teenager.

What really matters is the claim that Apple never raised those issues in the lawsuit with them. OpenAI claims the emails prove this, but to me all the emails prove is Apple sent an email that said “please see the attached letters”. We don’t know what is in the attachments but I imagine those were the relevant issues they raised.

Moreover OpenAI says, “[Apple] now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information”, but the transcript they cite seems to me to show the opposite? It’s Chang Liu asking for someone to help him copy data. The part where Apple employees reach out is later and it’s not for copying data to a hard drive… it’s basically “who should I talk to about this project?” Which makes sense because when he was contacted it was after he left (so he wouldn’t have access to data)

Can someone please tell me what am I missing? None of this makes sense with what they’re saying. The fact that the lawyer emailed the wrong person is moot if they caught it and resolved it days later.

Setting aside the presented evidence, it feels weird for somewhat emotionally charged complaining like this to go on an official company blog. Companies are generally pretty tight-lipped about active litigation outside court documents, right? This just seems a bit amateurish, down to the title. Is public opinion about this case so important to them?

When I look at the imessage conversation, one thing strikes me: that guy looks to be using the same icloud account he used when working for Apple with OpenAI. Is he using his own personal account? Why do both Apple and OpenAI allow that in the first place, this look so amateur. I would have assumed each company would have opened a different account for him and locked him when leaving.

Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?

Many years ago, back when I was a junior, I wrote something like this to my manager, complaining about another employee who has wronged me. I eventually decided not to send it because it just seemed so unprofessional.

Wild that a company this big would post this on their official, public blog.

This looks really bad for OpenAI. Honestly, do not post text messages on the web, you look like a messy bitch. At this point I really don't see this company going public under Altman, they're going to have to bring someone in to bring some professionalism here. Altman seems to have badly mismanaged pretty much every corporate relationship they've got going. OpenAI is such a natural fit to be a partner with Apple, yet somehow they've managed to completely burn those bridges in the most public and messy way possible.

Despite whether what OpenAI alleges in the blog post is true or not, it's super odd that a company of their size would make a blog post about it.

This looks like a company that's in a downward spiral. They're doing anything they can to attempt to salvage their reputation, maybe because when the court date finally rolls around it might already be too late.

Not buying it. In the end, OpenAI will throw these people under the bus and settle out.

I'm not Apple's biggest fan either (I got super upset when they conveniently wiped out all information about the person comiting suicide in one of their conference rooms and TMZ caught the police line and the sherif said "there is a gun, next to a dead person, we can't say much at the moment" and that was it). But it is unlikely that Apple would depriortize its brand on a fake story.

This is a company that's planning on going public soon. Imagine having your eggs in this basket, a basket which is already being zip lined across the Grand Canyon, and they're posting adolescent slam pieces about an ongoing lawsuit against the most valuable company in the world. The chance that any legal team has seen this yet has to be nothing because the second they see it they're going to scream to take it down. Even if OpenAI is right they look like amateurs.

This feels like a trumpian tantrum from someone at openai. If they’re innocent, just win the lawsuit. Is this quibbling over details supposed to win the public over? Because afaik the public doesn’t know or care about this, and publicizing it just makes it worse.

Odd, regardless, OpenAI is spreading itself too thin, trying to fight wars on the enterprise, consumer, and hardware fronts, and will likely end up losing them all.

Models are a lost cause anyway - https://open.substack.com/pub/taikhooms/p/why-openrouter-can...

Corporate posting in the weeks immediately surrounding a legal case or ruling impacting tech companies is definitely my favorite brand of written text. Despite not paying full attention to EU legislation, I get reliably notified by Google about every tiny bit of antitrust from them posting a "Google brings millions into the EU's [field they are getting hit with antitrust in] ecosystem" vagueblog about it.

Yay for more cherry-picked information.

A substantial amount of evidence in Apple's complaint isn't addressed, but what's shown here throws a decent amount of shade and doubt.

I have my popcorn ready for discovery. I hope it gets to that point, and I hope it proceeds to trial...

I can't see a judge looking kindly on this being published prior to trial.

It's in court already, fight it there. Even if you win public opinion with your point of view you can still lose in court.

Maybe there is a point but I don't see it, people in this or any community will support Apple. Publicity doesn't help at this point, the truth is the truth in this case I expect the case after discovery to be quite cut and dry.

Or maybe it isn't and stuff really is complicated like OpenAI makes it sound like. Or maybe I am cynical enough to believe OpenAI made this public post as a legal way to collude and make sure all involved parties can get their stories aligned without having to do secret communication that could be tracked and used as evidence of collusion.

(This last one is truly an unfounded claim, and just there to complicate OpenAI's narrative but the point is I don't see the point in making this public).

>They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.

I find it bizarre that they felt the need to specify "Asian". What does that have to do with anything?

Data theft (i.e. taking corporate IP) was normalised until very recently (I'd say the last 2-3 years with the rise of the adoption of DLP and public litigation). A few examples I can think of thing I've heard _just_ in my own career; terabytes of client data taken by a former consultant, sales reps that joined _solely for the purpose_ of taking this quarter's leads and then ghosting the company, execs forcing the use of their buddy's startup/consultant/vendor (and then they later join the startup/consultancy/vendor). The latter being _the most common_. If you're a large company, your sales pipeline is so valuable to startups -- and from a single consultant perspective the ROI of ripping off your sales data is _insane_.

I think back to the questionable things _I've_ done that _don't_ amount to data theft, but _should have_ caused someone to probably kick off an incident/investigation.. But they didn't.

- git cloning every repository in the company (who am I kidding, I do this in _every_ company

- airdropping stuff to my personal phone (my profile photo, but it could have been the aforementioned git repos)

- using sharedrop/similar services (to copy my RSS/news feeds, favourites bars) from my work laptop

- enumerated staff/ops dashboards/tooling to get shit done (think: enumerating the CRM before Lazarus and Lap$u$ made it cool)

They are genuinely holding on to the one minor mishap from Apple that was corrected right after. Either way, grabbing popcorn to see how this plays out in court.

What is this kind of unprofessional blog-style rant doing on OpenAI’s website? Shouldn’t this be settled between the two companies themselves rather than trying to play the court of public opinion?

Besides, I have absolutely no idea what this is about or whether I should care.

Any self respecting lawyer would normally tell you to stfu and not post stuff like this. Judges don't like trial by press.

I think they are hoping what they did with Elon will work with Apple.

Yikes. Big yikes. This is only showing with more clarity just how weak Altman actually is.

It almost feels as if they wanted the same clout received from the "Thoughts on Flash" Jobs article from nearly 20 years ago and thought ChatGPT could do better.

Lawyers would not have advised posting this.

One thing is probably true: airdrop failed

What I don't understand that if two companies are in legal battle, can they discuss the case and try to influence public swing by doing a blog post or sharing evidence that is not verified by anyone other than the party sharing them.

OpenAI, even after raising this much capital, had never anticipated that something like this could happen yet keeps digging it's own grave.

At this point all that's left is for them to kiss and pay else they're done.

Apple vs OpenAI will be the war of legacies, trust and innovation.

To me, this looks like OpenAI is terrified and tries to come out ahead of the public opinion to control the narrative. Such a shit company.

They built their whole business model on stolen data and act surprised when another company has zero trust in them.

Based on their track record this lawsuit is not unexpected at all.

Controversial! (and possible followup) Post off front page, down onto third page.

  Rank 78, 248 points, +10hr, 244 comments

Almost wish the thread could get locked instead, but maybe only almost…

Also, for coverage: FT picked this up, syndicated here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/openai-says-appl...

OpenAI quotes from iMessage communications between Liu and Peng

But Apple's motion states that their communications occurred "through the Line messenger app to avoid detection by Apple"

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...

My favorite thing about this is in 2026 it's still a major hurdle to move 200GB around.

“Hi, this is highly irregular, please remove me from this thread”

Oops.

A lot of negative comments, but I read it and said the usual social. media response of "damn they got the reciepts".

> Apple also accuses Tang Tan of trying to get and use their trade secrets. However, Tang has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies.

> Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets.

Well, I guess that settles it, then! Case closed.

Seriously, what is point of this?

Why do American corporate PR statements read like a teen drama novel nowadays?

I don’t really understand this, Apple obviously wants to force discovery and publishing stuff seems like it’d just widen the net there.

Just astounding how immature a company supposedly worth billions can be. Add "no-context public legal rant" to the collection of red flags for OpenAI: CEO/"nonprofit" drama, undetected hacking, etc.

This is the kind of post I would expect from Matt at WordPress.

Is this just me or this is always a bad look when a company needs to get to these dirty little details publicy in what I consider an amateurish manner?

This looks like PR disaster to me, but of course I am only a pair of eyes and a brain without accelerated reinforcement learning.

> after confusing two Asian last names

The addition that the last names are Asian is insane and just put there to make the opposite party look bad. Ironically, all it does is reflect the spirit of OpenAI.

Controversial opinion: I don't care about disputes between trillion-dollar companies.

I wondering how they'd do the iMessage transcript in the voice version they've posted, spoiler: they don't, they just skip over it and the emails too.

I guess there is something big about to happen and the Apple lawsuit situation needs to be visibly/publicly addressed in order to unblock it. And this thing is big enough that the objection “there is no good way to address the lawsuit” gets overruled with “then address it in a bad way”. So I guess it’s the IPO, closing a new funding round, or the hardware launch?

Why does the iMessage screenshot look “off”.

Something about the line-height, fonts used, etc don’t look like a real iMessage chat.

Am I alone on this?

Lots of comments about how OpenAI is posting this informal response to a lawsuit on a company blog, but ehh, they've been doing this forever:

https://openai.com/index/the-truth-elon-left-out/

https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/

https://openai.com/index/court-rejects-elon/

https://openai.com/elon-musk/

https://openai.com/index/response-to-nyt-data-demands/

https://openai.com/index/mental-health-litigation-approach/

(The Elon ones also have redacted screenshots as receipts.)

Indeed, they are litigating in the court of public opinion but let's not be naive to think that this is NOT what the other parties have also been doing.

I searched for "chips", "local", and "hardware" and realized wrong is right.

We're living through the history of how OpenAI became AppleAI, told in a teenager's diary tone - we just need some doodles in the corners.

Maybe someone could help me understand what this message means.

> I think I’m going to have to hit the workday button before I’m complete. I just got a weird message that is making me nervous (see below), so I am going to go hit the workday button now.

It’s a real Goliath vs Goliath thing we’ve got going here.

This is an insane thing to publish, and I can’t believe their legal team signed off on it. Save it for the courts.

Prejudicial, wouldn't surprise me if someone gets gagged. But then again, I think they're into it (OpenAI).

Looking at the messages, we are basically at the level of twitch streamers drama? Will we see a google doc manifesto next?

It feels weird doesn't it? It's because it is. Don't buy the story, we'll see what the court says.

Not buying it. In the end, OpenAI will throw these people under the bus and settle out.

Odd, regardless, OpenAI is spreading itself too thin, trying to fight wars on the enterprise, consumer, and hardware fronts, and will likely end up losing them all.

Models are a lost cause anyway - https://open.substack.com/pub/taikhooms/p/why-openrouter-can...

>They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.

I find it bizarre that they felt the need to specify "Asian". What does that have to do with anything?

One thing is probably true: airdrop failed

Is it normal for a company this big to make a public blog post like this with almost no introduction to what they’re on about?

I would expect them to start out with something like Apple is suing us for yada yada yada, but instead it reads like the diary of a hurt teenager.

> it reads like the diary of a hurt teenager.

Yep, down to the pages of iMessage screenshots

They might be head hunting other Apple staff and wish to control the narrative to avoid scaring them off.

Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?

Apparently Apple encourages their employees to use their personal iCloud accounts for company information, because their own OS doesn't support one iPhone, multiple iCloud identities.

Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/03/confidential-appl...

So yeah.

I've heard multiple times directly from Apple employees that there is no way to login to iCloud on your work machine using a company-controlled account. Many people create new Apple ID's which they only use while working there, but others just use their personal iCloud accounts. You are, of course, not supposed to store company data in iCloud. But thanks to Apple's own efforts, it's difficult to use a Mac without being logged into iCloud (for example if you want to use the App store), and some data can easily spill into the iCloud account.

If accurate, it is of course patently absurd that Apple has left this an unsolved problem.

Google allowed this until a few years ago.

> Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?

This doesn't seem out of line with common practices at other big tech firms. If you go work at Meta, your personal Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp/Oculus accounts become intrinsically linked to your work login identity (though a few employees created a secondary account on of all those to prevent this).

Although there are better controls than there used to be, it's not all that uncommon for sensitive work data to leak through this linkage into the public products...

On the phone with some App Store support person I was told they don't like people having multiple Apple IDs. That's why I use my personal one for work as well.

>Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?

Yes.

I have never worked at a place where they gave us corporate Apple accounts.

We’ve always been asked to use our personal Apple account to install apps used for work.

Yay for more cherry-picked information.

A substantial amount of evidence in Apple's complaint isn't addressed, but what's shown here throws a decent amount of shade and doubt.

I have my popcorn ready for discovery. I hope it gets to that point, and I hope it proceeds to trial...

I can't see a judge looking kindly on this being published prior to trial.

It's in court already, fight it there. Even if you win public opinion with your point of view you can still lose in court.

To me, this looks like OpenAI is terrified and tries to come out ahead of the public opinion to control the narrative. Such a shit company.

They built their whole business model on stolen data and act surprised when another company has zero trust in them.

Based on their track record this lawsuit is not unexpected at all.

Spot on, while reading this post I couldn't help be wonder "but what about the prototypes"?

Does US law prevent (or frown upon) defendant from publicly publishing evidence, even when the plaintiff publicly published the accusation and their evidence first? If so, how is the defendant supposed to protect their public reputation when a lawsuit is ongoing for years? Or maybe I’m missing your point on what wouldn’t be looked upon kindly?

Yeah, based on their track record (I mean, even their name is a bad joke at this point) I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Turns out there's downsides to conducting yourself with little integrity.

They might be head hunting other Apple staff and wish to control the narrative to avoid scaring them off.

> Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?

Although there are better controls than there used to be, it's not all that uncommon for sensitive work data to leak through this linkage into the public products...

>Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?

Yes.

> it reads like the diary of a hurt teenager.

Yep, down to the pages of iMessage screenshots

Google allowed this until a few years ago.

On the phone with some App Store support person I was told they don't like people having multiple Apple IDs. That's why I use my personal one for work as well.

Spot on, while reading this post I couldn't help be wonder "but what about the prototypes"?

If accurate, it is of course patently absurd that Apple has left this an unsolved problem.

Yes this seems incoherent and incompatible for a company that supposedly care about their trade secrets.

Apparently Apple encourages their employees to use their personal iCloud accounts for company information, because their own OS doesn't support one iPhone, multiple iCloud identities.

Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/03/confidential-appl...

So yeah.

So iOS is essentially unprofessional. A toy for those who have either no job or no private life. How does Android score in that respect?

Yes this seems incoherent and incompatible for a company that supposedly care about their trade secrets.

So iOS is essentially unprofessional. A toy for those who have either no job or no private life. How does Android score in that respect?

Two wrongs don't make a right, even if the plaintiff is playing dirty it doesn't give you the right to join in.

Assuming the exhibits aren't sealed they're publicly available as soon as they're entered by the court during trial.

If they're sealed there's probably a good reason they shouldn't be published until the trial is over.

I have never worked at a place where they gave us corporate Apple accounts.

We’ve always been asked to use our personal Apple account to install apps used for work.

Whereas I never worked in places where IT would not see that as a security violation.

Two wrongs don't make a right, even if the plaintiff is playing dirty it doesn't give you the right to join in.

Assuming the exhibits aren't sealed they're publicly available as soon as they're entered by the court during trial.

If they're sealed there's probably a good reason they shouldn't be published until the trial is over.

Whereas I never worked in places where IT would not see that as a security violation.

The timeline OpenAI wants to present looks like this to me:

- Leaving employee (LE) needs a USB stick to copy data off their Mac to give to their Manager (MA) so someone at Apple still has access

- After LE left, MA has access to LE Mac and iCloud to still access some data

- At some point, LE asks MA to sign out off LE's iMessage account on that Mac as they suspect they'll get OpenAI-related messages soon and don't want Apple/MA to see them

- Eventually, MA deletes the Apple files in LE's iCloud

I was a bit confused too initially, but it looks like Chang was asking for the data to be copied _off his iCloud_ by the existing employee on his final day of employment. And then everything after that is just the existing employee asking for help on things Chang had prior knowledge of

Wild that a company this big would post this on their official, public blog.

Yep, that's exactly what i thought at first look. This looks like one of those "letting-steam-off" mails you bin after thinking it through after cooling off.

I think this is a good way to vent. I've done that a few times. Typed up a long, angry rant. Only to delete it.

Just make sure this is on your computer and not in a Slack DM or draft email. Don't want to accidentally hit send.

Despite whether what OpenAI alleges in the blog post is true or not, it's super odd that a company of their size would make a blog post about it.

A few years ago Epic made a whole event out of deliberately breaking AppStore rules, writing blog posts and suing Apple.

Public opinion matters, and narrative control is important if you don’t want to be perceived as “morally wrong company”.

> super odd that a company of their size would make a blog post about it.

There is no "non-company blog" that wouldn't have to trace it back to OpenAI for verification anyway.

This looks like a personal message to a specific audience, which may include the employees who are nervous about the company's positioning.

It's unusual, but this is a blog. It's literally a web log and this is something that is going on with the company.

(This last one is truly an unfounded claim, and just there to complicate OpenAI's narrative but the point is I don't see the point in making this public).

Yikes. Big yikes. This is only showing with more clarity just how weak Altman actually is.

It almost feels as if they wanted the same clout received from the "Thoughts on Flash" Jobs article from nearly 20 years ago and thought ChatGPT could do better.

Lawyers would not have advised posting this.

Controversial! (and possible followup) Post off front page, down onto third page.

  Rank 78, 248 points, +10hr, 244 comments