Apple targets former employees in battle with Sam Altman’s OpenAI; sends letter asking to meet Apple lawyers with …

Apple has taken aggressive new legal actions against Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Just days after launching a trade secrets lawsuit, the iPhone maker has targeted dozens of its own former employees (now working for the ChatGPT maker) with stern personal legal warnings. Citing sources familiar with the situation, The Financial Times reported that Apple’s legal team has hit roughly 40 former employees with formal letters, issuing a directive to preserve all internal documents, notes and electronic communications, while demanding face-to-face meetings with Apple’s corporate lawyers. Apple’s legal offensive began when it filed a federal lawsuit accusing OpenAI of orchestrating a coordinated campaign to steal secret hardware designs, engineering processes and manufacturing blueprints to jumpstart its own device business.

What the initial lawsuit said

The lawsuit that Apple filed earlier this week specifically named two former Apple employees: Tang Tan, who served as Apple’s Vice President of Product Design and is now the OpenAI’s Head of Hardware. The second is Chang Liu, a former senior system electrical engineer for the iPhone. However, with reportedly more than 400 former Apple workers now employed at the AI startup, Apple made it clear in court filings that the named individuals are just the ‘tip of the iceberg’. By firing off legal notices to roughly 10% of those ex-employees right after filing the lawsuit, Apple is hunting for evidence to prove that OpenAI’s entire hardware division is built on stolen property. This highlights a breakdown in relations between the two tech giants, who previously partnered to integrate OpenAI’s systems into Apple’s voice assistant, Siri. Meanwhile, OpenAI has pushed back against the allegations, saying that it has “no interest” in the trade secrets of competitor firms and noted it is not aware of “any evidence that the complaint has merit”. Notably, OpenAI has been working with Jony Ive’s hardware design team to build its first-ever physical product. OpenAI bought Ive’s studio, io, last year for $6.4 billion to lead this division. Reports citing insiders claim that the first product is expected to be a screenless, palm-sized, portable gadget designed for the home, similar to a smart speaker. It will use an array of microphones and cameras to capture environmental cues, drawing heavily on a user’s personal data to run a customised AI assistant.