> OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can.
> Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan.
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI.
Non-competes and the like are gross but what's described here isn't just "bring your expertise to OpenAI" it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
It gets even worse. The person not only kept the laptop and used an exploit to download confidential Apple documents, they bragged about it to a contact who was still working at Apple who was also feeding him information:
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI. He also maintained a relationship with Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng, an Apple employee who continued to give him updates on Apple's projects, vendor decisions, and engineering details. When Liu learned he still had access to Apple's systems, he texted Peng "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny."
This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.
Doing it at a the company that most aggressively enforces secrecy is even crazier.
An acquaintance of mine was accidentally wired about $100k when it was supposed to be $5k. Before it could be reversed, they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country. They then changed all socials and handles. They are now ignoring all court documents and are on track to get a default judgement against them.
Their rationale? “It’s mine, they owed me this”. They are 100% convinced that they are in the right, not just that they can keep it but that they actually intended to send them this to begin with. I get it $100k isn’t nothing but they’re also throwing their life away for less than what they used to make a year in salary.
People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
I had a client send me an ACH that was legitimately a fat finger extra zero. For me, it was a "lot" of truck payments. For them, it was a rounding error that they were unaware of until I reached out and let them know about their mistake. I couldn't wait to make it right with them because it bothered me so much because suddenly I had a pile of money that was theirs and not mine.
I had a similar situation where someone had their email client configured with my address in the reply-to header. We shared a first initial, last name, and isp… also happened to be my email address. His email was firsnamelastname, or something similar. I emailed the guy several times explaining how to fix it, and that I was getting a lot of his business correspondence. Never heard from him.
Then one day I get a Chase Zelle email saying that someone was sending me money. Something like $500. Logged into the Chase app and sure enough, could have taken it with the click of a button.
I contacted the sender to explain the situation and recommended they call the intended recipient for a correct email address.
Couldn’t image just taking it knowing it wasn’t intended for me.
> An acquaintance of mine was accidentally wired about $100k when it was supposed to be $5k. Before it could be reversed, they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country. They then changed all socials and handles. They are now ignoring all court documents and are on track to get a default judgement against them.
$95k does not seems like enough money to totally upend your life like that for.
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
It's more that money and power enable you to be who you really are, and amplify your worst traits if you're lacking self-awareness.
There are many people who are rich/wealthy and/or powerful and they're decent individuals living relatively ordinary lives. You don't read about most of them because they're "normal".
If the only reason you didn't behave that way to begin with is that you lack the money and power to evade the consequences, then yes. You really are that person.
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
Given your story its not sounds like this is power grab. More like they actually on spectrum and have some mental issues on top this. Or had mental breakdown because something happened before that money arrived.
Situations when people do something weird, bad or just plain evil for money and power are usually logical. E.g people think they got access to more money they percieve they can earn in next decade, or ever, something that settles them for life.
Earning more than $100,000 and throwing everything away for $95,000 only make sense if you are terminally ill. Or if it was never your real identify in first place and its well planned scam.
If you're earning $100k in Silicon Valley, your expenses will swallow up almost all of that. A sudden $100k windfall, on the other hand, tax free and suitably invested,will let you live for years quite comfortably in many poor countries.
Sorry to disappoint you, but no you cannot live "comfortably" in "poor countries" for $100,000 for "years". Well, unless you mean like two years.
I lived across South East Asia for more than decade and now live here full time. I have to live on around $20,000 / year most of the time since starting my company. And I do not live anywhere close to what average US / EU citizen will call "comfortable" let alone people from valley.
Stories of rich living for cheap in poor countries its just that: stories. It only possible if you preserve your US salary. For $50,000 post tax a year you can live well unless you have kids that need not a "poor country education".
Sure, if you're starting from nothing and expect to live a Western lifestyle. But you can draw down $5000/year from that sum for a very long time, and make twice the average Indian yearly income.
One more thing about life in developing countries, ones with seemingly super low GDP per capita. Its that low because a lot of economy in rural areas is simple unaccounted for: communities build their own housing, grow their own food or work in family business usually with no accounting or taxes whatsoever.
If you're born there you unlikely to ever end up in US on $100,000+ job unless your whole family or village invest in it.
If you're expat you will soon end up finding out that as expat you'll pay completely different prices and starting local business is just impossible unless you become part of a family.
EU have free healthcare and education. Also not everyone, but alot of people still own their own houses and appartments or they can get relatively cheap mortage.
Nothing of it available in cheap country for expat. If you move to developing country you better pay for health insurance like 80-250 EUR / month / person.
Also if you have a partner who is not remote worker they might not be able to find well paid job there. If you have kids then giving them good modern education in English is exorbitantly expensive.
I wont even start about fact that government of cheap country might change and you lose your residence permit, social circle or even property. And in most of countries that are easy to enter never give permanent residences and passports. You have to pay pay pay all the time or jump countries.
They are not free, the costs are deducted from the gross income listed above. Not that fundamentally different than employers paying for your health insurance (besides the system being way more efficient etc.)
The question is still what number people need to live "comfortably" (i.e. upper middle class). The average salary there may not quite provide for the amenities the average American considers "comfortable".
For expat most important part of comfort its entertainment and socialization. In cheap areas you will only have locals who depend on country might want or not to socialize with you, but either way cultural gap will be massive and finding friends will be a struggle for most.
There of course cities with a lot of expats and activities, but imagine what - living there is not cheap. Cheaper than US / EU, but you still gonna need that $2000 / month.
Wont even start on topic of lost opportunities from lack of networking since we talk of some extreme downshifting here. But most people need friends and safety net at least.
I agree (from semi-relevant experience). Also, any “poor” country that’s inexpensive enough to fit this requirements probably isn’t one you’d voluntarily live in.
Side note for the original commenter: It would be kinder and more accurate to state “lower cost of living countries” than “poor countries”. There are numerous lower COL countries that offer a higher quality of life a than that of the US but they aren’t “poor” (I moved to one).
And likely "suitable" countries are not the ones you want to do any investments or even transfer 100,000 to local bank.
I understand that side note wasnt for me, but yeah most of cheaper developing South East Asia countries are not "poor". Though there are ones you can call that, but again in a such countries you dont really want anyone to know you have $100,000 somewhere on a bank because its can get unsafe very fast. Its either "live just a little better than locals" or get in trouble.
PS: I talking of Myanmar, most of Laos and Cambodia.
If you okay to live like vietnamese person do yes you can live on $700 just fine. Especily if you single, healthy and love driving on motorbikes through rain and take a bit of risks.
Plus health insurance like Cigna for $100-200 unless you want to pay $10,000-20,000 in vinmec if you crash on a motorbike or get other serious sickness.
Plus border runs like $200-300 three times a year or often for cheaper depend on your paasport.
Problem that I doubt its how average SWE on HN imagine "comfortable" living.
Then if you have a partner who is not remote worker and kids there will be other surpeises for you.
I do get that $100,000 in expensive parts of silicon valley likely will buy you a room, some food and commute to work, but math dont make sense here.
Person from that kind of country likely had to spend $100,000 just to find job and move to US and survive there for the first time.
Legal migration to US is super hard and super expensive. You have to be both very successful in what you do and very dedicated in order to do it. Or very rich. And it take years.
People who choose to migrate to US and manage to do it isnt the type to throw it away on small scam.
And if they managed to get in easy, fast and illegally then they wont be the ones competing for $100,000+ job.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them […]
At $WORK we have the option of getting a work smartphone or having the company pay for (at portion of) our monthly mobile bill.
I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination. (Others chose payment because they did not want the 'hassle' of carrying a second device (and to save some cash).)
Yeah. I was encouraged to take the lump-sum money my company paid (like most happily did - not taxed; amount equalling latest base iPhone cost) and get MDM installed on the personal phone so that we could access email and everything on that. Laptop was company issued anyway. I, and very few, chose company phone and I got a new SIM just for the company and set it up (they had to pay the SIM bill as well).
A nice side effect of that was I could clearly control when the phone won't even be on me and I had set that expectation - like treks, or short personal vacations, sleeping hours (yes!). I had championed the "follow the sun" policy in my company when it came to on-call rotation, but somehow some of my fellow country men/women colleagues took pride in "being available". Anyway, their time, their choice.
Later some of my colleagues were surprised when they couldn't install certain apps, couldn't do certain things and often used to wonder "does the company take screenshots of my phone?" because the permission was present :D
It really depends on where you want to steer your career. There's some roles, especially in management, where "working hours only" isn't really an option; if you aspire to one of those you've gotta convince people you'll do what's necessary.
Like you I keep them separate. Not just my phone. I don't do anything personal on work devices (don't log into personal email or banks, etc...)
But, I believe I'm in the minority. Most of my fellow employees have added corp to their phone. I believe most do personal stuff on their work computer. I get it, it's inconvenient. I've gone to offsites and given don't have corp on my phone I have to pull out my corp laptop to contact people and/or lookup stuff that they wouldn't. It would also be much nicer to set personal appointments or deal with personal things I need to during business hours on a laptop than my phone. On rare occasions I bring my laptop to work if I know I'm going to need access to my stuff even though all of it is in the cloud so theoretically I could access it from a work laptop.
I was once at an SV party and several Apple employees (3 women, 5 gay men, 3 straight men) said they all used their work laptops to watch porn at home or traveling. I was pretty shocked. Not that they watched but that they used work laptops for it. They all thought it was fine. It came up because, for some reason I mentioned I always take 2 laptops on business trips, my personal one and my work one. They said they never do that, they just take their work one and do personal stuff. I asked, what about porn and they all said they watched on work laptops.
That was a very long way to say I think people like myself who separate the two are rare.
Company IT policies really got it the wrong way around with “bring your own device”. My personal phone is the last device where I would want them to have a presence. Conversely, having them manage a laptop and workstation for me is never going to give me a device as nice as I’m used to at home.
It’s as if they had two choices:
“we’ll provide clothes but you can bring your own lunch!”; vs
“wear your own clothes and we’ll provide lunch!”
and they chose the weird one not the helpful one.
I am extremely picky about keyboards, screens, and OS configuration as a result of being partially deaf, having poor eyesight, and honestly being a bit of an old stick in the mud. It would be lovely to set aside some space on an old Thinkpad for work tasks. It would be comfortable and easy to isolate and be just like my personal machine.
Instead I get a choice between a MacBook with a fixed alternate key layout or a Windows machine with a locked down bright white wallpaper and a non admin account.
If you are worried about the ethics of using a company laptop to do personal work, you might be taking it a bit far, what damage does this do to the company?
If you are worried about the company claiming rights over your personal work, then it is prudent.
1) It really had nothing to do with what damage it does to the company. It’s a long story, but I take personal Integrity fairly seriously. It was about how I felt about it, inside. As I progressed, in my self-development, “cash register” honestly became more important.
2) That’s definitely a valid point. I have worked on free/open-source code for most of my adult life. For a long time, it was for my own use, but I started publishing code for use by others, and provenance became a much more important coefficient.
That seems absolutely crazy to do. One could argue that the marginal cost to work for using a work laptop is zero and the work is still yours (still beyond the risk I’m willing to take). Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it.
As for what damage you do, it kind of depends on what you're doing. But in the end you're exposing your work machine to patterns and processes outside your normal job duties, potentially exposing it and the data/access it has to additional risks.
It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.
It’s not just wrong, you’re potentially allowing anything you do on that work computer to 1) be owned by the company and 2) be discoverable in court. it’s amazing how many it orgs are so lax with this. personal/work devices should and always be entirely separate. BYOD is a really bad crutch and a potential compliance nightmare timebomb for all parties.
I did the same. Nothing nefarious on my work laptop, but I used it for websurfing (avoiding questionable sites), booking trips, etc.
Then I realized how stupid that was even though my employer was fine with and was never strict with how a work laptop is used.
I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high.
I bought my own cell phone and laptop and now never use my work equipment for anything but work. Not worth the risk.
> I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high.
If they wrongfully accuse you of that, isn't it a place you should leave in any case?
Absolutely, but just as it's not ok to enter someone's home just because they forgot to lock the door, it's not ok to exploit access at your old employer because their offboarding process missed something.
I do the same as GP does; I don't want there to be any chance that my former employer has forgotten to revoke access to something, so I make sure to clear out anything that might remain on any device that I don't return to them.
Who knows, maybe another former employee will decide to steal from them around the same time I leave, and me having access credentials on a personal device, even if I haven't used it, might arouse suspicion.
You get trustworthy people by trusting people. Generally when I was there there was a presumption of trust. Given how blatantly the defendants are alleged to have acted, that’s still the case.
Is it? I mean legally. Obviously it’s dumb of Apple to have left this guys access open, but that doesn’t mean they actually had any legal responsibility to lock him out. As far as I understand, the law is pretty clear that you can’t access anything you’re not allowed to by policy, whether there’s a technical block or not.
While it doesn't apply in this particular case, for healthcare organizations the HIPAA privacy rule implies a legal responsibility to lock out terminated employees from any access to protected health information.
Many devices are indeed locked down. But given that it's an OS company and hardware vendor, many employees have access to hardware with e.g. SoC fusing that allows them to install custom-signed firmware. It's very difficult to make an OS lock out the people whose job it is to build the platform that OS depends on.
I once worked at a cybersecurity firm and they had a particularly botched rollout of MDM to Macs (which would regularly put the machine into an undesirable mode of 100% CPU usage plus max out upload bandwidth repeatedly trying and failing to backup the machine to some online backup service). I had work to do, so I simply disabled the MDM profile for the machine, installed an OS to my liking, and restored the apps I wanted to use, and went about things.
A year or so later the company hit hard times and we had a large layoff that affected me, and at the end of the video call, the directory of my department mentioned that they needed to wipe my laptops but it "wasn't showing up in MDM". I said I'd be glad to jump on a call with IT to fix that, but then he mentioned the IT staff were laid off too.
I then suggested I did get hired for my cybersecurity expertise, that I do take my obligations seriously, and he could just ask me to do whatever they were planning to do from the MDM console, and it would get done. He insisted that wouldn't be necessary since in his worldview the MDM was unbreakable and he just needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi or something.
Very amusing worldview. In the real world, where I live, I would assume a highly competent employee could exfiltrate trade secrets without me being able to catch them via standard / automated means. This particular Apple former employee got caught because he bragged about it, not because of technical means to catch him. As I've pointed out to a number of people, the very best DLP solution can be completely obviated by someone aiming a camera at their company-issue workstation's monitor.
> then suggested I did get hired for my cybersecurity expertise, that I do take my obligations seriously, and he could just ask me to do whatever they were planning to do from the MDM console, and it would get done. He insisted that wouldn't be necessary since in his worldview the MDM was unbreakable and he just needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi or something.
> Very amusing worldview.
It’s ironic that you’re displaying the exact behavior pointed out by the GP:
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
MDM is implemented to protect company assets regardless of the actions of the users. It would not be due diligence on the part of the director to trust you to wipe your own device.
It’s not clear to me what the point of your comment is other than illustrating that you’re smarter than your director.
I don't think I'm smarter than everyone else, but instead attribute this to organisational dysfunction. The problem (that went on for weeks) of the default MDM deployed software making some computers unusable was one everyone who got afflicted by it just found workarounds for, and in particular, our incentives were to get our jobs done, not to make sure we continued to allow the MDM deployed stuff to do whatever it wanted that was actively harmful to the company's best interests.
Considering the MDM was not implemented properly (particularly in an environment where one hires cybersecurity professionals, who are more likely than most to be able to figure out workarounds to it), it would actually be much more prudent to hire trustworthy staff who can be trusted not to steal company assets, trade secrets, and so on versus thinking you can conduct a zoom call on said company asset and then fire off a command via the MDM to wipe the laptop when the call is over.
I actually think the director was pretty smart, since he managed to avoid having an extended conversation about the lack of working MDM and ability to follow the procedure in front of the other person on the zoom call. Sometimes it's very important to be able to read between the lines of what someone is telling you.
Relying on remote wipes to secure company data is not a particularly strong plan, either (as this Apple saga should make clear); a determined person would simply be either constantly exfiltrating data, disconnect a machine from the network before it can be wiped, or other various plans (and do so without detection). I should know, since my job duties there were to advise customers on how to move towards a zero trust environment.
Sounds like the boss's response was not to insist the proper procedure be followed, but to assert that the technology had to work as intended, and as soon as he figured out the issue on _his side_ the standard operating procedure could be followed.
Um, no. Why would it be their responsibility? There are laws regarding IP theft. If you willingly break them you can't just say "well your security wasn't good enough".
There's really no way to prevent an employee from taking a piece of paper or a digital file from one place to another. The most you can prevent is accidental transfer. If they are malicious they will find a way no matter what guardrails you put.
It’s a criminal charge. Have you seen a legal case for that? It’s always something like The People of California v. Someone. At least in theory, every citizen is an interested party when the prosecutor files a criminal case.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back
It’s a total liability to hold onto anything. Even if you don’t do anything with it, it could get stolen or misplaced, and you’re liable. Not worth the headache.
Rich people do this all day and it's why they're rich. There's nothing shocking about seeing a non-rich person try the same thing in hopes of becoming rich.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Right. I noticed a coworker who recently left the organization was still running some of our software on his personal computer (evident in the access logs) and notified him that I could see, he should be more careful, etc. We agree to these contracts because compliance matters, not just because we need the job.
>Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust, responsibility and accountability, but there's people coming from low trust environments where exploiting loopholes and scamming everyone outside their inner circle is the norm, and it's the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.
They're brazen because they've never been caught or suffered consequences for their actions.
This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview.
I’ve been seeing this “high-trust society” dog whistle a lot lately, and I think it’s one of the funniest of its kind. You truly want me to believe that the United States, a country with a history of slavery and segregation, a country that went through a historical period dominated by people literally called “robber barons,” was a high-trust society before immigrants from less industrialized places came and ruined that?
It isn’t a dog whistle. The US actually does have a high-trust society compared to most of the world. Petty theft, snatching, pickpockets, scams, etc are relatively uncommon compared to e.g. many popular places in Europe. Americans are famously vulnerable to it when traveling because it isn’t really part of their domestic threat environment. In many areas, Americans don’t bother to lock anything. You can leave stuff out in public places and it is unlikely to be stolen.
I would say it is lower trust today than when I was a child. Some cities have developed real petty theft problems due to disinterested enforcement. It is still noticeably higher trust than most places in the world I’ve traveled.
It really depends on the type of trust you're talking about. You're right that in many places in the US, people generally act honestly. But that's not always true -- porch pirates are still a huge problem in cities, for example.
Policy-wise, I would not describe the US as "high trust" relative to the rest of the first world. Virtually all of our non-senior welfare programs are means-tested or require some proof of virtue (e.g. "I am actively looking for a job" to collect unemployment insurance), meaning that society broadly does not "trust" people to collect benefits honestly unless they're seniors.
We can look this up empirically: https://ourworldindata.org/trust. It shows US is a medium-high trust society; lower than parts of Europe, and lower than China (assuming people answered honestly there!) but higher than most of Africa, South America and Asia.
I don’t think they were making that comparison, rather that touristy cities have more pickpockets, which is obviously true and expected.
You seem to be very sensitive when it comes to anyone that might deign to question the supremacy of the US and very quick to disparage those outside of it.
I didn't read this that way at all. Society != country of origin.
The US, like any country, is composed of many different cultures and more or less independent societies, some being high-trust/valuing more cooperation and some low-trust, valuing more competition.
I think you could be more charitable, as GP said “culture,” not “society.”
Apple alleges not only individual malfeasance, but also recruitment tactics like “show-and-tell” aimed at recruiting those willing to bring company secrets (and discriminating against those who would not).
This is enough to constitute a low-trust culture that self-perpetuates.
Surely given the size of China there are plenty of honorable people. And surely in the US there are many dishonorable people, as you’ve pointed out.
The US is high-trust for insiders (rich white people). We allowed Donald Trump to loot the richest and most powerful society in history by imagining that he would follow the example of previous presidents instead of seeing him for the sociopathic con man that he has always been.
Conversely, the US is zero-trust for outsiders such as foreigners, racially disfavored groups, and the poor. Allegedly-dog-eating Haitians and the like. We have guns and are not shy about using them. Being killed by police is a leading cause of death for young men of color, as noted by Ice Cube, and confirmed by researchers at Rutgers (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821204116).
Yes. People who grew up in the 40s and 50s in the US are common targets of scams because the world they grew up in is very trusting. Adults of the same age who grew up in the east bloc? Much more skeptical.
The colonies and, later, the United States didn’t just practice slavery; they industrialized it by transporting by force 12.5 million Africans to the Americas for nearly 250 years.
Even as fortunes were made, that didn’t stop the torture, rape, and brutality of these enslaved people.
Even after the Civil War, the descendants of the former enslaved people had to live under the Apartheid-like system of Jim Crow that lasted for another hundred years until the Civil Rights Act was enacted in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Ok, the implication that I'm reading between the lines is that this sort of behaviour is somehow more tolerated by people with names like Liu and Tan, but is this actually the case?
I know there's some evidence of Chinese people working at big tech and feeding data back to the CCP but is this a "low trust culture" issue in general or an extrapolation of that one pattern?
Heh, as a (very white) American I presumed it was America in general today. From what I can see, it seems to be turning into a place where it's all scams, rug-pulls, crypto and sports gambling. This concerns me about the world that my 9 year old is growing up in, the only world he's ever known, even the early 2010s seemed to be higher trust than the past decade has felt like.
That does seem like the way Capitalism is being presented these days. Move fast and break things struck me as also from the same "fuck it" ethos that pervades the Modern Valley.
It might be the Valley attracts this kind (of sociopath?). In "the day" I watched as some co-workers popped from company to company, never staying for more than 6 months, and getting a salary bump with each jump. I guess good for them?
You don’t have to look any first than the White House to say that behavior is well-established in American culture, too. From the prosperity gospel to “don’t hate the player”, etc. this is deeply not a Chinese thing.
This isn't true at all in general online discourse. Maybe on X, in which case I'd recommend getting off of X.
It's overwhelmingly brought up when talking about Japan (and sometimes Korea) in comparison to the US (or EU). With Japan (or Korea) being the high-trust culture in that comparison, and the US/EU being the low-trust one.
I guarantee you can do a search across mentions of high/low-trust culture across online platforms in the last 12 months and the large majority will be these contexts, i.e. Western countries described low-trust, not high-trust.
I've definitely seen it used both ways, comparing Japan to other countries as well as India/Africa.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a "racist dog whistle" myself, though - there is a very real pattern that's being pointed out but the reason I made the GP comment is that from my experience I would assume that Chinese culture is about as trustworthy as the West.
> Ok, the implication that I'm reading between the lines is that this sort of behaviour is somehow more tolerated by people with names like Liu and Tan, but is this actually the case?
Of course not. Have you been following national news or politics the past few years, and the continued incredibly strong support bad actors received despite atrocious behavior and even allegedly criminal acts?
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. The concept of low and high-trust societies is well-studied [0], though how a given country maps to it may be disputed.
> This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview
Why not? Sounds not that hard.
I actually believe this is something that would make a candidate looks good in an interview for many large corporations.
> Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust...
That is just a long sentence for "us" vs "those people".
Having said that I don't entirely deny the effect of society on people's behavior. But at the same time, I have seen people from so called high-trust society being all polished and nice on the surface while being assholes and people from so called low-trust society being genuinely decent people despite not having the right name or the surface polish.
Also, assholes tend to attract assholes and people of the same tribe/clan/race tend to form groups.
It's more about people with "everybody steals so I should steal too" also known as "tylko frajer by nie ukradł" -- "only a loser wouldn't steal that" -- mentality.
And while its somehow "cultural" it's more about people hanging together having similar moral views.
assuming these employees are not just trying to shift the blame to OpenAI to cover their asses.. that's the beauty of American civil courts and the discovery process. An accusation was made. We'll find out through a transparent court process which side is telling the truth (or more likely to be telling the truth in the case of balance of probabilities).
Nah man that's how you end up in the permanent underclass. If you want to make it you have to throw everyone and everything else under the bus, be a bizarrely mustache-twirling evil misanthrope and general freakazoid-type loser, and most importantly get too big to fail / too rich to sue bc you have the good lawyers who can basically stall suits to death. Here's an application to Wendy's.
The crucial part of why non-competes are gross is that they're trying to enforce what you do after someone stopped receiving anything from the past employer. If someone is helping competitors when still working somewhere, or actively taking stuff from their past employer after they've left, then yeah, of course that's dumb and should be punished. But there's no reason a non-compete clause is needed for that!
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
Reminds me of how Sam Altman told the board that a safety reviewer had approved one of their AI models when the reviewer had done no such things.
Culture issue. From How to Apply to Y Combinator[1] by Paul Graham:
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
> we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.
It seems to be a common trait of the AI people to just brazenly violate the law. It’s like a requirement for working at openAI is to think rules don’t apply to you because you’re so smart.
I hate to use the word sociopath, because it has such a fine point on it, but if you believe there are smart "sociopaths" out there, might they be attracted to AI in general (companies like OpenAI or SpaceXAI specifically)?
Sure, “Trade Secret” non-competes are usually a pretext employers use to keep low-wage workers under their thumbs, but protecting bonafide trade secrets is their only sorta legitimate use, IMO. The world would be better if they were illegal, but letting engineers disperse confidential information from their last employer wouldn’t be the beneficial part.
Right? Just straight up documentation with no shame: From an Axios article on this
> Liu celebrated the exploit, according to the filing. "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny," he said in a message to a former colleague who was still employed by Apple.
Meh. It's one megacorp stealing stuff from another megacorp, hardly "appalling", who cares. I'd probably react the same way; I just wouldn't leak it to my next employer, that's dumb.
These companies are big enough (especially financially) that I'm really surprised that they do not have their own FBI/CIA/NSA departments in the world of corporate espionage.
It’s even more ridiculous when choosing to do it Apple. It’s hard to think of a company with more legal resources and which is more protective of its hardware IP.
No. Steve's rage was justified, IMO. It was because Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board while simultaneously being Google's CEO and Google was surreptitiously building Android at the time. Mother of all conflict of interests.
There was a recent story that reminded me of it. Mike Krieger was on Figma's board and Anthropic's CPO, while Anthropic was surreptitiously building Claude Design.
It wasn't very surreptitiously, Google very loudly bought Android Inc. for 50 million in 2005, two years before Apple ripped of the phone that won the iF Design Award in 2006, the LG Prada.
Either people are being really, really silly (which cannot be discounted), or the potential reward is so high as to override whatever qualms a normal person must have. Is that it? Is this people looking at a solid career at Apple or sudden millions from OpenAI, and thinking the risk is worth it somehow? Or, more darkly, is it people thinking _this is my only chance and I have to take it_? Or is it trickle-down lawlessness?
Sometimes the reward is pitifully small. There was a podcast about insider trading and sometimes the insiders will give the information for free or a negligible sum. There’s something in human psychology that facilitates collaboration even in unethical acts.
Google and Uber started as courtroom enemies, but probably had to commiserate some on Anthony Levandowski probably being the worst hire they both made.
Amazing character. Started as a regular robot-loving engineering kid, was in the right place at the right time and earned something like $140 million from Google, mostly from truly ludicrous performance bonuses, went to Uber for another giant payout, was worth nine figures. And sure, he was convicted for crimes, but he got one of those definitely-legitimate Trump pardons.
And then he managed to turn that into a negative $50 million net worth.
And also he briefly started a religion based around having an AI inventing a Christian god or something because his story wasn't crazy enough.
When all that went down, I was at Facebook. And some recruiter posted the news that Anthony was no longer at Uber, with a message like “this is a great opportunity to secure a top tier hire!”
I replied (on Workplace) “Absolutely the fuck NOT.”
Intelligence is domain-specific. People who have put too many skill points in technical knowledge often have none left for common sense and street-smarts.
More like lot of people are leaving Apple for OpenAI (no surprise) and an Apple manager wants to send a signal to everyone leaving to chill with what they walk out with. Corps have to perform a lot of theatre because there is lot of info constantly leaking out.
Those people are designers. And they don't necessarily understand software, data, or security. When I explained to my non-technical friends about how they were being tracked by website cookies, it sounded like a sci fi story to them. But yes, it's dumb.
I was more surprised by how they managed to keep using work devices after termination. This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.
> This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.
It's very safe to assume Apple has a standard exit process, for low level ICs.
Tan was Apple's vice president of iPhone and Apple Watch product design. This person worked for Apple for 25 years and likely a friend of top executives. I wouldn't be surprised if he just hugged everyone and casually walked out on his last day.
> Through Apollinaire, Picasso contacted the poet’s ex-secretary, Honore-Joseph Géry Pieret, who was ready to steal artifacts for a reasonable price. In 1907, Pieret broke into the Louvre and took several sculptures with him. Months later, Picasso would reveal his ground-breaking Cubist work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which was heavily inspired by Iberian and African sculpture.
Having a certain type of finish on the metal is an idea. Tricking someone into using Apple’s exact trade-secret finishing technique is copying. Making a new, even better technique, that’s so good the general public forgets about Apple and thinks you’re the new benchmark… that’s the kind of stealing that quote is talking about.
Yes, and if you analyze the finished metal and put in the work to reverse engineer it, fine, have at it. That's not even theft. If Apple really wanted to keep it completely secret forever, they can't sell it, so thats the risk they accept.
But thats very different than scheming to steal actual property, which these files are.
The concept of applying some kind of Apple-ish texture finish to metal is an idea. A research-heavy, highly specific, finely tuned, multiple step, trade secret, brand signature metal finishing technique is a painting.
Kinda seems like OpenAI didn’t actually have that idea or the ability to execute it, if they had to go to apple’s supplier and lie to them to get them do it.
Because companies get an advantage by having their people do this. You only hear about the times they get caught, but apparently they get caught so rarely that it's worth it.
Everywhere I've ever worked, if I went to management and said "hey, I've got some files from my last job, if you want to see them," they would say "absolutely not, please get rid of them RIGHT NOW," and probably fire me.
It's people who hold these beliefs who commit these acts. They're so convinced everyone around them is depraved, usually–at least in part–through personal experience, that they don't stop to consider the alternative.
Generally speaking, companies retaining a competitive advantage with each other is good for their investors but bad for the public. It's usually to the public's benefit for employees to share knowledge, it makes goods and services cheaper and more available.
Civil disobedience involves flagrantly and publicly and obviously violating the law so you can be arrested to draw attention to whatever issue you have with the law. If you’re breaking the law and trying to get away with it, that’s just criminality and isn’t honorable or respectable.
Civil disobedience is the breaking of laws your conscience tells you are unjust -- and accepting all possible consequences that come along with such an act.
Doesn't mean you have to make it trivial for the consequences to find you by literally walking yourself into jail.
You are mistaken and gp is correct: civil disobedience is usually thought of as done in public. "My conscience tells me it's fine to steal from this rich bastard because property is theft" is not civil disobedience.
As a counterpoint, why should a “metal finishing technique” be proprietary? Lying to the vendor that Apple said it’s ok is obviously wrong, but an employee taking that knowledge in their head doesn’t seem wrong to me. We have moved past the age of indentured apprentices and the freemasons.
Because Apple paid to produce that knowledge? It's good that people can spend a lot of time and money developing new knowledge and then for some period of time they get to exclusively reap the rewards of doing so.
Do you mind if I MITM all of your work output, your emails, your code, your messages, and attach my name to it and then receive your paychecks in exchange for my work?
But if they can pay some people to produce the knowledge they can also pay them to not share it after they change employers. Just like regular noncompete clauses I don't see why this is something that require more than regular contract law or why it should be inherent instead of negotiated for a fee.
> Because Apple paid to produce that knowledge? It's good that people can spend a lot of time and money developing new knowledge and then for some period of time they get to exclusively reap the rewards of doing so.
To me, the fraud is the issue. If the person actually has the knowledge to spec out the whole technique, then sure, they can ask for it. But if they just said "give me what you give Apple" or describes it in detail and the vendor says "no I only will give that when Apple says they're okay", I don't see anything wrong with that either.
This may be just one bad employee, i.e., Mr. Tan. Your quoted sentences say OpenAI did such and such, but it may all be just Mr. Tan. That's not to say OpenAI is not responsible because they are supposed to give strong guidance to new hires that they are not to bring any confidential information from their former employer.
Obviously they are looking at your IP and code. Anthropic trains on your data regardless of you opting out, I know that one for certain. There's no coincidence they "keep your data temporarily despite opting out" - because they wash it in legal loopholes. There is no opt out. These companies WILL steal your business. Only a matter of time before they are sued as well.
They systematically violated copyright when they grabbed whole internet to train their models. Do you really believe that they will stop stealing because they signed some funny ToS? Especially when every bit of data they have and competition does not have is making their model better.
People downvote you like you're being paranoid, but we're literally discussing this in a thread that shows how little respect those companies have for any sort of trade secrets.
They were required to keep all non-European user logs for a temporary period between April and September 2025, because the media companies suing them think these logs may be the only evidence in existence that could prove or disprove their alleged misconduct.
How is it obvious? We have strong legal agreements that state otherwise, do you think they are just lying and risking thousands of lawsuits?
I think it's more likely that there are 3/4 of a billion users that don't have these agreements and just pay for ChatGPT Plus and don't opt-out of anything, and are feeding the scaling machine every day.
Yes. They're constantly lying, and constantly getting caught for it. They have a reputation for it. Why do you think this would be any different?
Their standard opt-out agreement frames it as if they won't train on your data, but they do anyway, due to legal loopholes. They essentially clean-room everyone who opts-out, so while it's "technically" not training on "your" data, to the model it makes no difference. Your alpha and IP is not safe. Paying customers are now more easily able to clone your business as well, not just Anthropic themselves.
The only reason this hasn't leaked yet is fear. Anthropic is a very litigious and dangerous company. Only a matter of time though, someone there will grow a spine and speak up.
That means it’s in the corporate DNA to treat laws as things for little people.
Apple have deep enough pockets that they can actually sue OpenAI but I bet OpenAI are surprised they got caught.
Now ask yourself, would the Codex agents on your machine ever over step legal boundaries? Would OpenAI ever make use of data you, voluntarily, send to their servers?
If they did could your company afford to sue OpenAI and would it still be too late to save the business?
OpenAI is about to get ROCKED on this. From this report, this looks open and shut. Apple has basically infinite money and incredible lawyers. Not sure what OpenAI can counter with unless they have clear, hard evidence this hasn’t been happening.
OpenAI also has infinite money, and the graph for money/lawyering gets clamped well below what OpenAI can afford. It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.
OpenAI really doesn’t have infinite money. They have a lot of money, sure, but it is being burned like crazy, we know this. It is widely known that they are deeply unprofitable.
Compare that with Apple, a company that throws off billions of cash every quarter. This isn’t a legit comparison.
I agree that both companies have sufficient capital that legal resources are a a wash. But:
> It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.
This we don't know. We don't know what Apple wants to accomplish with this suit. They may be more interested in the injunctive relief than the monetary recovery. They may want to weaken OpenAI as part of a strategic pivot toward marketing local, private AI inference. As everyone has noted, the factual allegations are detailed and extensive - Apple likely has OpenAI dead to rights on this.
Exactly. what financial benefit can Apple get from a nonexistent OAI hardware business with no launched products? What actual harm has been caused so far? This is all about preempting future harm by slowing their product launch by years or, like Waymo/Uber, forcing OAI’s hand to cut losses and sunset their hardware ambitions permanently.
The OPs point wasn’t that OpenAis financial situation is comparable to Apples. It was that the likely cost of litigation is a drop in the ocean for OpenAi too despite their comparative lack of cash to burn.
Legal disputes like this cost in the hundreds of millions over many years, so well below 1% OpenAis last single funding round in single year.
If they got a tiny benefit from this (very gross) behaviour it may be finically well worth while.
OpenAI may very well go under IMO, but this will barely be a straw on the camels back.
This is when I wish Jobs was still in charge of Apple. I never quite liked him, but I like Altman way less. And Jobs would CRUCIFY the whole openAI team for this. It would be beautiful to watch.
Well OpenAI is offering equity to the US Government (and who knows who else privately) Tim Apple famously refused to bring manufacturing back to the US when the current president asked and play hardball on infosec. While this is a civil case, increasingly judiciary seems to be an extension of the executive. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
For real. If Apple can prove half of this complaint, OpenAI need to be jumping straight to "how can we settle this immediately." Can you imagine how much fun Apple lawyers would have taking this to a jury trial? Especially considering overall Apple knows that the public overall vaguely likes Apple and distrusts "AI" companies for, hmmm... (alleged) IP theft.
I'm also wondering about all these involved ex-Apple people who decided to pivot to crime, it seems like OpenAI has to fire all of them, no? Because how do you just keep them, knowing that they're all basically tainted, and that Apple will be coming back to sue you again for anything that seems "inspired" by Apple products or tech.
What a massive cock-up for whoever (Tan?) is at the top of this conspiracy, to think this was worth the risk, and to have not known that the chances of getting caught going this far outside the legal boundaries were less than 100%.
Based on a cursory read of the situation, it seems similar (at least on its face) to the Waymo vs Uber situation. In that case, Uber payed a Waymo an equity stake and signed an agreement about which technology they would/wouldn't use. The key person involved also was sentenced to 18 months in prison (pardoned after 6 months).
In the extreme case it may result in OpenAI having to abandon their in-progress consumer hardware products, but honestly that might actually be good for them. I really can't see all that investment being worthwhile. Better for them to stick to their core competency.
More realistically - OpenAI will cooperate, the specific employees involved will be punished, there will be a settlement, and this whole matter will be forgotten.
Basically nothing. I mean they’ll have to pay up but money clearly isn’t something OpenAI worries about. They’ll just raise more from the infinite vc money tree.
Apple may get a chance to rifle through OpenAI's trade secrets. And they may win an outcome where there is direct court supervision over what OpenAI is allowed to build and how.
Is there any other AI company with as much controversy as this company?
- ~murdered~ (dead) employee who's mother is on a anti-sam hate campaign
- ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company
- conflict of interest with Microsoft
Despite Anthropic's bad press, they haven't been as dishonest as this company.
Steve Jobs left because he lost a corporate power struggle. Sam Altman was fired because the board thought he was too fundamentally untrustworthy to remain as CEO (if we're to believe their statement ofc).
OpenAI will just put the employees involved under the bus. They can claim the information acquired wasn't used for OpenAI's benefit or authorization especially since the device isn't actually out yet.
Until the industry addresses the Original Sin of Generative AI (and the ascendance of Thievery Corporations), we should expect more and more of this. So far, theft has been rewarded. As long as you make enough money, people seem to be okay with ignoring long-lasting impacts of intellectual theft. As long as you become King of the Cannibals, it seems many are happy to remember you as King and not as the Cannibal.
A company that behaves like this in one area, cannot be trusted in any area. Any enterprise that endorses/allows OpenAI products to be used is taking a big risk.
The same can be said about Apple. Several companies have complained about them taking a meeting with apple, presenting their product, only to have Apple then rip it off and build it in house. To say nothing of sherlocking.
I’ve been at companies where just one group - or even just one person - did something unconscionable and kept getting away with it until the story hit the headlines. And I can tell you, it was never just an isolated incident involving just that group. It’s also all the people who knew something was up and didn’t say anything. And it’s the corporate leadership fostering a pervasive culture of turning a blind eye to ethical problems. Often by allowing people in power to ensure that sounding the alarm is a career-limiting move.
You think the group tasked with developing whatever hardware device they're trying to build is isolated away from senior leadership and is running rogue?
Not being able to prove is one thing, pretending it may not be the case is next level of positivity. There are definitely going to be pockets of hard working smart folks in every place, however the company as a whole would get a bad name even if few folks are indulged and the company is not doing anything about it.
Same thought I had, I realized I was zero percent surprised reading the claims made, it feels like a perfect representation of the personality Sam Altman shows the world.
I'm the farthest thing from an Apple fanboi you can find, but Apple's not so unethical as to make all this (OpenAI trade secret) stuff up. The OpenAI settlement they'll no doubt get from this won't amount to 30 days of their App Store rent-seeking that they were propping up with those lies.
If they can't prove any of this stuff they wouldn't file the suit. No matter what you or I think of Apple, the chances that this went down at least as criminally as they allege, are very high.
> To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.
> [..]
> Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies. They did not seek to withdraw the testimony or to have it stricken (although Apple did request that the Court strike other testimony). Thus, Apple will be held to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.
Meh. Consider that you had no choice and no say that your data out there, both present and historic as mined, aggregated and analyzed by data collectors, was used as a training set for the LLMs. I think you’re a tad too late with your warning. They’re already thieves and they know it. And they know you can’t and won’t do anything about it.
Depends on the objective of Apple. It’s hard to imagine they’re after a quick payout. They may wish to keep this in the news cycle as long as possible. I could see them both harming open ai and sending a message to employees thinking of leaving that if they even consider breaking their confidentiality agreements, it will absolutely ruin their careers.
I keep seeing this take in the comments, but why wouldn't Apple make an example of OpenAI? They can certainly afford to. There's no lawyering your way out of a case this cut and dry, if it makes it to court. OpenAI has already signaled intent to become a direct competitor to Apple, why wouldn't Apple publicly humiliate them before they can get that product off the ground?
who knows, maybe he had giant gambling debts or other addiction(s) or bad real estate investments and/or lost half of it all to an ex-wife first. things that Jony might be readily aware of. assuming there is more than a kernel of truth to this - and i can't imagine not, the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account - it doesn't surprise me that Tan was a criminal, it's that he was such a bad criminal
Being spurned is one possible motivation, but so is an outstanding offer, where you go from middle of the pack performer with career stagnation to superstar leading the hot new product.
I do hope Anthropic are better with IP, and I think they may be. Given Dario Amodei hasn't been sued by OpenAI while building Anthropic this seems likely.
I think Amodei may actually be quite a good human, despite my trust in big tech being at an all-time low.
Casually dragging new employees into the deepest shit, it’s breathtaking. Also the naïveté of going along with it??
> He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information
If instead of downloading the files they took the info out in the form of neural network trained on the files and able to reproduce the information, that would be just fair use, 100 pound.
I’d guess phone, anything else is too compute-constrained and just an accessory for them, plus has to pay 30% of subscriptions and can be disadvantaged strategically.
Is this the simple case of being used to stealing so much (most ai companies pretty much stole all of data available on the internet with little consequence) that they also felt comfortable stealing data from companies?
Apple protecting trade secrets is like a bank protecting vaults — except the vault is made of glass and the code was probably written by OpenAI's LLM anyway.
In every company I've worked at (all with >1000 employees), there is always some text in the offer or onboarding documents clearly stating that you should not bring any previous employer's trade secret or intellectual property to this company.
I wonder whether Open AI's offer letter or onboarding document also says such a thing.
9. In the months before he left Apple, Mr. Tan met with OpenAI or its collaborators and
discussed meetings with a key Apple supplier. He began emailing himself information about Apple’s
suppliers and internal summaries of the consumer electronics industry. And today, when interviewing
Apple employees for jobs at OpenAI, Mr. Tan uses Apple’s confidential information to gain access
to even more insider knowledge. He has used an Apple internal project codename to ask, “What’s the
plan[?]” for an unannounced Apple product. He has directed job candidates still working for Apple
to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and
his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information. These directions to bring
Apple’s parts to OpenAI job interviews surprised at least one of the candidates, who commented that
he “didn’t even know we could take those from the office.”
10. This is part of OpenAI’s strategy to extract Apple’s confidential information. OpenAI
has been instructing Apple employees to bring “CAD/design artifacts” and “prototypes” to their
interviews and to divulge details about their work such as “subsystem and component selection,” the
“tools or methodologies you use for system integration, such as CAD software, simulation tools,”
and “Vendor selection and communication/collaboration with vendors.”
11. OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For
example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay
at Apple as long as they can. After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an
internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for
employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI
colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their
departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols. Unsurprisingly, Apple’s investigation has found
a pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended
to protect Apple’s confidential information.
If you sleep with dogs you're gonna get fleas. These AI companies have made billions by stealing other peoples content, what makes you think they would be above stealing from Apple?
Quick reminder that Apple was part of the silicon valley crew that partook of illegal non-poaching arrangements with other SV companies, helping to stifle salaries and more.
But, that's a bit of a tangent. On the other hand, Apple is accused of (and a jury ruled against them on the issue) hiring from Masimo to steal trade secret. Appeals are pending, of course, but it's a reminder that Apple is not lily white on this topic.
The jury ruled against Apple only on the issue of patents, and the claims of trade secret theft were dismissed. There doesn’t seem to be evidence that the Masimo employees who went to work for Apple brought any confidential information along with them.
My gut instinct is to call you a mooncalf, given the lengthy documented history of OpenAI "re-appropriating" things and wanting to profit from it. So here is my honest question, what light did you see them in before and what did you base that on?
They do all of this, plus far worse. Including but not limited to flooding the internet with guerrilla marketing and sentiment-shifting bots across all social media platforms.
This is the sort of company they are, and it's just the tip of the iceberg: https://clawd.rip
I'm curious, who is actually making the calls and who is actually doing the scouting for these people. If this is coordinated, the chain must long, so let's see it!
Pretty foolish of them to play so unethically only to lose such a big account and now gain an open-and-shut lawsuit that will seriously damage their ability to compete in hardware for a very long time.
Reminder that Apple hired 30+ engineers from Masimo and stole multiple trade secrets, including their blood-oxygen monitoring tech, leading to a $634 million judgement against them. They also asked President Biden to intervene and pressure the ITC to reverse their ruling.
Not saying OpenAI is innocent here of course, but really no large corporation is. This is just how the game is played.
Weirdly, this seems like they're trying to train a model to work like Apple? They seem really interested in processes and how stuff is done, rather than only the finished artifacts.
Given that allegedly hardware information was involved I’d lean more toward this is for developing either custom silicon based on Apple’s designs or OpenAI wants to make consumer hardware. Aren’t they making something with Jony Ive too?
I assumed consumer hardware too though I can't imagine what OpenAI hardware would look like. Another take on the "smart speaker" that has hit the consumer market with a resounding "meh?"
A lot of people have tried to copy Apple’s finished product and they never get it right, because they don’t have the process behind it. How something looks is only a small part of it.
>In its lawsuit Friday, Apple accused Tang Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and a former Apple executive, of coaching his hires from Apple on how to evade Apple’s security processes for departing employees.
The word "coaching" is very malleable, and could refer to perfectly legal conduct, or conduct that is illegal, unethical, or both. How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are? One would assume he was told by previously-departed Apple employees. Would they have been forbidden to disclose information about the outgoing process? I would think so, given how careful Apple is about these things.
> Apple accused another former employee, Chang Liu, of using a former colleague’s Apple-owned laptop to access and download technical documents while working at OpenAI. Mr. Liu told that Apple employee what information about unannounced products she should study before job interviews, Apple said.
I would be very hesitant to assist a former colleague who is still at Apple in this way. Apple is well known for using deliberate leaks to smoke out leakers, and it would be easy for them to get a current/loyal employee to go through the interview process at a competitor for the purpose of finding out if the competitor is trying to get Apple employees to act unethically/illegally.
EDIT: I see my comment, which I posted on the HN thread for an NYT article, has been merged into the comment section of a different article, and is now being downvoted a bunch. Please understand I did not post this comment here, so if it seems out of place that's why.
> After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols.
I will never grow tired of highly paid so-called geniuses so deluded by their own hubris they think no one will not only not notice them moving GBs of data onto a USB on their last day of work, but assume they also don't have logs of everything you accessed and everything you took.
Little no-name companies have this capability with off the shelf software.
Large companies like Apple have entire departments of staff whose job it is to monitor data theft.
It's bonkers and I love every single story as if it's never been told before.
This kind of stuff happens all the time. The employees in question are just incredibly bad at covering their tracks, normally they'd get fired and that would be it.
It is fishy that OpenAI's leadership didn't have the watchdogd in place to catch it. And there's this huge public lawsuit about it now. Plus there's the Elon lawsuit. Makes me think somebody wants OpenAI to go down. Almost like a sacrificial scapegoat, in order to achieve psychosocial unity in the programming community, or something like that.
Hot take, but Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could. Of course Apple can sue and they will probably settle some amount with OpenAI, but acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment, and OpenAI is uniquely worse at stealing corporate secrets is laughable. Especially considering Apple’s famous history!
> Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could
The closest involved Apple selling Xerox pre-IPO shares [1]. And there are zero allegations any PARC employees who moved to Apple with confidential information the this has gone down.
> acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment
It's not. It's why it gets litigated and criminally charged. I won't disagree that there is a section of Americans who think it's commonplace. But that's because they're either personally doing the crimes or surrounded by criminals.
Hmmm it does seem like this seems much worse than what I thought of Apple doing (like stealing the idea for a mouse and GUI from Xerox), the best I could find is Qualcomm claiming Apple stole its modem code and gave it to Intel. That was settled before trial.
This however does actually seem far worse, reminds me more of Waymo vs Uber, people can go to jail.
Yeah, I find the majority of comments here interesting. Sure, it should be common sense not to email internal documents to yourself when you leave, or keep a company laptop and access internal networks after you no longer work at a place. That's just dumb and unethical and illegal.
But also, I can't find it in myself to really care about this. Trillion-dollar company takes ideas from other trillion-dollar company. Apple has done this to much smaller companies countless times. But OpenAI-on-Apple violence is so far removed from a crime that actually harms normal people that I'm not sure why I should give a shit.
Well they trained their model by scraping all digitised human knowledge and ignoring IP and CW laws so whats a little bit of corporate espionage in the grand scheme of things
Idea is that Trump would bailout AI companies and call it "job protection" or "America growth" or "national security" because they know the word 'bailout' is politically bad.
Other ideas discussed are that AI companies are going through a chain of larger and larger subsidies: VC --> Big Tech --> Governments. And that these companies haven't been able to make money off of AI so they're priming things for a bailout that's not a bailout wink wink. And that they foresee a situation where Trump will accept bribes in order to heavily regulate some AI companies but not others. Picking winners and losers.
What a dumb take. Apple is the most wildly successful company in the market. You think whatever pittance they get from this will outweigh the cost of stolen ip?
Some of the Apple/Samsung complaint was horseshit (and was a bit of a distraction because they knew they'd need to settle their suit with Nokia).
But it was design copying and IP infringement stuff: duplication of things already in the wild.
This is on another level. If any of this is true, it's extraordinary, and I think OpenAI will likely want to settle quickly, thus increasing Apple's AI-related earnings.
I didn't read the full complaint but the article focuses on bringing Apple IP to interviews. It's not clear that it was intended to steal trade secrets.
The Liu guy seemingly did so but he wouldn't be the first person to try to take his own work product out the door for personal reasons.
I distrust statements like:
> “pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.”
They do explain that in more detail deeper in the complaint. They allege that OpenAI has obtained the offboarding checklist for Apple managers, that OpenAI is using it to issue guidance to departing employees on how they can avoid scrutiny, and that employees receiving this guidance have been ignoring Apple security personnel who try to schedule their standard exit processes.
That doesn't sound too heinous. As far as I am aware, employers aren't entitled to exit processes so long as they get their property back. OpenAI possessing an offboarding checklist accessible to any Apple manager doesn't seem like an IP issue.
I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this part other than Apple trying to imply OpenAI has something to hide.
They're more than trying to imply it. Apple says "This is the tip of the iceberg", and a lawsuit is necessary to uncover the full scope of what they think OpenAI has to hide.
> As far as I am aware, employers aren't entitled to exit processes so long as they get their property back.
They're not, but one of the defendants allegedly dodged returning his company laptop. It's then alleged that he used it to continue accessing Apple documents after he'd already left, and coached at least one other person on how to copy confidential documents without alerting Apple's security team.
If these allegations are supported, it seems pretty reasonable to wonder whether there might be more people he coached and what documents they might have copied undetected.
Some pretty damning stuff:
> OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can.
> Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan.
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI.
Non-competes and the like are gross but what's described here isn't just "bring your expertise to OpenAI" it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
It gets even worse. The person not only kept the laptop and used an exploit to download confidential Apple documents, they bragged about it to a contact who was still working at Apple who was also feeding him information:
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI. He also maintained a relationship with Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng, an Apple employee who continued to give him updates on Apple's projects, vendor decisions, and engineering details. When Liu learned he still had access to Apple's systems, he texted Peng "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny."
This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.
Doing it at a the company that most aggressively enforces secrecy is even crazier.
>This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply you.
Spot on perfect. I see this too often and not just in tech.
An acquaintance of mine was accidentally wired about $100k when it was supposed to be $5k. Before it could be reversed, they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country. They then changed all socials and handles. They are now ignoring all court documents and are on track to get a default judgement against them.
Their rationale? “It’s mine, they owed me this”. They are 100% convinced that they are in the right, not just that they can keep it but that they actually intended to send them this to begin with. I get it $100k isn’t nothing but they’re also throwing their life away for less than what they used to make a year in salary.
People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
I had a client send me an ACH that was legitimately a fat finger extra zero. For me, it was a "lot" of truck payments. For them, it was a rounding error that they were unaware of until I reached out and let them know about their mistake. I couldn't wait to make it right with them because it bothered me so much because suddenly I had a pile of money that was theirs and not mine.
I had a similar situation where someone had their email client configured with my address in the reply-to header. We shared a first initial, last name, and isp… also happened to be my email address. His email was firsnamelastname, or something similar. I emailed the guy several times explaining how to fix it, and that I was getting a lot of his business correspondence. Never heard from him.
Then one day I get a Chase Zelle email saying that someone was sending me money. Something like $500. Logged into the Chase app and sure enough, could have taken it with the click of a button.
I contacted the sender to explain the situation and recommended they call the intended recipient for a correct email address.
Couldn’t image just taking it knowing it wasn’t intended for me.
> An acquaintance of mine was accidentally wired about $100k when it was supposed to be $5k. Before it could be reversed, they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country. They then changed all socials and handles. They are now ignoring all court documents and are on track to get a default judgement against them.
$95k does not seems like enough money to totally upend your life like that for.
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
It's more that money and power enable you to be who you really are, and amplify your worst traits if you're lacking self-awareness.
There are many people who are rich/wealthy and/or powerful and they're decent individuals living relatively ordinary lives. You don't read about most of them because they're "normal".
> It's more that money and power enable you to be who you really are
If you’re only a certain way when you have money and power, is it really “who you really are”?
If the only reason you didn't behave that way to begin with is that you lack the money and power to evade the consequences, then yes. You really are that person.
Spot on
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
Given your story its not sounds like this is power grab. More like they actually on spectrum and have some mental issues on top this. Or had mental breakdown because something happened before that money arrived.
Situations when people do something weird, bad or just plain evil for money and power are usually logical. E.g people think they got access to more money they percieve they can earn in next decade, or ever, something that settles them for life.
Earning more than $100,000 and throwing everything away for $95,000 only make sense if you are terminally ill. Or if it was never your real identify in first place and its well planned scam.
If you're earning $100k in Silicon Valley, your expenses will swallow up almost all of that. A sudden $100k windfall, on the other hand, tax free and suitably invested,will let you live for years quite comfortably in many poor countries.
Sorry to disappoint you, but no you cannot live "comfortably" in "poor countries" for $100,000 for "years". Well, unless you mean like two years.
I lived across South East Asia for more than decade and now live here full time. I have to live on around $20,000 / year most of the time since starting my company. And I do not live anywhere close to what average US / EU citizen will call "comfortable" let alone people from valley.
Stories of rich living for cheap in poor countries its just that: stories. It only possible if you preserve your US salary. For $50,000 post tax a year you can live well unless you have kids that need not a "poor country education".
Sure, if you're starting from nothing and expect to live a Western lifestyle. But you can draw down $5000/year from that sum for a very long time, and make twice the average Indian yearly income.
One more thing about life in developing countries, ones with seemingly super low GDP per capita. Its that low because a lot of economy in rural areas is simple unaccounted for: communities build their own housing, grow their own food or work in family business usually with no accounting or taxes whatsoever.
If you're born there you unlikely to ever end up in US on $100,000+ job unless your whole family or village invest in it.
If you're expat you will soon end up finding out that as expat you'll pay completely different prices and starting local business is just impossible unless you become part of a family.
Okay lets say you are a person who want and able to live on average Indian yearly income in rural India.
How the hell you end up in US on $100,000+ job? How much time it took and how much you spent on education / job search / migration to US?
If you're from India then likely all your relatives invested into your education and migrarion.
50,000 sounds like a lot. Most people in West European countries don’t make that much.
EU average is ~€39.000, gross, before taxes. And only nine countries have above average average salaries.
And that’s not available income. France median pre-tax "net" income is ~€2.100 / month.
EU have free healthcare and education. Also not everyone, but alot of people still own their own houses and appartments or they can get relatively cheap mortage.
Nothing of it available in cheap country for expat. If you move to developing country you better pay for health insurance like 80-250 EUR / month / person.
Also if you have a partner who is not remote worker they might not be able to find well paid job there. If you have kids then giving them good modern education in English is exorbitantly expensive.
I wont even start about fact that government of cheap country might change and you lose your residence permit, social circle or even property. And in most of countries that are easy to enter never give permanent residences and passports. You have to pay pay pay all the time or jump countries.
> EU have free healthcare and education
They are not free, the costs are deducted from the gross income listed above. Not that fundamentally different than employers paying for your health insurance (besides the system being way more efficient etc.)
We're talking about an engineer here…
You might be surprised how "little" engineers make outside the US too
The question is still what number people need to live "comfortably" (i.e. upper middle class). The average salary there may not quite provide for the amenities the average American considers "comfortable".
For expat most important part of comfort its entertainment and socialization. In cheap areas you will only have locals who depend on country might want or not to socialize with you, but either way cultural gap will be massive and finding friends will be a struggle for most.
There of course cities with a lot of expats and activities, but imagine what - living there is not cheap. Cheaper than US / EU, but you still gonna need that $2000 / month.
Wont even start on topic of lost opportunities from lack of networking since we talk of some extreme downshifting here. But most people need friends and safety net at least.
I agree (from semi-relevant experience). Also, any “poor” country that’s inexpensive enough to fit this requirements probably isn’t one you’d voluntarily live in.
Side note for the original commenter: It would be kinder and more accurate to state “lower cost of living countries” than “poor countries”. There are numerous lower COL countries that offer a higher quality of life a than that of the US but they aren’t “poor” (I moved to one).
And likely "suitable" countries are not the ones you want to do any investments or even transfer 100,000 to local bank.
I understand that side note wasnt for me, but yeah most of cheaper developing South East Asia countries are not "poor". Though there are ones you can call that, but again in a such countries you dont really want anyone to know you have $100,000 somewhere on a bank because its can get unsafe very fast. Its either "live just a little better than locals" or get in trouble.
PS: I talking of Myanmar, most of Laos and Cambodia.
I've lived in Vietnam on and off for several months at a time. One of the safest countries anywhere ( as long as you don't badmouth the government)
Easy to live on sub 700$ a month if you're happy with air conditioned studio, mostly asian food, scooter and not going to high end bars.
Get the 1 bedroom apartment, quite often takeaway/delivered western food sub 1500$ a month.
Go eat out western food everyday, live in a 3 bedroom in the nicest district go to fancy bars etc and yeah maybe you can reach your 5k a month...
People have no clue / are not willing to experience adjustment for 3 weeks... But easily possible to live here for budgets mentioned above...
If you okay to live like vietnamese person do yes you can live on $700 just fine. Especily if you single, healthy and love driving on motorbikes through rain and take a bit of risks.
Plus health insurance like Cigna for $100-200 unless you want to pay $10,000-20,000 in vinmec if you crash on a motorbike or get other serious sickness.
Plus border runs like $200-300 three times a year or often for cheaper depend on your paasport.
Problem that I doubt its how average SWE on HN imagine "comfortable" living.
Then if you have a partner who is not remote worker and kids there will be other surpeises for you.
The person was probably from a poor country already and was used to that.
I do get that $100,000 in expensive parts of silicon valley likely will buy you a room, some food and commute to work, but math dont make sense here.
Person from that kind of country likely had to spend $100,000 just to find job and move to US and survive there for the first time.
Legal migration to US is super hard and super expensive. You have to be both very successful in what you do and very dedicated in order to do it. Or very rich. And it take years.
People who choose to migrate to US and manage to do it isnt the type to throw it away on small scam.
And if they managed to get in easy, fast and illegally then they wont be the ones competing for $100,000+ job.
> they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country
To be fair this is smarter than like 95% of white-collar criminals.
Hell, I used to know a guy who did this to steal a monitor from work. Went all the way down to Panama or something.
$95,000 isn't that much to destroy your life over.
> immediately bought a one way flight out of country
Is this referring to a foreign national who can leave at any time?
> They are 100% convinced that they are in the right, not just that they can keep it but that they actually intended to send them this to begin with.
They quite clearly do not believe that. If they did, they wouldn't need to go into hiding or leave the country.
This honestly sounds like mental illness.
Nah, it doesn't even sound true.
Honestly yes, that’s most likely a major factor
The correct term is entitled, as it applies equally whether they think they are smarter or not.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them […]
At $WORK we have the option of getting a work smartphone or having the company pay for (at portion of) our monthly mobile bill.
I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination. (Others chose payment because they did not want the 'hassle' of carrying a second device (and to save some cash).)
Yeah. I was encouraged to take the lump-sum money my company paid (like most happily did - not taxed; amount equalling latest base iPhone cost) and get MDM installed on the personal phone so that we could access email and everything on that. Laptop was company issued anyway. I, and very few, chose company phone and I got a new SIM just for the company and set it up (they had to pay the SIM bill as well).
A nice side effect of that was I could clearly control when the phone won't even be on me and I had set that expectation - like treks, or short personal vacations, sleeping hours (yes!). I had championed the "follow the sun" policy in my company when it came to on-call rotation, but somehow some of my fellow country men/women colleagues took pride in "being available". Anyway, their time, their choice.
Later some of my colleagues were surprised when they couldn't install certain apps, couldn't do certain things and often used to wonder "does the company take screenshots of my phone?" because the permission was present :D
Exactly that.
I wasn't reachable by phone for company related stuff outside my regular working hours unless I had on-call-duty, which means it was working hours.
I don't get why people would be proud about not setting boundaries.
It really depends on where you want to steer your career. There's some roles, especially in management, where "working hours only" isn't really an option; if you aspire to one of those you've gotta convince people you'll do what's necessary.
Like you I keep them separate. Not just my phone. I don't do anything personal on work devices (don't log into personal email or banks, etc...)
But, I believe I'm in the minority. Most of my fellow employees have added corp to their phone. I believe most do personal stuff on their work computer. I get it, it's inconvenient. I've gone to offsites and given don't have corp on my phone I have to pull out my corp laptop to contact people and/or lookup stuff that they wouldn't. It would also be much nicer to set personal appointments or deal with personal things I need to during business hours on a laptop than my phone. On rare occasions I bring my laptop to work if I know I'm going to need access to my stuff even though all of it is in the cloud so theoretically I could access it from a work laptop.
I was once at an SV party and several Apple employees (3 women, 5 gay men, 3 straight men) said they all used their work laptops to watch porn at home or traveling. I was pretty shocked. Not that they watched but that they used work laptops for it. They all thought it was fine. It came up because, for some reason I mentioned I always take 2 laptops on business trips, my personal one and my work one. They said they never do that, they just take their work one and do personal stuff. I asked, what about porn and they all said they watched on work laptops.
That was a very long way to say I think people like myself who separate the two are rare.
Company IT policies really got it the wrong way around with “bring your own device”. My personal phone is the last device where I would want them to have a presence. Conversely, having them manage a laptop and workstation for me is never going to give me a device as nice as I’m used to at home.
It’s as if they had two choices:
“we’ll provide clothes but you can bring your own lunch!”; vs
“wear your own clothes and we’ll provide lunch!”
and they chose the weird one not the helpful one.
I am extremely picky about keyboards, screens, and OS configuration as a result of being partially deaf, having poor eyesight, and honestly being a bit of an old stick in the mud. It would be lovely to set aside some space on an old Thinkpad for work tasks. It would be comfortable and easy to isolate and be just like my personal machine.
Instead I get a choice between a MacBook with a fixed alternate key layout or a Windows machine with a locked down bright white wallpaper and a non admin account.
Depending on where you live, your employer may be legally required to accommodate your disabilities. Here in France, HR are usually dutiful about it.
In my early career, I used my work computer (off hours) to do personal work. I never made any money, but it was still wrong.
At some point, I couldn’t live with myself, and purchased my own computer (better than what work gave me, anyway).
I never used my personal cell for work. The closest thing was coordinating meetups, when traveling.
If you are worried about the ethics of using a company laptop to do personal work, you might be taking it a bit far, what damage does this do to the company?
If you are worried about the company claiming rights over your personal work, then it is prudent.
1) It really had nothing to do with what damage it does to the company. It’s a long story, but I take personal Integrity fairly seriously. It was about how I felt about it, inside. As I progressed, in my self-development, “cash register” honestly became more important.
2) That’s definitely a valid point. I have worked on free/open-source code for most of my adult life. For a long time, it was for my own use, but I started publishing code for use by others, and provenance became a much more important coefficient.
I think that the new version of this is using your work's LLM account (potentially more powerful) to do personal work
That seems absolutely crazy to do. One could argue that the marginal cost to work for using a work laptop is zero and the work is still yours (still beyond the risk I’m willing to take). Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it.
There was a brief moment in all the hullabaloo that this went unnoticed :X
That potentially consumes a lot more resources than the very negligible marginal wear and tear that using a work computer would cause.
As for what damage you do, it kind of depends on what you're doing. But in the end you're exposing your work machine to patterns and processes outside your normal job duties, potentially exposing it and the data/access it has to additional risks.
It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.
It’s not just wrong, you’re potentially allowing anything you do on that work computer to 1) be owned by the company and 2) be discoverable in court. it’s amazing how many it orgs are so lax with this. personal/work devices should and always be entirely separate. BYOD is a really bad crutch and a potential compliance nightmare timebomb for all parties.
I did the same. Nothing nefarious on my work laptop, but I used it for websurfing (avoiding questionable sites), booking trips, etc.
Then I realized how stupid that was even though my employer was fine with and was never strict with how a work laptop is used.
I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high.
I bought my own cell phone and laptop and now never use my work equipment for anything but work. Not worth the risk.
> I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high.
If they wrongfully accuse you of that, isn't it a place you should leave in any case?
Name me a large corporation who "trusts" their employees. I'd pretty much be forced into unemployment if trust was a requirement.
I would guess you're probably right. But if you are accused of something, not having a separate non-work computer/phone could make that process worse.
Many years ago my mom chose to have the company pay for her private phone number.
When she stopped working for them, they informed her, that the number legally belonged to them.
It was not a problem for her, because she wanted to get rid of the number anyway, else too many old clients would call.
But it was an interesting situation nonetheless.
"Whenever I leave a company I make sure..."
But its also that companies responsibility to ensure that the employer doesn't take anything.
Apple know how to use MDM on Apple laptops, why wasn't the device locked and located.
Absolutely, but just as it's not ok to enter someone's home just because they forgot to lock the door, it's not ok to exploit access at your old employer because their offboarding process missed something.
I do the same as GP does; I don't want there to be any chance that my former employer has forgotten to revoke access to something, so I make sure to clear out anything that might remain on any device that I don't return to them.
Who knows, maybe another former employee will decide to steal from them around the same time I leave, and me having access credentials on a personal device, even if I haven't used it, might arouse suspicion.
But it's Apple, which is a huge target. Never mind these individuals, you will have China, Russia and other seeking to infiltrate it.
In any top r&d area, one wonders if they perhaps should be searching staff on way out and making then sign out and return CAD drawings etc.
You get trustworthy people by trusting people. Generally when I was there there was a presumption of trust. Given how blatantly the defendants are alleged to have acted, that’s still the case.
>it’s also that company’s responsibility
Is it? I mean legally. Obviously it’s dumb of Apple to have left this guys access open, but that doesn’t mean they actually had any legal responsibility to lock him out. As far as I understand, the law is pretty clear that you can’t access anything you’re not allowed to by policy, whether there’s a technical block or not.
While it doesn't apply in this particular case, for healthcare organizations the HIPAA privacy rule implies a legal responsibility to lock out terminated employees from any access to protected health information.
That doesn't absolve an employee (or ex-employee) of the covered entity going about and abusing the access they do have.
Many devices are indeed locked down. But given that it's an OS company and hardware vendor, many employees have access to hardware with e.g. SoC fusing that allows them to install custom-signed firmware. It's very difficult to make an OS lock out the people whose job it is to build the platform that OS depends on.
I once worked at a cybersecurity firm and they had a particularly botched rollout of MDM to Macs (which would regularly put the machine into an undesirable mode of 100% CPU usage plus max out upload bandwidth repeatedly trying and failing to backup the machine to some online backup service). I had work to do, so I simply disabled the MDM profile for the machine, installed an OS to my liking, and restored the apps I wanted to use, and went about things.
A year or so later the company hit hard times and we had a large layoff that affected me, and at the end of the video call, the directory of my department mentioned that they needed to wipe my laptops but it "wasn't showing up in MDM". I said I'd be glad to jump on a call with IT to fix that, but then he mentioned the IT staff were laid off too.
I then suggested I did get hired for my cybersecurity expertise, that I do take my obligations seriously, and he could just ask me to do whatever they were planning to do from the MDM console, and it would get done. He insisted that wouldn't be necessary since in his worldview the MDM was unbreakable and he just needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi or something.
Very amusing worldview. In the real world, where I live, I would assume a highly competent employee could exfiltrate trade secrets without me being able to catch them via standard / automated means. This particular Apple former employee got caught because he bragged about it, not because of technical means to catch him. As I've pointed out to a number of people, the very best DLP solution can be completely obviated by someone aiming a camera at their company-issue workstation's monitor.
> then suggested I did get hired for my cybersecurity expertise, that I do take my obligations seriously, and he could just ask me to do whatever they were planning to do from the MDM console, and it would get done. He insisted that wouldn't be necessary since in his worldview the MDM was unbreakable and he just needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi or something.
> Very amusing worldview.
It’s ironic that you’re displaying the exact behavior pointed out by the GP:
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
MDM is implemented to protect company assets regardless of the actions of the users. It would not be due diligence on the part of the director to trust you to wipe your own device.
It’s not clear to me what the point of your comment is other than illustrating that you’re smarter than your director.
I don't think I'm smarter than everyone else, but instead attribute this to organisational dysfunction. The problem (that went on for weeks) of the default MDM deployed software making some computers unusable was one everyone who got afflicted by it just found workarounds for, and in particular, our incentives were to get our jobs done, not to make sure we continued to allow the MDM deployed stuff to do whatever it wanted that was actively harmful to the company's best interests.
Considering the MDM was not implemented properly (particularly in an environment where one hires cybersecurity professionals, who are more likely than most to be able to figure out workarounds to it), it would actually be much more prudent to hire trustworthy staff who can be trusted not to steal company assets, trade secrets, and so on versus thinking you can conduct a zoom call on said company asset and then fire off a command via the MDM to wipe the laptop when the call is over.
I actually think the director was pretty smart, since he managed to avoid having an extended conversation about the lack of working MDM and ability to follow the procedure in front of the other person on the zoom call. Sometimes it's very important to be able to read between the lines of what someone is telling you.
Relying on remote wipes to secure company data is not a particularly strong plan, either (as this Apple saga should make clear); a determined person would simply be either constantly exfiltrating data, disconnect a machine from the network before it can be wiped, or other various plans (and do so without detection). I should know, since my job duties there were to advise customers on how to move towards a zero trust environment.
Sounds like the boss's response was not to insist the proper procedure be followed, but to assert that the technology had to work as intended, and as soon as he figured out the issue on _his side_ the standard operating procedure could be followed.
Um, no. Why would it be their responsibility? There are laws regarding IP theft. If you willingly break them you can't just say "well your security wasn't good enough".
Apple is obviously the victim but prevention is easier than what is happening now, which is potentially going to court, discovery, etc.
There's really no way to prevent an employee from taking a piece of paper or a digital file from one place to another. The most you can prevent is accidental transfer. If they are malicious they will find a way no matter what guardrails you put.
And they can get you for theft, etc, if you do. Sometimes the social and legal controls are far more effective.
If you leave your house unlocked and someone steals your stuff AND is never caught, you're SOL.
Okay but why assume the latter part? In this case the perps were clearly caught.
what part of "Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can." did you miss?
We need criminal charges to be filed against Liu, Tan and Peng. (And deep discovery to find anything Altman might have said to or about them.)
Wait, who is “we”? Why are you so invested in enforcing Apple’s IP rights?
Some people care about justice in general?
Also, normalizing stealing IP is only going to have bad consequences for everyone.
It’s a criminal charge. Have you seen a legal case for that? It’s always something like The People of California v. Someone. At least in theory, every citizen is an interested party when the prosecutor files a criminal case.
Why don’t you care about the rule of law?
Bad people in control of AI is incredibly dangerous.
If you're interested in seeing them prosecuted you probably want to wait a couple of years. The current DOJ isn't doing so hot.
> current DOJ isn't doing so hot
Hit them with state charges. Altman being a brat makes this politically attractive for any AG with ambitions.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back
It’s a total liability to hold onto anything. Even if you don’t do anything with it, it could get stolen or misplaced, and you’re liable. Not worth the headache.
Rich people do this all day and it's why they're rich. There's nothing shocking about seeing a non-rich person try the same thing in hopes of becoming rich.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Right. I noticed a coworker who recently left the organization was still running some of our software on his personal computer (evident in the access logs) and notified him that I could see, he should be more careful, etc. We agree to these contracts because compliance matters, not just because we need the job.
>Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust, responsibility and accountability, but there's people coming from low trust environments where exploiting loopholes and scamming everyone outside their inner circle is the norm, and it's the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.
They're brazen because they've never been caught or suffered consequences for their actions.
This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview.
I’ve been seeing this “high-trust society” dog whistle a lot lately, and I think it’s one of the funniest of its kind. You truly want me to believe that the United States, a country with a history of slavery and segregation, a country that went through a historical period dominated by people literally called “robber barons,” was a high-trust society before immigrants from less industrialized places came and ruined that?
It isn’t a dog whistle. The US actually does have a high-trust society compared to most of the world. Petty theft, snatching, pickpockets, scams, etc are relatively uncommon compared to e.g. many popular places in Europe. Americans are famously vulnerable to it when traveling because it isn’t really part of their domestic threat environment. In many areas, Americans don’t bother to lock anything. You can leave stuff out in public places and it is unlikely to be stolen.
I would say it is lower trust today than when I was a child. Some cities have developed real petty theft problems due to disinterested enforcement. It is still noticeably higher trust than most places in the world I’ve traveled.
It really depends on the type of trust you're talking about. You're right that in many places in the US, people generally act honestly. But that's not always true -- porch pirates are still a huge problem in cities, for example.
Policy-wise, I would not describe the US as "high trust" relative to the rest of the first world. Virtually all of our non-senior welfare programs are means-tested or require some proof of virtue (e.g. "I am actively looking for a job" to collect unemployment insurance), meaning that society broadly does not "trust" people to collect benefits honestly unless they're seniors.
We can look this up empirically: https://ourworldindata.org/trust. It shows US is a medium-high trust society; lower than parts of Europe, and lower than China (assuming people answered honestly there!) but higher than most of Africa, South America and Asia.
> Petty theft, snatching, pickpockets, scams, etc are relatively uncommon compared to e.g. many popular places in Europe.
Yes, in non-popular places in Europe those are also quite uncommon, even more then in the US on average..
So the lesson here is that those type of crimes are common in tourist heavy places, like.. Times Square in NYC for example.
Pickpocketing is not as common in NYC as it is in Barcelona or Paris
Nice try though. Europeans are really sensitive - maybe not high trust societies, but definitely high sensitivity ones.
I don’t think they were making that comparison, rather that touristy cities have more pickpockets, which is obviously true and expected.
You seem to be very sensitive when it comes to anyone that might deign to question the supremacy of the US and very quick to disparage those outside of it.
> compared to e.g. many popular places in Europe
Citation and lots of specification needed.
US office culture is generally pretty high trust. It has relatively high autonomy, authority, and low surveillance norms.
I don't know what that has to do with a historical period of slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black
I didn't read this that way at all. Society != country of origin. The US, like any country, is composed of many different cultures and more or less independent societies, some being high-trust/valuing more cooperation and some low-trust, valuing more competition.
I think you could be more charitable, as GP said “culture,” not “society.”
Apple alleges not only individual malfeasance, but also recruitment tactics like “show-and-tell” aimed at recruiting those willing to bring company secrets (and discriminating against those who would not).
This is enough to constitute a low-trust culture that self-perpetuates.
Surely given the size of China there are plenty of honorable people. And surely in the US there are many dishonorable people, as you’ve pointed out.
100%.
The US is high-trust for insiders (rich white people). We allowed Donald Trump to loot the richest and most powerful society in history by imagining that he would follow the example of previous presidents instead of seeing him for the sociopathic con man that he has always been.
Conversely, the US is zero-trust for outsiders such as foreigners, racially disfavored groups, and the poor. Allegedly-dog-eating Haitians and the like. We have guns and are not shy about using them. Being killed by police is a leading cause of death for young men of color, as noted by Ice Cube, and confirmed by researchers at Rutgers (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821204116).
Yes. People who grew up in the 40s and 50s in the US are common targets of scams because the world they grew up in is very trusting. Adults of the same age who grew up in the east bloc? Much more skeptical.
> history of slavery
Every country and group has practiced slavery.
> Every country and group has practiced slavery.
The colonies and, later, the United States didn’t just practice slavery; they industrialized it by transporting by force 12.5 million Africans to the Americas for nearly 250 years.
Even as fortunes were made, that didn’t stop the torture, rape, and brutality of these enslaved people.
Even after the Civil War, the descendants of the former enslaved people had to live under the Apartheid-like system of Jim Crow that lasted for another hundred years until the Civil Rights Act was enacted in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Ok, the implication that I'm reading between the lines is that this sort of behaviour is somehow more tolerated by people with names like Liu and Tan, but is this actually the case?
I know there's some evidence of Chinese people working at big tech and feeding data back to the CCP but is this a "low trust culture" issue in general or an extrapolation of that one pattern?
Heh, as a (very white) American I presumed it was America in general today. From what I can see, it seems to be turning into a place where it's all scams, rug-pulls, crypto and sports gambling. This concerns me about the world that my 9 year old is growing up in, the only world he's ever known, even the early 2010s seemed to be higher trust than the past decade has felt like.
That does seem like the way Capitalism is being presented these days. Move fast and break things struck me as also from the same "fuck it" ethos that pervades the Modern Valley.
It might be the Valley attracts this kind (of sociopath?). In "the day" I watched as some co-workers popped from company to company, never staying for more than 6 months, and getting a salary bump with each jump. I guess good for them?
You don’t have to look any first than the White House to say that behavior is well-established in American culture, too. From the prosperity gospel to “don’t hate the player”, etc. this is deeply not a Chinese thing.
I think you’ve made an extreme leap in your interpretation of the comment you’re replying to…
No, ‘high/low-trust culture’ has lately been co-opted as a racist dog whistle.
This isn't true at all in general online discourse. Maybe on X, in which case I'd recommend getting off of X.
It's overwhelmingly brought up when talking about Japan (and sometimes Korea) in comparison to the US (or EU). With Japan (or Korea) being the high-trust culture in that comparison, and the US/EU being the low-trust one.
I guarantee you can do a search across mentions of high/low-trust culture across online platforms in the last 12 months and the large majority will be these contexts, i.e. Western countries described low-trust, not high-trust.
I've definitely seen it used both ways, comparing Japan to other countries as well as India/Africa.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a "racist dog whistle" myself, though - there is a very real pattern that's being pointed out but the reason I made the GP comment is that from my experience I would assume that Chinese culture is about as trustworthy as the West.
When One Nation here in Aus is yapping about “high trust societies” and talking about Japan etc. to me it is absolutely a racist dog whistle.
Huh, TIL. Thanks for pointing it out.
I feel like it used to be an effective dog whistle, but has ceased to be since Trump and company came around.
> Ok, the implication that I'm reading between the lines is that this sort of behaviour is somehow more tolerated by people with names like Liu and Tan, but is this actually the case?
Of course not. Have you been following national news or politics the past few years, and the continued incredibly strong support bad actors received despite atrocious behavior and even allegedly criminal acts?
The grandparent commentor is just racist.
> The grandparent comment is just racist.
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. The concept of low and high-trust societies is well-studied [0], though how a given country maps to it may be disputed.
0: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3997396/
> This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview
Why not? Sounds not that hard. I actually believe this is something that would make a candidate looks good in an interview for many large corporations.
> Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust...
That is just a long sentence for "us" vs "those people".
Having said that I don't entirely deny the effect of society on people's behavior. But at the same time, I have seen people from so called high-trust society being all polished and nice on the surface while being assholes and people from so called low-trust society being genuinely decent people despite not having the right name or the surface polish.
Also, assholes tend to attract assholes and people of the same tribe/clan/race tend to form groups.
Not sure you're being clear about what you mean, here. Is OpenAI's company culture something you consider "low trust"?
It's more about people with "everybody steals so I should steal too" also known as "tylko frajer by nie ukradł" -- "only a loser wouldn't steal that" -- mentality.
And while its somehow "cultural" it's more about people hanging together having similar moral views.
> "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb f*ks" - Mark Zuckerberg
Sometimes there are no consequences
When espionage was your goal all along...
assuming these employees are not just trying to shift the blame to OpenAI to cover their asses.. that's the beauty of American civil courts and the discovery process. An accusation was made. We'll find out through a transparent court process which side is telling the truth (or more likely to be telling the truth in the case of balance of probabilities).
lol openai will be fine, but this guy and everyone in his blast radius is fucked. play stupid games win stupid prizes.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Meh, I'm not returning my nice 4k wfh monitor unless they ask for it specifically
Exfiltrating secrets via monitor burn in would be wild though.
Or you can just snap a photo with your personal phone.
Nah man that's how you end up in the permanent underclass. If you want to make it you have to throw everyone and everything else under the bus, be a bizarrely mustache-twirling evil misanthrope and general freakazoid-type loser, and most importantly get too big to fail / too rich to sue bc you have the good lawyers who can basically stall suits to death. Here's an application to Wendy's.
I swear, some people are too quick to be offended or just can't recognize sarcasm.
The crucial part of why non-competes are gross is that they're trying to enforce what you do after someone stopped receiving anything from the past employer. If someone is helping competitors when still working somewhere, or actively taking stuff from their past employer after they've left, then yeah, of course that's dumb and should be punished. But there's no reason a non-compete clause is needed for that!
The companies are based in California, so regular non-competes are irrelevant. This is solely about IP theft.
I was responding to a direct statement by the parent comment about non-competes. If you think they're irrelevant, you should complain to them, not me.
That’s the key point, what’s happening here is theft.
Theft of trade secrets and a non-compete are unrelated and separate things.
Yes, this is why garden leaves are popular in quant finance.
You get paid for about a year to do nothing so that the trade secrets from your firm (trading strategies) expire.
That's very different from a non-compete. A non-compete is about your own know-how, not the company's.
Your gripe is with the parent comment then for mentioning them in the first place, not me. I was just responding to their aside.
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
Reminds me of how Sam Altman told the board that a safety reviewer had approved one of their AI models when the reviewer had done no such things.
Culture issue. From How to Apply to Y Combinator[1] by Paul Graham:
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
> we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.
1: https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html
Nah
You can beat the system and be disobedient while still behaving ethically. In fact that's the very best time to beat the system and be disobedient.
Notice how the description never included the term "ethical". That's something you injected as an assumption to make a counter point.
Not blaming you, just highlighting the flaw in your argument. Because, the lack of mention of that word IS a culture issue.
> Because, the lack of mention of that word IS a culture issue.
or, how you interpret the question is part of the interview process...
Sure, that's possible, but the question is, is that what's actually happening?
And, if YC is paying attention, this question might make a good filter for the unethical folks who’re willing to admit to their misdeeds.
That's literally what they're looking for. To filter out ethical founders.
It seems to be a common trait of the AI people to just brazenly violate the law. It’s like a requirement for working at openAI is to think rules don’t apply to you because you’re so smart.
No it's because they think they're saving the world.
Nothing more dangerous really.
I hate to use the word sociopath, because it has such a fine point on it, but if you believe there are smart "sociopaths" out there, might they be attracted to AI in general (companies like OpenAI or SpaceXAI specifically)?
Remember it's apple lawyer words, not established facts.
Yeah every job transition I’ve managed I was straightforward and some new employers instructed me to do so.
It’s weird too, these people’s history will show up on job sites and etc, people will find out… fast.
The examples seem clumsy and amateurish.
Sure, “Trade Secret” non-competes are usually a pretext employers use to keep low-wage workers under their thumbs, but protecting bonafide trade secrets is their only sorta legitimate use, IMO. The world would be better if they were illegal, but letting engineers disperse confidential information from their last employer wouldn’t be the beneficial part.
> emailing themselves
These are supposedly our brightest minds..
This isn’t the first time something like this happens and I always wonder how are these seemingly smart people earning good money so dumb.
Right? Just straight up documentation with no shame: From an Axios article on this
> Liu celebrated the exploit, according to the filing. "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny," he said in a message to a former colleague who was still employed by Apple.
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-trade-sec...
It'd be even funnier if the 'message' was a text sent from their iphone.
Appalling.
Meh. It's one megacorp stealing stuff from another megacorp, hardly "appalling", who cares. I'd probably react the same way; I just wouldn't leak it to my next employer, that's dumb.
It is but it is the Silicon Valley way and business way for many. Steamroll and do whatever it takes to win and be successful. Morals what are those?
These companies are big enough (especially financially) that I'm really surprised that they do not have their own FBI/CIA/NSA departments in the world of corporate espionage.
Don't worry, some do.
Exactly. If ever there was a y'all deserve eachother situation, it is this.
"Is you taking notes on a criminal f-cking conspiracy?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZLoMrRgFFE
I want this to run like a real f-cking business!
flagrant
It’s even more ridiculous when choosing to do it Apple. It’s hard to think of a company with more legal resources and which is more protective of its hardware IP.
And vindictiveness.
Steve declared thermonuclear war on Google because Android re-skinned to use BUTTONS.
> because Android re-skinned to use BUTTONS.
No. Steve's rage was justified, IMO. It was because Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board while simultaneously being Google's CEO and Google was surreptitiously building Android at the time. Mother of all conflict of interests.
There was a recent story that reminded me of it. Mike Krieger was on Figma's board and Anthropic's CPO, while Anthropic was surreptitiously building Claude Design.
It wasn't very surreptitiously, Google very loudly bought Android Inc. for 50 million in 2005, two years before Apple ripped of the phone that won the iF Design Award in 2006, the LG Prada.
> Steve declared thermonuclear war on Google because Android re-skinned to use BUTTONS.
Was there ever a point in time where Google was not the default search engine on iOS?
Yes, briefly: https://qz.com/apple-google-yahoo-search-engine-safari-antit...
Disney comes to mind…
If I remember, there was a former Apple employee, who was quite influential with The House of Mouse…
Nintendo?
I’ve been present when the world comes crashing down around people who thought they were too smart to get caught.
The surprise in their eyes is always very genuine.
Either people are being really, really silly (which cannot be discounted), or the potential reward is so high as to override whatever qualms a normal person must have. Is that it? Is this people looking at a solid career at Apple or sudden millions from OpenAI, and thinking the risk is worth it somehow? Or, more darkly, is it people thinking _this is my only chance and I have to take it_? Or is it trickle-down lawlessness?
Sometimes the reward is pitifully small. There was a podcast about insider trading and sometimes the insiders will give the information for free or a negligible sum. There’s something in human psychology that facilitates collaboration even in unethical acts.
Google/Waymo + Uber/Otto comes to mind here with Anthony Levandowski.
Google and Uber started as courtroom enemies, but probably had to commiserate some on Anthony Levandowski probably being the worst hire they both made.
Amazing character. Started as a regular robot-loving engineering kid, was in the right place at the right time and earned something like $140 million from Google, mostly from truly ludicrous performance bonuses, went to Uber for another giant payout, was worth nine figures. And sure, he was convicted for crimes, but he got one of those definitely-legitimate Trump pardons.
And then he managed to turn that into a negative $50 million net worth.
And also he briefly started a religion based around having an AI inventing a Christian god or something because his story wasn't crazy enough.
> And also he briefly started a religion
I always assumed this was a tax-avoidance scheme
When all that went down, I was at Facebook. And some recruiter posted the news that Anthony was no longer at Uber, with a message like “this is a great opportunity to secure a top tier hire!”
I replied (on Workplace) “Absolutely the fuck NOT.”
Intelligence is domain-specific. People who have put too many skill points in technical knowledge often have none left for common sense and street-smarts.
Intelligence is actually extremely general and transferrable - IQ measures meta skills and ability that predicts success in a plethora of areas.
If you don’t believe in IQ consider agency and conscientiousness
Statistically yes but we need to look at the actual distribution and I doubt it’s just a handful of outliers.
INT 18 WIS 3 is a terribly dangerous build in this world.
More like lot of people are leaving Apple for OpenAI (no surprise) and an Apple manager wants to send a signal to everyone leaving to chill with what they walk out with. Corps have to perform a lot of theatre because there is lot of info constantly leaking out.
And now the entire industry knows they are too stupid to be employed.
Overconfidence. These people think they are much smarter than others to be caught.
Those people are designers. And they don't necessarily understand software, data, or security. When I explained to my non-technical friends about how they were being tracked by website cookies, it sounded like a sci fi story to them. But yes, it's dumb.
I was more surprised by how they managed to keep using work devices after termination. This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.
> This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.
It's very safe to assume Apple has a standard exit process, for low level ICs.
Tan was Apple's vice president of iPhone and Apple Watch product design. This person worked for Apple for 25 years and likely a friend of top executives. I wouldn't be surprised if he just hugged everyone and casually walked out on his last day.
You assume they have a standard exit process.
A VP is not a designer, and doesn't have a standard anything.
seemingly smart is the key here. intelligence doesnt make up for ethics.
And I'd question the intelligence also. I don't think employment at FAANG means a lot in that regard.
Yeah but it isn't just unethical, it's also deeply stupid -- you will be caught.
"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
- Steve Jobs
Great artists steal ideas, not a painting off a gallery wall.
> Through Apollinaire, Picasso contacted the poet’s ex-secretary, Honore-Joseph Géry Pieret, who was ready to steal artifacts for a reasonable price. In 1907, Pieret broke into the Louvre and took several sculptures with him. Months later, Picasso would reveal his ground-breaking Cubist work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which was heavily inspired by Iberian and African sculpture.
https://www.thecollector.com/famous-artists-turned-crime/
Well their whole model is a stolen art collection :)
Why not both? Three cheers for escape artists!
a "metal-finishing technique" _is_ an idea.
joke
When you are bulk copying data off your former employer's network share, that is a lot more than "stealing ideas".
Having a certain type of finish on the metal is an idea. Tricking someone into using Apple’s exact trade-secret finishing technique is copying. Making a new, even better technique, that’s so good the general public forgets about Apple and thinks you’re the new benchmark… that’s the kind of stealing that quote is talking about.
Yes, and if you analyze the finished metal and put in the work to reverse engineer it, fine, have at it. That's not even theft. If Apple really wanted to keep it completely secret forever, they can't sell it, so thats the risk they accept.
But thats very different than scheming to steal actual property, which these files are.
The concept of applying some kind of Apple-ish texture finish to metal is an idea. A research-heavy, highly specific, finely tuned, multiple step, trade secret, brand signature metal finishing technique is a painting.
Kinda seems like OpenAI didn’t actually have that idea or the ability to execute it, if they had to go to apple’s supplier and lie to them to get them do it.
Funny thing, Steve Jobs is the only source that attributes this quote to Picasso, and it seems very likely he made it up.
The idea behind the quote most likely came from T.S. Eliot: Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
Because companies get an advantage by having their people do this. You only hear about the times they get caught, but apparently they get caught so rarely that it's worth it.
Everywhere I've ever worked, if I went to management and said "hey, I've got some files from my last job, if you want to see them," they would say "absolutely not, please get rid of them RIGHT NOW," and probably fire me.
But, I don't work in Silicon Valley.
I work for a Silicon Valley headquartered company and would expect the same.
Companies don't get to be worth billions of dollars without doing something unethical.
It's people who hold these beliefs who commit these acts. They're so convinced everyone around them is depraved, usually–at least in part–through personal experience, that they don't stop to consider the alternative.
> Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan.
That's one of the dumbest things one can do while on their soon-to-be ex-employer's network.
Apple colluding on no poaching agreements was far worse and more damaging. So I don’t feel bad for them.
AirDrop you mean lol? Anyone can now have a local LLM make a QR code based data transfer script
make sense since they stole all of humanity knowledge for their gain
Every single time.
If someone calls himself open, you should know who it is and what to expect.
Generally speaking, companies retaining a competitive advantage with each other is good for their investors but bad for the public. It's usually to the public's benefit for employees to share knowledge, it makes goods and services cheaper and more available.
If "eliminate all IP law" is your preference then that's fine but it isn't a reason to commit crimes while we have these laws.
Civil disobedience.
Civil disobedience involves flagrantly and publicly and obviously violating the law so you can be arrested to draw attention to whatever issue you have with the law. If you’re breaking the law and trying to get away with it, that’s just criminality and isn’t honorable or respectable.
Civil disobedience is the breaking of laws your conscience tells you are unjust -- and accepting all possible consequences that come along with such an act.
Doesn't mean you have to make it trivial for the consequences to find you by literally walking yourself into jail.
You are mistaken and gp is correct: civil disobedience is usually thought of as done in public. "My conscience tells me it's fine to steal from this rich bastard because property is theft" is not civil disobedience.
IP law can be a thing while maximizing transparency by not including trade secrets as a concept.
We have the laws, but I don't have to feel outraged when regular people undercut the oligarchs and those people's interests align with my own.
Apple will lose this because they didn't do the due diligence to do basic protection against this.
Apple doesn't have a history of losing lawsuits.
Apple does have a history of settling out-of-court after claiming disproportionate damages. NSO Group and Corellium come to mind.
As a counterpoint, why should a “metal finishing technique” be proprietary? Lying to the vendor that Apple said it’s ok is obviously wrong, but an employee taking that knowledge in their head doesn’t seem wrong to me. We have moved past the age of indentured apprentices and the freemasons.
Because Apple paid to produce that knowledge? It's good that people can spend a lot of time and money developing new knowledge and then for some period of time they get to exclusively reap the rewards of doing so.
Do you mind if I MITM all of your work output, your emails, your code, your messages, and attach my name to it and then receive your paychecks in exchange for my work?
Trade secrets dont have a time limit.
But if they can pay some people to produce the knowledge they can also pay them to not share it after they change employers. Just like regular noncompete clauses I don't see why this is something that require more than regular contract law or why it should be inherent instead of negotiated for a fee.
> Because Apple paid to produce that knowledge? It's good that people can spend a lot of time and money developing new knowledge and then for some period of time they get to exclusively reap the rewards of doing so.
You’re describing patents?
Trade secrets. A legally recognized thing, and legally protected.
And NDAs. I may develop a non-patentable technique. That doesn't mean I can't share it with you under NDA and, if you breach said NDA, enforce it.
I'm describing "intellectual property," patents being only one way to legally protect such property.
To me, the fraud is the issue. If the person actually has the knowledge to spec out the whole technique, then sure, they can ask for it. But if they just said "give me what you give Apple" or describes it in detail and the vendor says "no I only will give that when Apple says they're okay", I don't see anything wrong with that either.
My reading is that the employee did not know the method but only of its existence.
It must have some sort of value if OpenAI went through the trouble to get access to it.
This may be just one bad employee, i.e., Mr. Tan. Your quoted sentences say OpenAI did such and such, but it may all be just Mr. Tan. That's not to say OpenAI is not responsible because they are supposed to give strong guidance to new hires that they are not to bring any confidential information from their former employer.
This is basically the end of OpenAI hardware. This is by far worst than the Waymo vs. Uber lawsuit which killed the Uber self driving project.
Also if you are a business using OpenAI models, I would highly suggest you do not because they are most likely looking at your code and IP.
Obviously they are looking at your IP and code. Anthropic trains on your data regardless of you opting out, I know that one for certain. There's no coincidence they "keep your data temporarily despite opting out" - because they wash it in legal loopholes. There is no opt out. These companies WILL steal your business. Only a matter of time before they are sued as well.
> Anthropic trains on your data regardless of you opting out, I know that one for certain.
How do you know that?
They systematically violated copyright when they grabbed whole internet to train their models. Do you really believe that they will stop stealing because they signed some funny ToS? Especially when every bit of data they have and competition does not have is making their model better.
People downvote you like you're being paranoid, but we're literally discussing this in a thread that shows how little respect those companies have for any sort of trade secrets.
Weren't they required by a court to keep everything, despite the privacy policy etc.? Or am I mixing up my companies in constant law battles.
They were required to keep all non-European user logs for a temporary period between April and September 2025, because the media companies suing them think these logs may be the only evidence in existence that could prove or disprove their alleged misconduct.
How is it obvious? We have strong legal agreements that state otherwise, do you think they are just lying and risking thousands of lawsuits?
I think it's more likely that there are 3/4 of a billion users that don't have these agreements and just pay for ChatGPT Plus and don't opt-out of anything, and are feeding the scaling machine every day.
> do you think they are just lying
Yes. They're constantly lying, and constantly getting caught for it. They have a reputation for it. Why do you think this would be any different?
Their standard opt-out agreement frames it as if they won't train on your data, but they do anyway, due to legal loopholes. They essentially clean-room everyone who opts-out, so while it's "technically" not training on "your" data, to the model it makes no difference. Your alpha and IP is not safe. Paying customers are now more easily able to clone your business as well, not just Anthropic themselves.
The only reason this hasn't leaked yet is fear. Anthropic is a very litigious and dangerous company. Only a matter of time though, someone there will grow a spine and speak up.
This is way overstated.
OpenAI will certainly launch devices. It is to be seen how competitive they are and how much product market fit they achieve.
OpenAI also has better data retention policies relative to Anthropic on SOTA models.
Good point. If these are the ethical standards they go by, who’s to say they’re abiding by any standards to keep my data private.
My guess it winds up like the old FAT joke about Android.
OpenAI is a company built on copyright violation.
That means it’s in the corporate DNA to treat laws as things for little people.
Apple have deep enough pockets that they can actually sue OpenAI but I bet OpenAI are surprised they got caught.
Now ask yourself, would the Codex agents on your machine ever over step legal boundaries? Would OpenAI ever make use of data you, voluntarily, send to their servers?
If they did could your company afford to sue OpenAI and would it still be too late to save the business?
Don't matter to people who look at codex as a way to replace employees
OpenAI is about to get ROCKED on this. From this report, this looks open and shut. Apple has basically infinite money and incredible lawyers. Not sure what OpenAI can counter with unless they have clear, hard evidence this hasn’t been happening.
OpenAI also has infinite money, and the graph for money/lawyering gets clamped well below what OpenAI can afford. It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.
OpenAI really doesn’t have infinite money. They have a lot of money, sure, but it is being burned like crazy, we know this. It is widely known that they are deeply unprofitable.
Compare that with Apple, a company that throws off billions of cash every quarter. This isn’t a legit comparison.
I agree that both companies have sufficient capital that legal resources are a a wash. But:
> It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.
This we don't know. We don't know what Apple wants to accomplish with this suit. They may be more interested in the injunctive relief than the monetary recovery. They may want to weaken OpenAI as part of a strategic pivot toward marketing local, private AI inference. As everyone has noted, the factual allegations are detailed and extensive - Apple likely has OpenAI dead to rights on this.
Exactly. what financial benefit can Apple get from a nonexistent OAI hardware business with no launched products? What actual harm has been caused so far? This is all about preempting future harm by slowing their product launch by years or, like Waymo/Uber, forcing OAI’s hand to cut losses and sunset their hardware ambitions permanently.
Infinite money if lawyers are accepting AWS and Azure credits. You got to store those discovery documents somewhere after all.
OpenAI's money belongs to investors and can be pulled if, say, investors got spooked. Apple's money is much more real.
> OpenAI also has infinite money
And an infinite money-eating bonfire
Unless Apple protracts the case, that won't become an issue.
Drag out a legal battle? Surely, Apple would never do something like that[1].
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....
>> OpenAI also has infinite money
Except OpenAI needs every cent of that money for compute, and they don't have healthy profits that can replenish what they spend.
Their financial situation is simply not comparable to that of Apple's.
The OPs point wasn’t that OpenAis financial situation is comparable to Apples. It was that the likely cost of litigation is a drop in the ocean for OpenAi too despite their comparative lack of cash to burn. Legal disputes like this cost in the hundreds of millions over many years, so well below 1% OpenAis last single funding round in single year. If they got a tiny benefit from this (very gross) behaviour it may be finically well worth while. OpenAI may very well go under IMO, but this will barely be a straw on the camels back.
OpenAI has no shortage of vc money sources.
For now.
This is when I wish Jobs was still in charge of Apple. I never quite liked him, but I like Altman way less. And Jobs would CRUCIFY the whole openAI team for this. It would be beautiful to watch.
That's a very twisted kind of relative deification.
Well OpenAI is offering equity to the US Government (and who knows who else privately) Tim Apple famously refused to bring manufacturing back to the US when the current president asked and play hardball on infosec. While this is a civil case, increasingly judiciary seems to be an extension of the executive. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Does this ring true in California?
For real. If Apple can prove half of this complaint, OpenAI need to be jumping straight to "how can we settle this immediately." Can you imagine how much fun Apple lawyers would have taking this to a jury trial? Especially considering overall Apple knows that the public overall vaguely likes Apple and distrusts "AI" companies for, hmmm... (alleged) IP theft.
I'm also wondering about all these involved ex-Apple people who decided to pivot to crime, it seems like OpenAI has to fire all of them, no? Because how do you just keep them, knowing that they're all basically tainted, and that Apple will be coming back to sue you again for anything that seems "inspired" by Apple products or tech.
What a massive cock-up for whoever (Tan?) is at the top of this conspiracy, to think this was worth the risk, and to have not known that the chances of getting caught going this far outside the legal boundaries were less than 100%.
Also OpenAI is the one that bought all the ram chips for the years to come, so no one likes them
Apple’s proposed remedy: give Us all the ram.
What kind of repercussions will OpenAI face?
Based on a cursory read of the situation, it seems similar (at least on its face) to the Waymo vs Uber situation. In that case, Uber payed a Waymo an equity stake and signed an agreement about which technology they would/wouldn't use. The key person involved also was sentenced to 18 months in prison (pardoned after 6 months).
In the extreme case it may result in OpenAI having to abandon their in-progress consumer hardware products, but honestly that might actually be good for them. I really can't see all that investment being worthwhile. Better for them to stick to their core competency.
More realistically - OpenAI will cooperate, the specific employees involved will be punished, there will be a settlement, and this whole matter will be forgotten.
Basically nothing. I mean they’ll have to pay up but money clearly isn’t something OpenAI worries about. They’ll just raise more from the infinite vc money tree.
Apple may get a chance to rifle through OpenAI's trade secrets. And they may win an outcome where there is direct court supervision over what OpenAI is allowed to build and how.
Apple should buy OpenAI
With what money? I don't think you have looked at OAI's valuation lately.
I hope they can pull it off.
That said, silicon valley is full of stories where people brazenly stole from company A to start company B and pretty much got away with it.
EDIT: this is the one I remember:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems%2C_Inc....
The silicon valley TV show even had episodes on this! Man I miss that show. They'd have so much funny material nowadays if they came back.
Is there any other AI company with as much controversy as this company?
- ~murdered~ (dead) employee who's mother is on a anti-sam hate campaign - ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company - conflict of interest with Microsoft
Despite Anthropic's bad press, they haven't been as dishonest as this company.
proactively creating the script for the movie
> ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company
Are we discussing Steve Jobs in 1985?
Any time there is that much money and power involved there is going to be intense drama.
> Are we discussing Steve Jobs in 1985?
Steve Jobs left because he lost a corporate power struggle. Sam Altman was fired because the board thought he was too fundamentally untrustworthy to remain as CEO (if we're to believe their statement ofc).
Different kinds of "controversy" IMO
Steve also actually, you know, left. And stayed away for over a decade.
This is not drama though, it's more inline with unethical, immoral, and bad. It's indicative of company with bad character.
OpenAI will just put the employees involved under the bus. They can claim the information acquired wasn't used for OpenAI's benefit or authorization especially since the device isn't actually out yet.
Until the industry addresses the Original Sin of Generative AI (and the ascendance of Thievery Corporations), we should expect more and more of this. So far, theft has been rewarded. As long as you make enough money, people seem to be okay with ignoring long-lasting impacts of intellectual theft. As long as you become King of the Cannibals, it seems many are happy to remember you as King and not as the Cannibal.
unrelated, but I love the writing style of this comment
A company that behaves like this in one area, cannot be trusted in any area. Any enterprise that endorses/allows OpenAI products to be used is taking a big risk.
The same can be said about Apple. Several companies have complained about them taking a meeting with apple, presenting their product, only to have Apple then rip it off and build it in house. To say nothing of sherlocking.
I always wonder why this long-supported theme doesn’t get more mindshare amid tech commenters’ worship at the altar of Apple.
"Good artists copy; great artists steal" - Pablo Picasso, but was also used by Steve Jobs, ironically.
This is only like the 12th reason not to trust OpenAI. The culture starts from the top
I’m not one to defend huge companies, but OpenAI is a huge company.
It’s possible this kind of behavior is endorsed throughout, or it’s possible it’s limited to this specific group.
We know nothing beyond what Apple has alleged.
I’ve been at companies where just one group - or even just one person - did something unconscionable and kept getting away with it until the story hit the headlines. And I can tell you, it was never just an isolated incident involving just that group. It’s also all the people who knew something was up and didn’t say anything. And it’s the corporate leadership fostering a pervasive culture of turning a blind eye to ethical problems. Often by allowing people in power to ensure that sounding the alarm is a career-limiting move.
It very well could be a culture issue.
If it is, would you extend your opinion to say Apple turns a blind eye to ethical issues as well?
All of the employees divulging secrets came from Apple after all. The person named in the lawsuit was a 24 year Apple veteran and a VP at departure.
It sounds more like they were kept in check at Apple and when they left they showed their true color
You think the group tasked with developing whatever hardware device they're trying to build is isolated away from senior leadership and is running rogue?
Not being able to prove is one thing, pretending it may not be the case is next level of positivity. There are definitely going to be pockets of hard working smart folks in every place, however the company as a whole would get a bad name even if few folks are indulged and the company is not doing anything about it.
Do you know who the CEO is?
Same thought I had, I realized I was zero percent surprised reading the claims made, it feels like a perfect representation of the personality Sam Altman shows the world.
Are you joking or are you confusing huge valuations with huge headcount?
OpenAI had >5000 employees last year. How many work in the hardware group?
This thread is certainly achieving Apple's PR goals
You can trust Apple. I mean they openly lied to a judge last year under oath, but you can trust them.
Apple earned some trust unlike openai.
I'm the farthest thing from an Apple fanboi you can find, but Apple's not so unethical as to make all this (OpenAI trade secret) stuff up. The OpenAI settlement they'll no doubt get from this won't amount to 30 days of their App Store rent-seeking that they were propping up with those lies.
If they can't prove any of this stuff they wouldn't file the suit. No matter what you or I think of Apple, the chances that this went down at least as criminally as they allege, are very high.
Can you provide a source? Otherwise your comment is useless.
Judge's ruling.
> To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.
> [..]
> Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies. They did not seek to withdraw the testimony or to have it stricken (although Apple did request that the Court strike other testimony). Thus, Apple will be held to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
Meh. Consider that you had no choice and no say that your data out there, both present and historic as mined, aggregated and analyzed by data collectors, was used as a training set for the LLMs. I think you’re a tad too late with your warning. They’re already thieves and they know it. And they know you can’t and won’t do anything about it.
Public/crawlable data is very different from private/internal documents and code that employees might prompt with.
> A company that behaves like this in one area, cannot be trusted in any area.
A company locking down their phone platform cannot be trusted with their laptop OS.
Apple kindly wanted to make OpenAI add in some legal liabilities to their IPO filling.
Discovery is going to be great fun (for Apple).
Discovery is the entertainment for the rest of us.
this will settle before it gets to discovery I bet
Depends on the objective of Apple. It’s hard to imagine they’re after a quick payout. They may wish to keep this in the news cycle as long as possible. I could see them both harming open ai and sending a message to employees thinking of leaving that if they even consider breaking their confidentiality agreements, it will absolutely ruin their careers.
I keep seeing this take in the comments, but why wouldn't Apple make an example of OpenAI? They can certainly afford to. There's no lawyering your way out of a case this cut and dry, if it makes it to court. OpenAI has already signaled intent to become a direct competitor to Apple, why wouldn't Apple publicly humiliate them before they can get that product off the ground?
Yes, exactly. Probably a settlement similar in spirit to Google v Uber RE: Anthony Levandowski stealing self driving IP
Interesting how Tang Yew Tan worked at Apple for 25 years (!!) and then threw it all out for this.
not even the first time https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/iyo-sues-former-eng...
Edit: this was a year ago
who knows, maybe he had giant gambling debts or other addiction(s) or bad real estate investments and/or lost half of it all to an ex-wife first. things that Jony might be readily aware of. assuming there is more than a kernel of truth to this - and i can't imagine not, the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account - it doesn't surprise me that Tan was a criminal, it's that he was such a bad criminal
What did he scrub? Looks like an account with posts to me
> the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account
who responded to what?
https://x.com/drewpusateri/status/2075708238650089981
and
https://x.com/drewpusateri
And how many years of being passed over for promotions, I wonder.
Not that it justifies what he did for a moment but you can absolutely work somewhere for a long time and end up resenting it by the time you leave.
> And how many years of being passed over for promotions, I wonder.
He was Vice President of Product Design when he left Apple. How many more promotions could there be?
Approximately three.
Being spurned is one possible motivation, but so is an outstanding offer, where you go from middle of the pack performer with career stagnation to superstar leading the hot new product.
This is a really bad look for a company that has vast quantities of our IP stored on its servers.
I don’t put my company’s IP on their servers, because I don’t trust them to not steal it.
I do hope Anthropic are better with IP, and I think they may be. Given Dario Amodei hasn't been sued by OpenAI while building Anthropic this seems likely.
I think Amodei may actually be quite a good human, despite my trust in big tech being at an all-time low.
Amodei tried to regulation capture the AI access and also tried to ban open weights. So I disagree with you.
I’m unconvinced that morality is a simple Boolean. He might have ethical standards that are different that others though.
Yes. I'm not sure whether Amodei's motivation for attempting to ban open-weight models was for safety or to strengthen Anthropic's position though.
Hasn't his lab not released a single open weight model?
You have not a single clue what kind of human he is
That's also a bad look for any company who willingly hands its IP over
this time they stole from people who have the resources to fight back
It’s really unsurprising. Stealing IP is their whole business model.
Casually dragging new employees into the deepest shit, it’s breathtaking. Also the naïveté of going along with it??
> He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information
Apple: they stole our trade secrets. OpenAI: we just asked GPT-5.6 to predict what Apple was working on and it was weirdly accurate.
If instead of downloading the files they took the info out in the form of neural network trained on the files and able to reproduce the information, that would be just fair use, 100 pound.
Altman showing how desperate he is to get into hardware. He knows local models that supplement models in chip are the end of OIA
So I guess we can forget about next AI IPOs for a while, can't we? It's Crazy that Elon may end up winning this one, too.
Probably among many reasons for the switch to Gemini for their band aid AI until they get theirs were they want/need.
This may be the reason why OpenAI reportedly delayed its IPO.
They might have had an inkling that this was coming.
I read that Apple warned them about a potential litigation in February so you could be correct.
It's not really surprising that a company that is essentially built on stolen IP will steal more IP when there's an opportunity .
I forgot they were still working on a device, any guesses what it is?
I’m guessing a wrist wearable
I’d guess phone, anything else is too compute-constrained and just an accessory for them, plus has to pay 30% of subscriptions and can be disadvantaged strategically.
My money is on drone with missile pods.
the only ai device that makes any sense is a robot
An egg
The one from Black Mirror?
Fried egg fried egg gotta get down on fried egg
Aybody's lookin forward
To tha
Weakened
… in these trying times?
Is this the simple case of being used to stealing so much (most ai companies pretty much stole all of data available on the internet with little consequence) that they also felt comfortable stealing data from companies?
Mr Tan is suddenly going to be in a LOT of trouble
Which equals fame and intrigue in the Trump era, big congratulations to Mr. Tan on his new found wealth
Just remembering randomly here, xAI also sued an employee who went to OpenAI for trade secret theft:
https://winbuzzer.com/2025/09/01/xai-sues-former-engineer-al...
This reads like there are enough alleged serious federal felonies that DOJ needs to get involved immediately.
People do this kind of stuff because people rarely go to jail for white-collar crime.
Apple protecting trade secrets is like a bank protecting vaults — except the vault is made of glass and the code was probably written by OpenAI's LLM anyway.
It's ok because this information was just being used to train their models.
In every company I've worked at (all with >1000 employees), there is always some text in the offer or onboarding documents clearly stating that you should not bring any previous employer's trade secret or intellectual property to this company.
I wonder whether Open AI's offer letter or onboarding document also says such a thing.
Copy of the Complaint.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...
9. In the months before he left Apple, Mr. Tan met with OpenAI or its collaborators and discussed meetings with a key Apple supplier. He began emailing himself information about Apple’s suppliers and internal summaries of the consumer electronics industry. And today, when interviewing Apple employees for jobs at OpenAI, Mr. Tan uses Apple’s confidential information to gain access to even more insider knowledge. He has used an Apple internal project codename to ask, “What’s the plan[?]” for an unannounced Apple product. He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information. These directions to bring Apple’s parts to OpenAI job interviews surprised at least one of the candidates, who commented that he “didn’t even know we could take those from the office.”
10. This is part of OpenAI’s strategy to extract Apple’s confidential information. OpenAI has been instructing Apple employees to bring “CAD/design artifacts” and “prototypes” to their interviews and to divulge details about their work such as “subsystem and component selection,” the “tools or methodologies you use for system integration, such as CAD software, simulation tools,” and “Vendor selection and communication/collaboration with vendors.”
11. OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can. After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols. Unsurprisingly, Apple’s investigation has found a pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.
If you sleep with dogs you're gonna get fleas. These AI companies have made billions by stealing other peoples content, what makes you think they would be above stealing from Apple?
This is going to be interesting.
Only because both companies have access to billions and infinite lawyers.
Apples billions are in cash
OpenAIs billions are in IOUs to Nvidia
IPO has entered the chat.
Michael Burry intensifies
OpenAI has concepts of money.
OpenAI investors have concepts of money. OpenAI has their money.
I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
2026 Wimpy would be an effective serial entrepreneur.
Only one has Actual Money™ and quite a lot of it.
Lawyers: rubbing hands together
Yeah it reminds me of tha Pink Floyd lyric “..we’re so happy we can hardly count!”.
Can you pay for lawyers with RAM, GPUs or IOUs for tokens?
Imagine comparing what apple has access to vs a deeply money losing firm
More importantly Apple can effectively bring up the shadow of this lawsuit whenever OpenAi tries to acquire money.
They can make legal fillings and calls to Bloomberg to keep the story going as long as they want to and suck some oxygen out of any IPO ramp up.
The “nuclear bomb vs coughing baby” meme comes to mind.
I would guess these days Apple probably has more lawyers than engineers.
It would not be bard hard to believe if you told me that they stole Siri and then they put it back on the shelf.
Quick reminder that Apple was part of the silicon valley crew that partook of illegal non-poaching arrangements with other SV companies, helping to stifle salaries and more.
But, that's a bit of a tangent. On the other hand, Apple is accused of (and a jury ruled against them on the issue) hiring from Masimo to steal trade secret. Appeals are pending, of course, but it's a reminder that Apple is not lily white on this topic.
The jury ruled against Apple only on the issue of patents, and the claims of trade secret theft were dismissed. There doesn’t seem to be evidence that the Masimo employees who went to work for Apple brought any confidential information along with them.
Wow. Makes me see OpenAI in an entirely different light.
My gut instinct is to call you a mooncalf, given the lengthy documented history of OpenAI "re-appropriating" things and wanting to profit from it. So here is my honest question, what light did you see them in before and what did you base that on?
Why are most lawsuits filed on Friday? To avoid the excessive news cycle? But in this case, Apple might want that.
What a neat culture OpenAI has.
This is a drop in the ocean compared to what Anthropic does behind closed doors.
Based on what?
They do all of this, plus far worse. Including but not limited to flooding the internet with guerrilla marketing and sentiment-shifting bots across all social media platforms.
This is the sort of company they are, and it's just the tip of the iceberg: https://clawd.rip
I tend to see far more obvious bots attacking Claude than any other - which makes sense, they're winning.
Same, the main network I see bots on is X and there’s a really obvious bot attack on them there since the fight with the DoD.
Reddit and X are flooded with them.
I'm curious, who is actually making the calls and who is actually doing the scouting for these people. If this is coordinated, the chain must long, so let's see it!
Get ‘em Apple. Begin the IP wars have…
probably the real reason why Apple opted Gemini over ChatGPT
Pretty foolish of them to play so unethically only to lose such a big account and now gain an open-and-shut lawsuit that will seriously damage their ability to compete in hardware for a very long time.
Maybe they believed Apple would roll their own AI and not have to license Google's.
There's also the possibility it was a coincidence, and the stakeholders in the Gemini decision are breathing a heavy sigh of relief.
Based on the timelines at play here, I'd wager this.
Changing suppliers is potentially the reason why Apple’s AI strategy was so delayed.
I heard oai turned apple down, not the other way around
Reminder that Apple hired 30+ engineers from Masimo and stole multiple trade secrets, including their blood-oxygen monitoring tech, leading to a $634 million judgement against them. They also asked President Biden to intervene and pressure the ITC to reverse their ruling.
Not saying OpenAI is innocent here of course, but really no large corporation is. This is just how the game is played.
The $634 million judgement you’re referring to was only for Masimo’s patents, and the other claims they made about trade secret theft were dismissed.
Seems to me that OpenAI has a culture of questionable ethics that includes this incident but goes way beyond it. This seems very “on brand” for them.
Sam Altman is doing Sam Altman stuff.
New revenue streams
> Chang Liu
What did he steal, Garageband?
This season of Silicon Valley is getting spicy
Nothing is too low for Sam. I expect any kind of shady shit from that company
> According to a report by The New Yorker, Swartz described Altman as a "sociopath" who "can never be trusted" and "would do anything
Who is surprised by this development?
Apple suing someone when they lose ground in a space is never surprising.
Weirdly, this seems like they're trying to train a model to work like Apple? They seem really interested in processes and how stuff is done, rather than only the finished artifacts.
Given that allegedly hardware information was involved I’d lean more toward this is for developing either custom silicon based on Apple’s designs or OpenAI wants to make consumer hardware. Aren’t they making something with Jony Ive too?
There's rumors they've been planning a phone.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/29/everything-we-know-abou...
It would make sense. Massive distribution vector
I assumed consumer hardware too though I can't imagine what OpenAI hardware would look like. Another take on the "smart speaker" that has hit the consumer market with a resounding "meh?"
A lot of people have tried to copy Apple’s finished product and they never get it right, because they don’t have the process behind it. How something looks is only a small part of it.
That doesn't seem that weird to me. Good processes lead to good artifacts.
Apple just seems like a weird target for that kind of stuff, is all.
>In its lawsuit Friday, Apple accused Tang Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and a former Apple executive, of coaching his hires from Apple on how to evade Apple’s security processes for departing employees.
The word "coaching" is very malleable, and could refer to perfectly legal conduct, or conduct that is illegal, unethical, or both. How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are? One would assume he was told by previously-departed Apple employees. Would they have been forbidden to disclose information about the outgoing process? I would think so, given how careful Apple is about these things.
> Apple accused another former employee, Chang Liu, of using a former colleague’s Apple-owned laptop to access and download technical documents while working at OpenAI. Mr. Liu told that Apple employee what information about unannounced products she should study before job interviews, Apple said.
I would be very hesitant to assist a former colleague who is still at Apple in this way. Apple is well known for using deliberate leaks to smoke out leakers, and it would be easy for them to get a current/loyal employee to go through the interview process at a competitor for the purpose of finding out if the competitor is trying to get Apple employees to act unethically/illegally.
EDIT: I see my comment, which I posted on the HN thread for an NYT article, has been merged into the comment section of a different article, and is now being downvoted a bunch. Please understand I did not post this comment here, so if it seems out of place that's why.
> How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are?
The openAI employee in question is also a former Apple employee.
Not just any employee. A 24 year veteran and at the time of departure the VP of design for the iPhone and Apple Watch
Ah, somehow I missed that even though it was included in the quote I copied. Thanks!
> After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28453229-apple-v-ope...
Lawsuits like this tend to be surprisingly easy to read, partly because they intend for the public/journalists to read them.
> How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are?
Either by being a former Apple employee, or polling former Apple employees.
I will never grow tired of highly paid so-called geniuses so deluded by their own hubris they think no one will not only not notice them moving GBs of data onto a USB on their last day of work, but assume they also don't have logs of everything you accessed and everything you took.
Little no-name companies have this capability with off the shelf software.
Large companies like Apple have entire departments of staff whose job it is to monitor data theft.
It's bonkers and I love every single story as if it's never been told before.
This kind of stuff happens all the time. The employees in question are just incredibly bad at covering their tracks, normally they'd get fired and that would be it.
It is fishy that OpenAI's leadership didn't have the watchdogd in place to catch it. And there's this huge public lawsuit about it now. Plus there's the Elon lawsuit. Makes me think somebody wants OpenAI to go down. Almost like a sacrificial scapegoat, in order to achieve psychosocial unity in the programming community, or something like that.
Hot take, but Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could. Of course Apple can sue and they will probably settle some amount with OpenAI, but acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment, and OpenAI is uniquely worse at stealing corporate secrets is laughable. Especially considering Apple’s famous history!
> Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could
The closest involved Apple selling Xerox pre-IPO shares [1]. And there are zero allegations any PARC employees who moved to Apple with confidential information the this has gone down.
> acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment
It's not. It's why it gets litigated and criminally charged. I won't disagree that there is a section of Americans who think it's commonplace. But that's because they're either personally doing the crimes or surrounded by criminals.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-21/larry-tesl...
Hmmm it does seem like this seems much worse than what I thought of Apple doing (like stealing the idea for a mouse and GUI from Xerox), the best I could find is Qualcomm claiming Apple stole its modem code and gave it to Intel. That was settled before trial.
This however does actually seem far worse, reminds me more of Waymo vs Uber, people can go to jail.
Apple’s “stealing” has been dramatized because Jobs gave it a good line. It’s really not comparable to what these guys are doing.
Didn't apple get banned from selling apple watch because they pretended to want to buy IP and basically just poached and gutted the company instead?
WOW so these companies really are stealing enterprise data to make competing products! Fucking slimy! How can anyone trust them now?
Yeah, I find the majority of comments here interesting. Sure, it should be common sense not to email internal documents to yourself when you leave, or keep a company laptop and access internal networks after you no longer work at a place. That's just dumb and unethical and illegal.
But also, I can't find it in myself to really care about this. Trillion-dollar company takes ideas from other trillion-dollar company. Apple has done this to much smaller companies countless times. But OpenAI-on-Apple violence is so far removed from a crime that actually harms normal people that I'm not sure why I should give a shit.
Super stupid actions by these ex-employees LMAO
These people think OpenAI can/will protect them?
Well they trained their model by scraping all digitised human knowledge and ignoring IP and CW laws so whats a little bit of corporate espionage in the grand scheme of things
Some more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48865019
The threads have now been merged, it seems.
Stop trying to cram your "P" into "AI".
Can't wait for the inevitable bailout and US tax dollars to pay for this!
Hence the rise of the DSA.
Bailout of OpenAI? Doubt it, unless Trump and Musk have some sort of falling out (again).
Has nobody heard about this theory yet? https://youtu.be/RqDAMeqvUgo
That video's over an hour long. Care to sum it up for us?
Idea is that Trump would bailout AI companies and call it "job protection" or "America growth" or "national security" because they know the word 'bailout' is politically bad.
Other ideas discussed are that AI companies are going through a chain of larger and larger subsidies: VC --> Big Tech --> Governments. And that these companies haven't been able to make money off of AI so they're priming things for a bailout that's not a bailout wink wink. And that they foresee a situation where Trump will accept bribes in order to heavily regulate some AI companies but not others. Picking winners and losers.
Like when Apple sued Samsung. Why bother with the free market when you can just sue your competitors?
What a dumb take. Apple is the most wildly successful company in the market. You think whatever pittance they get from this will outweigh the cost of stolen ip?
> At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies
I sure hope they weren't referring to Siri here
Although I haven't tried the new Siri.
Reminds me of Apple suing Samsung. Why bother with the free market when you can just sue your competitors?
Some of the Apple/Samsung complaint was horseshit (and was a bit of a distraction because they knew they'd need to settle their suit with Nokia).
But it was design copying and IP infringement stuff: duplication of things already in the wild.
This is on another level. If any of this is true, it's extraordinary, and I think OpenAI will likely want to settle quickly, thus increasing Apple's AI-related earnings.
Are we sure this isn’t espionage? The names of the parties involved may also imply stealing by certain foreign countries
aren't most of their suppliers Chinese? don't need to spy to get hardware trade secrets when you get BCC'ed on everything.
That’s a pretty grotesque insinuation.
Why? It’s not unheard of to perform corporate espionage
Too bad I cannot downvote your blatant racism. Take it to Gab social or X.
If you think this is bad, I promise that anything they're doing at Anthropic is 10x worse.
They didn't still the property, that would be illegal. They trained a model on it. That's totally ok.
According to Apple, are there any tech companies in the galaxy who haven't stolen their trade secrets?
If you can’t see the difference between a design firm pointing out obvious riffs on their first to market designs…
And a company openly instructing poached employees to exfiltrate documents on their way out the door, well…
I didn't read the full complaint but the article focuses on bringing Apple IP to interviews. It's not clear that it was intended to steal trade secrets.
The Liu guy seemingly did so but he wouldn't be the first person to try to take his own work product out the door for personal reasons.
I distrust statements like:
> “pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.”
This could mean almost anything.
They do explain that in more detail deeper in the complaint. They allege that OpenAI has obtained the offboarding checklist for Apple managers, that OpenAI is using it to issue guidance to departing employees on how they can avoid scrutiny, and that employees receiving this guidance have been ignoring Apple security personnel who try to schedule their standard exit processes.
That doesn't sound too heinous. As far as I am aware, employers aren't entitled to exit processes so long as they get their property back. OpenAI possessing an offboarding checklist accessible to any Apple manager doesn't seem like an IP issue.
I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this part other than Apple trying to imply OpenAI has something to hide.
They're more than trying to imply it. Apple says "This is the tip of the iceberg", and a lawsuit is necessary to uncover the full scope of what they think OpenAI has to hide.
> As far as I am aware, employers aren't entitled to exit processes so long as they get their property back.
They're not, but one of the defendants allegedly dodged returning his company laptop. It's then alleged that he used it to continue accessing Apple documents after he'd already left, and coached at least one other person on how to copy confidential documents without alerting Apple's security team.
If these allegations are supported, it seems pretty reasonable to wonder whether there might be more people he coached and what documents they might have copied undetected.