OpenAI has moved to dismiss Apple's trade-secrets lawsuit by attacking the premise that Apple's information qualifies as trade secrets at all. In a motion filed this week, alongside newly submitted exhibits, OpenAI argues Apple allowed employees to use personal iCloud accounts for work and failed to revoke that access when they left — the sort of housekeeping failure that, under trade-secret law, can strip information of legal protection entirely. Apple's original complaint was filed in July, and the two sides are now fighting over whether there is a case to try.
The centerpiece exhibit is a set of text-message records involving Chang Liu, a former Apple engineer named as a defendant. OpenAI says an Apple manager remained logged into Liu's personal iCloud account after he left the company, used the access to transfer files, and later reached back out to Liu with technical questions about ongoing Apple projects. In OpenAI's telling, that is not the behavior of a company that treated the underlying information as a closely guarded secret.
Apple accuses OpenAI of orchestrating a scheme to extract confidential hardware information from former Apple engineers who joined the AI company. This week Apple asked the court to expedite discovery, saying its internal investigation suggests additional former employees may have participated in or witnessed the alleged theft. Apple has not yet responded in filings to OpenAI's motion to dismiss.
Key facts
- 01OpenAI filed a motion to dismiss Apple's July trade-secrets suit, arguing Apple's own security lapses defeat trade-secret status.
- 02The filing cites text records showing an Apple manager stayed logged into ex-engineer Chang Liu's personal iCloud after he left.
- 03OpenAI says Apple lets employees use personal iCloud accounts for work and failed to revoke access on departure.
- 04Apple this week asked the court to expedite discovery, saying more former employees may have participated in or witnessed the alleged theft.
- 05OpenAI argues Apple never specified which components were stolen, listing only generic categories like manufacturing and vendor relationships.
OpenAI's framing is that former Apple engineers were simply helping ex-colleagues, not exfiltrating protected material. The company argues Apple omitted the consequences of its own information-management practices from the original complaint and is now characterizing routine post-departure confusion as theft. It is, in effect, a legal version of arguing that the door was left open — but calibrated to the specific requirement in trade-secret law that a plaintiff must take reasonable steps to keep the information secret in the first place.
“OpenAI has no use, need or desire for Apple's trade secrets”— OpenAI, Motion to dismiss filing
The other prong of OpenAI's defense targets specificity. The motion says Apple has not identified which trade secrets or confidential components were actually stolen, and instead describes what OpenAI calls generic categories of the product-development process — component manufacturing, product testing, vendor and supplier relationships, and distribution channels. Courts typically require plaintiffs in trade-secret cases to particularize what was taken, and vague category descriptions rarely survive a motion to dismiss.
OpenAI also frames the suit as competitive obstruction. The filing argues Apple is trying to slow a rival's push into AI-powered hardware, and points to the broader talent flow from Cupertino to OpenAI as the real grievance behind the litigation. OpenAI has been hiring aggressively across hardware, design, and systems engineering as it builds toward a first-party consumer device, and a meaningful share of those hires have come from Apple.
The motion's sharpest lines land on the talent question. OpenAI says the company is building something entirely new and different from anything at Apple, and that many Apple engineers, inventors, developers and creators have chosen to leave for that work. It concedes Apple might not like that, then argues the courts should not be used to make up for Apple's shortcomings in the market for talent and its failures to integrate AI into its products.
“Apple should not be permitted to use a baseless and pretextual lawsuit to make up for its shortcomings in the market for talent and retaining its employees, and its failures to integrate AI into its products”— OpenAI, Motion to dismiss filing
This week's motion follows earlier coverage of OpenAI's initial pushback, where the company called the suit rotten to its core. The new filing is a more mechanical legal argument: rather than debating intent, OpenAI is trying to knock out the case at the threshold by showing Apple did not treat the information as secret and has not said with any precision what was allegedly taken.
There is a plausible counter. Apple's expedited-discovery request suggests it believes more evidence will surface — including additional witnesses among former employees — and courts often let trade-secret plaintiffs refine their identification of what was stolen after discovery, rather than dismissing on pleading specificity alone. The iCloud records also cut both ways: they show sloppy offboarding, but they also demonstrate that Apple employees continued to interact with departed engineers about active projects, which Apple can use to argue that information was still flowing after those engineers had left.
The case is a live test of how trade-secret law adapts to a talent market moving at AI speed, where senior engineers change employers on quarters, not years, and where the line between institutional know-how and portable expertise blurs. If OpenAI's motion succeeds, it becomes materially harder for large incumbents to use trade-secret suits as a brake on lateral hiring by AI competitors. If Apple's expedited-discovery bid succeeds first, the fight moves quickly into text messages, iCloud logs, and code repositories — an evidentiary theater OpenAI would rather avoid. Either way, the ruling on this motion will shape how the next wave of Apple-to-OpenAI defections is litigated.
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