This should tell you how unserious these "companies" are when they consider themselves the grand harbinger of the one and true "AGI" because their frontier models were able to solve (with great assistance) some sort of conjecture that was never taken seriously in the mathematical world but somehow is significant now because ???
I was wondering where this goal post would shift to next. So now instead of AI being incapable of doing something not in its training data it needs too much external help doing what no human could do, and what it came up with isn't even important anyways.
The companies can suck and their product can do amazing things at the same time.
“Nothing in my training data covers this, but if I had to guess, OpenAI may have released information about GPU support in Mac OS X early, pissing off Steve Jobs.”
Which, somehow, confused me even further. I get that it's a stylistic choice to make them easy to read or whatever, but my first thought was "wait, they just posted screenshots with the names censored like a bad Reddit post?"
This is pretty wild. Without context, it's barely coherent, but I guess they didn't want to say "Apple is suing us for X, Y, Z" because that makes them look bad. But there's just no upside to publishing this:
If you don't know what's going on, this blog post is nonsensical and makes OpenAI look weird.
If you do know what's going on, you'll immediately notice they don't address 80% of the stuff Apple is accusing them of, which makes OpenAI look dishonest.
It just seems incredibly unprofessional and ill-considered.
It's always suspect when one side tries to argue their case in the court of public opinion.
Frankly, it's a big red flag for me and immediately casts suspicion on said party. I mean, do you think you're going to lose in court and so you're trying to get out ahead of that?
No. This is a fucking legal case. It will be decided in the courtroom, not on the internet.
Posting this is insane in the sense of "What will posting this possibly improve for OpenAI?"
It's not going to change the court case. It's not going to impress professional adults.
I guess... teenage reddit users with too much time on their hands who are fans of OpenAI? Though struggling to see how that demo would care about a theft of trade secrets case.
Whatever executive decision-making thread led to this being released needs to be recalibrated. I'd expect >13 year old maturity from a company even 1/10 the size of OpenAI.
OpenAI needs mass consumer buy in because a large part of their strategy is ad supported consumer use. Bad pr pushes those users away. A lot of people have teenage Reddit user mindset
I'm struggling to imagine someone like that who also cares about the minutiae of this case. Or heck, who even knows this case exists.
"OpenAI is so inept at system isolation that it accidentally hacked Huggingface" seems like a more important PR fire to put out. (Whether or not that breach was artificially manufactured)
Full self driving teslas on the moon any day now. AI data centers in space! We’re all going to be rich! What a whacked out timeline where this is the richest man.
Exactly. This reads like someone decided PR firms don't know what they're doing and decided to handle it themselves.
But... it turns out that professional people and consulting companies who have years of experience in a subject area might have something to offer. Who knew?!
Not to that extent though. For OpenAI the PR investment is disproportionate.
Regular companies have people that talk to the media or maybe run some ads. OpenAI is trying to have in-house media.
For a frontier lab it’s striking just how much energy (and dough) goes into this.
You’re right of course that PR exists elsewhere, but that obviously true assertion misses the finer details of how PR works at OpenAI. In doing so it functions as a thought-terminating cliché.
Direct and unrehearsed doesn't seem like the right tack for a high-stakes legal dispute between two (allegedly) trillion-dollar companies. Especially since they've not been able to make a coherent point here.
Yes, we've built a society where being two-faced and false is rewarded. The least we can do is temper our criticism when someone "fails" to adhere to that.
I get what you're saying, but this seems like the wrong vehicle. I mean these are two corporations engaged in a huge and expensive legal battle—we're not talking about a personal he-said/she-said spat on X.
You got your crude analogy backwards - it is the calculated, tactical PR-speak that is more like shitting up the public square, than the naive, honest-if-self-serving speech.
Did no one ever explain to you why you should wear nice clothes to a job interview? Or a wedding?
Not simply that you should, but why? Conducting onesself with decorum and professionalism in certain contexts is not about deception. It's about respecting other people, both individually/directly, and the communal space.
Even if you consciously don't care about or respect anyone else, "everyone else is wrong for not being be ok with my t-shirt and flipflops" it's still simply a self-own to present this image of someone who lacks such a minimum level of perception.
A business communique like this isn't a performance art piece where it's fine if most people react badly to it because the whole point was to make people think about their reactions or reflect on some aspect of life. It's not the time or place to make a chocolate Jesus.
It's just some infants in pants they don't know how to fill, not "refreshing honesty".
From: Che Chang <redacted>
Date: Feb 23, 2026, at 8:04 PM
Subject: Re: Former Apple Employees at OpenAI Retaining Non-public, Confidential, and Proprietary Information
To: <redacted>
Hi [Apple in-house legal counsel] and [Apple in-house legal counsel],
This guy from Weil claims to be representing you. For some reason, he is lying about speaking with me on the phone. I don't know who he is and we have never spoken.
I don't know what the point of his lie is, but could you please confirm if he is actually representing you, and if so, whether you have other counsel you can use. I don’t think interacting through him is appropriate given this behavior.
---
So, a lawyer emailed the wrong person. That's it. And they use that as a peg to hang their whole case on. I guess GPT 6 thought this was the real smoking gun!
What really matters is the claim that Apple never raised those issues in the lawsuit with them. OpenAI claims the emails prove this, but to me all the emails prove is Apple sent an email that said “please see the attached letters”. We don’t know what is in the attachments but I imagine those were the relevant issues they raised.
Moreover OpenAI says, “[Apple] now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information”, but the transcript they cite seems to me to show the opposite? It’s Chang Liu asking for someone to help him copy data. The part where Apple employees reach out is later and it’s not for copying data to a hard drive… it’s basically “who should I talk to about this project?” Which makes sense because when he was contacted it was after he left (so he wouldn’t have access to data)
Can someone please tell me what am I missing? None of this makes sense with what they’re saying. The fact that the lawyer emailed the wrong person is moot if they caught it and resolved it days later.
The timeline OpenAI wants to present looks like this to me:
- Leaving employee (LE) needs a USB stick to copy data off their Mac to give to their Manager (MA) so someone at Apple still has access
- After LE left, MA has access to LE Mac and iCloud to still access some data
- At some point, LE asks MA to sign out off LE's iMessage account on that Mac as they suspect they'll get OpenAI-related messages soon and don't want Apple/MA to see them
- Eventually, MA deletes the Apple files in LE's iCloud
Granted, Apple does do this weird thing where you're invited to use your personal iCloud (/Apple) account for work-related things (I suspect because they're just bad at supporting multiple accounts simultaneously). As part of the deal, your iCloud account gets upgraded during your employment.
But they're also quite explicit and repeat the directive (including during the exit interview) about removing Apple files from your account when you leave, and logging out of iCloud from the Apple devices you leave behind.
Also:
> At some point, LE asks MA to sign out off LE's iMessage account
You can sign out remotely, so this would've been stupid of everyone involved.
Then again, this whole situation demonstrates a level of stupidity from supposedly competent people that I wish I could say was unbelievable. Add "Making a public post about a topic under litigation" under that category too.
From what I saw, it's been leapfrogging for the past few weeks. Even if Apple is currently behind them, I don't think it's particularly fair to say it's "fallen to" them.
Funny to hear that even Apple themself struggle with that. In the past it's been such a PITA for us to decide whether employees can use private account or shall use company apple ids. As we have a pretty lax policy, most of them use their private accounts to have iCloud sync or to simply access purchased apps but having a simple way for dual account usage would be too easy i guess.
I wonder how deep this integration goes. I’d never want to use my personal accounts for proprietary work items. Just seems like a recipe for disaster. Also, removing a latop from iCloud doesn’t delete the imessage data already on the device.
I am actually confused why creating an email john.doe@apple.com and separated employees work only iCloud on the email is such a problem and they want people to use personal iCloud? Not even corporate stuck in 90s does that.
I was a bit confused too initially, but it looks like Chang was asking for the data to be copied _off his iCloud_ by the existing employee on his final day of employment. And then everything after that is just the existing employee asking for help on things Chang had prior knowledge of
Why in the world would a high-level Apple employee not sign out of his personal iCloud on his work computer, and then also use his personal iCloud for data from his new company?
Setting aside the presented evidence, it feels weird for somewhat emotionally charged complaining like this to go on an official company blog. Companies are generally pretty tight-lipped about active litigation outside court documents, right? This just seems a bit amateurish, down to the title. Is public opinion about this case so important to them?
Yea that’s what strikes me as weird too. I had to look up at the web site bar to really confirm this was OpenAI and not some employee blog site. Particularly, the whole Asian last name bit was so shoehorned in to imply Apple is racist I guess? Not something I have seen in a statement from a company like OpenAI. Just weird energy. Also, that text exchange made Apple look like a fun place to work.
I used to think there was an air of professionalism with really successful, powerful people and entities - until I read the kind of drivel that Epstein and friends were emailing each other.
Now seeing the worlds most powerful organisations act like children doesn't surprise me at all.
Yeah this is the cloest a corporate company can get to drunk texting their ex at 3 am and reiterating how it wasn't their fault. But I mean its OpenAI, it loves drama
Haha omg what if someone at openai prompted a model to write this and the model could only come up with this unhinged version. It reads like a 3am manic text fest cuz that's what the model figures it should be.
I mean we've had Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress make various below-the-belt comments about their competitors and other companies, something tells me that they're not the only CEO who acts in such a childish manner.
I'm sure saner heads like their legal people would prevail at some point, but until then...
Is public opinion important to an industry whos future depends on datacenters being built for hundreds of billions of dollars, while the people all around them, whos utilities get more and more expensive in no small part because of datacenter buildouts, experience a constant cost of living crisis...
When I look at the imessage conversation, one thing strikes me: that guy looks to be using the same icloud account he used when working for Apple with OpenAI. Is he using his own personal account? Why do both Apple and OpenAI allow that in the first place, this look so amateur. I would have assumed each company would have opened a different account for him and locked him when leaving.
Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
Apparently Apple encourages their employees to use their personal iCloud accounts for company information, because their own OS doesn't support one iPhone, multiple iCloud identities.
Always found it odd that Apple don't let you have a second separate business profile to switch your phone to for work - especially when you don't necessarily want to be bringing browser history/personal apps into your workplace or wifi. Having your iphone locked to your personal account also hobbles their continuity features if you work on a business computer with its own work account (as most businesses do).
Facebook is equally bad on this front - requiring you to use your personal account to administrate business pages (don't even get me started on how they forced large businesses to use a custom 2FA method they then phased out - locking people out of their personal accounts forever).
however, it is quite neat for Apple if employees are "voluntarily" giving up their privacy by merging their accounts and indirectly allowing Apple to monitor their whole digital identity.
Apple is then "just" monitoring the corporate user account for security reasons, it was the employee who decided to use the same account for private purposes...
>Always found it odd that Apple don't let you have a second separate business profile to switch your phone to for work - especially when you don't necessarily want to be bringing browser history/personal apps into your workplace or wifi.
I'm guessing it's the same reason they don't offer multiple accounts on iPad. They would rather you bought more devices.
Apple can give employees an iphone which will have an iCloud account in apples’s corp domain and can be used only for work. Many other companies do this.
Even Microsoft lets you use your personal iCloud account on corp laptops. They can’t snoop your personal data without disabling SIP or showing system level privacy prompts or recording indicators.
Either with a single local account that accesses multiple Google accounts, or multiple local accounts. Though this is device specific, it may be disabled by your manufacturer/provider.
As mentioned elsewhere though, an enrolled phone is an enrolled phone so corporate wiping will wipe the entire phone and not just the profile.
I'm pretty sure this is a thread about how you can't do things like that on iOS.
Regardless, its been a long time since I've had to use a personal device for work purposes and at the time Android seemed to only want to lock the entire phone down. If that is now fixed them thats great.
It's been a while, but at a previous job (maybe 8 years ago) I was responsible for managing mobile devices and using Blackberry's MDM suite, you could have segregation of personal and private data, where you couldn't move data from one "container" to the other, including clipboard data.
I'm out of the loop now, though.
Android did have better support at the time, but if I remember correctly, devices that had a work managed profile on them could still be completely wiped, including the personal/private container.
A bit of a pain, but I've always preferred (where possible) to have separate work and personal devices.
Yeah, I had an Android phone at work with separate personal/work profiles, but using the phone to begin with required one main account that had to be my personal. Might've been possible to remove after, but I was afraid to mess with it.
Wouldn't want one phone to be both personal and work though. They owned it, idk if I could've put my own sim in without unforeseen issues, it could've been wiped like you said, and it ofc got wiped when I quit.
I've heard multiple times directly from Apple employees that there is no way to login to iCloud on your work machine using a company-controlled account. Many people create new Apple ID's which they only use while working there, but others just use their personal iCloud accounts. You are, of course, not supposed to store company data in iCloud. But thanks to Apple's own efforts, it's difficult to use a Mac without being logged into iCloud (for example if you want to use the App store), and some data can easily spill into the iCloud account.
If accurate, it is of course patently absurd that Apple has left this an unsolved problem.
But I don’t have to use any apps from the store, in fact I’d say that at my company there aren’t any apps available on the store that we use. So the parent is right, it’s perfectly usable without ever touching iCloud. I don’t think I’ve ever even opened the settings for it on my work laptop
Yes, that's correct - an Apple account is tied to a person. A person can have multiple Apple accounts, if they wish. But there is no such thing as an organizationally controlled Apple account.
>A person can have multiple Apple accounts, if they wish.
I don't know if it's in the terms but Apple definitely discourages this. In particular it won't let you setup a new account on the same phone number as an existing account.
Which is what OpenAI will argue - that Apple is negligent in protecting their trade secrets. Trade secrets are not protected in the USA if the company doesn't take reasonable effort in protecting them. I would feel quite confident as a lawyer arguing against a company that intentionally has their employees use personal accounts on their corporate devices, long after using separate work accounts and devices has become SOP for large companies with serious security concerns (almost certainly including OpenAI itself).
> When new employees join Apple, the company often issues them an iPhone and Mac and pays for an iCloud account with a large amount of online storage capacity. Crucially, during the onboarding process, Apple encourages new hires to use their preexisting personal Apple IDs with this iCloud account, through which their co-workers can share internal Apple documents and other files with them.
I have a company-managed Apple account on my work iPhone and Mac. So I beg to differ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
It is quite nerfed compared to a normal Apple account - for example the App store is effectively disabled and you need some MDM to be able to install or update apps. But otherwise, it allows me to not use my personal Apple account which was the main objective.
Edit for precision: I don't work at Apple. My point is that it is possible - I guess Apple doesn't want to manage these accounts, but it is not for lack of technical feasibility.
You can log into your personal account and have iCloud file sync disabled. I mean what does that prevent that you couldnt do by some other means? I could also just use a browser to drag and drop anything to my personal google drive. Or use a usb stick.
I don’t understand people that create separate Apple accounts for work.
I’ve always used my personal account on corp laptops, including MFAANG. It’s awesome being able to use side car on my personal machines, hand-off on my AirPods, or screen mirroring to my Apple TV during conference calls. What are you gaining from isolating your account? Why even bother making a fake account at all?
If you are a decision maker, you might find your personal stuff subject to a subpoena for any number of reasons. Antitrust, insider trading, harassment suits, all sorts of legal fishing expeditions. Its convenient to be able to just give them the corporate burner, and get another. I know a few people who had to go through this with their personal phones and this is a horrible experience. For once, you lose your phone there and then and are explicitly forbidden for tampering with anything replicated to iCloud.
A friend of mine is a svp of something something and his corp was sued by antitrust regulators. One day police is at his doorstep - not even a legal letter - and they took his phone then and there. Super disruptive, considering one usually has a lot of MFA tied to the phone.
You aren't gaining or losing much - but they are gaining a huge risk. Just as you above show by being able to easily move files to any USB drive or Google Drive
Are you saying that your employers prevent you from accessing any potential data-leaking avenues? No usb ports, really? That’s an insane level of paranoia. Do you work for the mob or a drug cartel? How do you even compile and debug?
My company locks down the USB ports on our macbooks so that only input devices are recognized. Flash drives and the like are not recognized. We’re a small private company in the telco space so definitely not the mob or a cartel.
Why would I need a USB drive to docker build or run a debugger?
I've worked in strategically important sector and only USB devices that were allowed were keyboards and mice. The use of Bluetooth keyboard/mouse was discouraged.
This is simply bad hygene. It's such a basic thing that I can't even figure out how to back up far enough to start to explain why one should keep work and personal life seperate. I guess if I'd ever had kids I would have had to figure this out when they were like 5 or 6, and then I'd know how to explain what should be explained to every 5 or 6 year old.
This is what gets people subpoena'd and their entirely private messages scrutinised. Happened to a lot of people, including a friend of mine who's affair became a matter of public record after his company was investigated for anti-trust issues. Super unprofessional and legally dangerous.
I keep two phones, one for work, another for private life, and also two laptops for the same reason. The support for multi-identity is very inconvenient on apple[1], and very poor with whatsapp, signal and, really, most apps except for Google's. Shame, really, considering how well funded Apple and Meta are, and how little effort would be needed to implement the 80% of what people need: the ability to chat using different identities, without touching the rest of the OS wiring.
[1] on macos, its possible to create users with multiple apple id associations, but not on iphone
> Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
This doesn't seem out of line with common practices at other big tech firms. If you go work at Meta, your personal Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp/Oculus accounts become intrinsically linked to your work login identity (though a few employees created a secondary account on of all those to prevent this).
Although there are better controls than there used to be, it's not all that uncommon for sensitive work data to leak through this linkage into the public products...
Did employees get official approval to create secondary accounts?
-
Someone went on Reddit to ask if they really had to use their personal Facebook account to manage the company page as they said their boss pushed back against the idea, saying, “Do you think when Disney manages their Facebook page that Disney marketing execs have to use their personal Facebook accounts?”
And it seemed like the answer may well have been yes. There must be some value to Zuckerberg in tying it all together.
> Did employees get official approval to create secondary accounts?
Yeah, at orientation they told us it was an option. I don't recall more than a couple of people taking advantage - if you go to work for Meta you've probably made your peace with it already.
> “Do you think when Disney manages their Facebook page that Disney marketing execs have to use their personal Facebook accounts?”
There are various business portal things that separate a business page from just one user owning them, but you still login to a business page you manage via your personal account, regardless of size of business
Google allowed iMessage until a few years ago, when they banned all non-work messaging apps for exfiltration reasons. But you can still sign into a personal iCloud, which iirc you need to do for certain Mac App Store apps that are corp-approved.
On the phone with some App Store support person I was told they don't like people having multiple Apple IDs. That's why I use my personal one for work as well.
Correct, because other companies are not in a position to certify the security of iCloud meeting their own standards. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Apple trusts Apple more than other people trust Apple.
Many years ago, back when I was a junior, I wrote something like this to my manager, complaining about another employee who has wronged me. I eventually decided not to send it because it just seemed so unprofessional.
Wild that a company this big would post this on their official, public blog.
Yep, that's exactly what i thought at first look. This looks like one of those "letting-steam-off" mails you bin after thinking it through after cooling off.
This looks really bad for OpenAI. Honestly, do not post text messages on the web, you look like a messy bitch. At this point I really don't see this company going public under Altman, they're going to have to bring someone in to bring some professionalism here. Altman seems to have badly mismanaged pretty much every corporate relationship they've got going. OpenAI is such a natural fit to be a partner with Apple, yet somehow they've managed to completely burn those bridges in the most public and messy way possible.
Despite whether what OpenAI alleges in the blog post is true or not, it's super odd that a company of their size would make a blog post about it.
This looks like a company that's in a downward spiral. They're doing anything they can to attempt to salvage their reputation, maybe because when the court date finally rolls around it might already be too late.
Not buying it. In the end, OpenAI will throw these people under the bus and settle out.
I'm not Apple's biggest fan either (I got super upset when they conveniently wiped out all information about the person comiting suicide in one of their conference rooms and TMZ caught the police line and the sherif said "there is a gun, next to a dead person, we can't say much at the moment" and that was it). But it is unlikely that Apple would depriortize its brand on a fake story.
Not buying it. In the end, OpenAI will throw these people under the bus and settle out.
I think you're right, but let's not forget that Apple's goal isn't to protect themselves or to get a fat payout here. Their goal is to make their current employees less likely to leave for an offer at a company like OpenAI. This suit is telling everyone Apple employs "Hey, if you leave and we can find anything that looks a bit dubious, we're happy to screw you over."
Apple aren't a loving and caring company that nurtures people. They're as ruthless as the next trillion-dollar unicorn.
This is a company that's planning on going public soon. Imagine having your eggs in this basket, a basket which is already being zip lined across the Grand Canyon, and they're posting adolescent slam pieces about an ongoing lawsuit against the most valuable company in the world. The chance that any legal team has seen this yet has to be nothing because the second they see it they're going to scream to take it down. Even if OpenAI is right they look like amateurs.
This feels like a trumpian tantrum from someone at openai. If they’re innocent, just win the lawsuit. Is this quibbling over details supposed to win the public over? Because afaik the public doesn’t know or care about this, and publicizing it just makes it worse.
This reeks of MAGAt communication style. It's tacky, classless, and completely irrelevant. Why is this a public blog post? It should be presented in a proper court, not on the internet
Odd, regardless, OpenAI is spreading itself too thin, trying to fight wars on the enterprise, consumer, and hardware fronts, and will likely end up losing them all.
Corporate posting in the weeks immediately surrounding a legal case or ruling impacting tech companies is definitely my favorite brand of written text. Despite not paying full attention to EU legislation, I get reliably notified by Google about every tiny bit of antitrust from them posting a "Google brings millions into the EU's [field they are getting hit with antitrust in] ecosystem" vagueblog about it.
That is absolutely not true in this case. If what Apple alleges is true, the closest example we can look to is Waymo vs Uber. Where Uber ended up settling, they paid Google a quarter of a billion in stock, agreed not to use the IP they had stolen and fired the engineer involved. This could very easily just kill OpenAI's hardware product, they might literally not be able to release what they've built. At that point they have to decide whether they start again from scratch, with monitoring to ensure they aren't using any of the IP or they just give up on this expensive distraction from their core business in the run up to an IPO.
Does US law prevent (or frown upon) defendant from publicly publishing evidence, even when the plaintiff publicly published the accusation and their evidence first? If so, how is the defendant supposed to protect their public reputation when a lawsuit is ongoing for years? Or maybe I’m missing your point on what wouldn’t be looked upon kindly?
Maybe there is a point but I don't see it, people in this or any community will support Apple. Publicity doesn't help at this point, the truth is the truth in this case I expect the case after discovery to be quite cut and dry.
Or maybe it isn't and stuff really is complicated like OpenAI makes it sound like. Or maybe I am cynical enough to believe OpenAI made this public post as a legal way to collude and make sure all involved parties can get their stories aligned without having to do secret communication that could be tracked and used as evidence of collusion.
(This last one is truly an unfounded claim, and just there to complicate OpenAI's narrative but the point is I don't see the point in making this public).
>They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.
I find it bizarre that they felt the need to specify "Asian". What does that have to do with anything?
Latin alphabet transcription of East Asian languages tend to be incredibly lossy and there tends to be a lot of ambiguities.
That Vietnamese surname of Nguyen is formally written as Nguyễn in the current script, or as 阮 in the old adapted Hanzi script, and practically pronounced somewhere around "gwen". Most other EA countries tend to do equivalents of "阮" -> "gwen", and East Asian cultures generally prefer Last-First ordering, which tend to put more information in the first name, and so there are going to be tons of last names in Latin that end up being barely unambiguous to be a form of identification.
These can be a problem if email addresses are going to be formulated as e.g. "阮 必成" -> "Nguyễn Tất Thành" -> "Gwen Tat Than" -> "t.gwen@example.net", even if the surname is going to be that much long(although Nguyen in particular is just identical even in Vietnamese).
(Japan may be less affected thanks to having default 2+ char random surnames farmers made up in modernization efforts, but there are still the 灘(nada) highscool, the 津(tsu) city, etc etc that can be NLP problems)
Yes, but why specify it? Why not just say „they confused 2 people with the same name“? Adding „Asian“ doesn’t add anything to the story other than flagging Apple as casually racist
Even if Westerners maintained the characters for the names rather than transliterate them, there's still the problem that common surnames are used by literally hundreds of millions of people of Chinese descent, and there are a lot of commonly-used given names as well. I think in all of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese almost all given names are 1-2 syllables in length, so there's even less space for disambiguation, even before you get to the additionally ambiguities introduced by transliteration and dropping of diacritics.
Japanese has several advantages:
1. Both given names and surnames often use more than 2 syllables. This makes it more familiar to speakers of European languages, where multi-syllable words are no big deal.
2. English speakers find Japanese easier to pronounce and remember due to its simpler syllable structure and use of globally more common sounds compared to the other languages.
3. Unlike the other languages, Japanese names are always given in Given Name, Surname order in English media, while names from the other languages are inconsistently transcribed in either order.
4. Japanese is the "default" East Asian culture for the West in many ways, since it's the one that at least the US has most deeply engaged for the longest time. Many, many cultural exports that actually originated in China were introduced to the West via Japan with Japanese names. Also, Japan has been an advanced industrial economy since the late 1800s, while China only achieved that status a few decades ago.
5. Japanese transcription into Roman characters has remained consistent for a long time (helped by the simpler phonology). Chinese and Korean have been cursed with several incompatible transcription systems over the years - although Pinyin has been winning out for Chinese, there are still many names with legacy transcriptions, not to mention the other Chinese languages needing their own transcriptions. Vietnamese does exclusively use Latin characters, but the diacritics and unfamiliar pronunciation makes them harder to remember.
They are definitely trying to get you to think that Apple (the company perhaps single-handedly responsible for developing Chinese manufacturing) is racist
I’m not saying they’re racist but I will say that them using Chinese manufacturing isn’t an argument against it. Most top level leadership, which include the people who would have initiated this investigation, actually have a small representation of Asians [1] compared to the rest of the business [2].
But what makes that necessary context? That can be communicated clearly without specifying Asian, „Apple confused 2 people with the same name“. Adding Asian sort of excuse Apple for the mistake, which is strange for OpenAI to do? I would tend to believe they are implying some casual racism
Because confusing two people because of having the same name is much less likely for European names than for Asian names (there are only about 100 Chinese family names, for instance), so it's an indirect dig that Apple wasn't paying attention (since they presumably employ a lot of Asians, and thus should know better). There's no need to bang on the racism drum, it's pretty tiring.
Data theft (i.e. taking corporate IP) was normalised until very recently (I'd say the last 2-3 years with the rise of the adoption of DLP and public litigation). A few examples I can think of thing I've heard _just_ in my own career; terabytes of client data taken by a former consultant, sales reps that joined _solely for the purpose_ of taking this quarter's leads and then ghosting the company, execs forcing the use of their buddy's startup/consultant/vendor (and then they later join the startup/consultancy/vendor). The latter being _the most common_. If you're a large company, your sales pipeline is so valuable to startups -- and from a single consultant perspective the ROI of ripping off your sales data is _insane_.
I think back to the questionable things _I've_ done that _don't_ amount to data theft, but _should have_ caused someone to probably kick off an incident/investigation.. But they didn't.
- git cloning every repository in the company (who am I kidding, I do this in _every_ company
- airdropping stuff to my personal phone (my profile photo, but it could have been the aforementioned git repos)
- using sharedrop/similar services (to copy my RSS/news feeds, favourites bars) from my work laptop
- enumerated staff/ops dashboards/tooling to get shit done (think: enumerating the CRM before Lazarus and Lap$u$ made it cool)
I guess I’m a dummy, I always deleted all cloned repos from companies I ever worked with. I’ve always been way too terrified to keep anything company related
Oh this was on company issued devices, I don’t keep the source code! I was just explaining how this is something that probably should have triggered an investigation, but didn’t.
It used to be a thing that dev were keeping source code and all in old time.
I remember a manager during an internship telling me to do clean code because later I might have to reuse piece of code in further work experiences.
It was the time when code was shared with zip and so or net shares.
At that time there wasn't that many "software shop" and it was just a way to do things in other company like hardware manufacturers. Obviously you would have been trusted not to take or disseminate or reuse company trade secret or coffee things like expected by your non competition clause in your contact anyway.
Since then, a lot of company became like "software production" company and developers are now considered like factory workers.
And in some way I would say that you are nowadays robbed of your code and there isn't even attribution anymore.
Look, in the 80/90s it was more common to know the name of the main dev of major companies, and their contributions were clearly attributed to them. But now you will very very rarely know the dev that did the code for anything. Top manager/architect/... Might be recognized but not really for their code contributions.
You’re so right, I totally forgot how normalised it was to take common functions and classes and factories. I guess ultimately, it was all worthless anyway thanks to LLM’s.
I actually recall the lead engineers in my department coming into work on their last day with a harddrive. The same people who had access to national databases, and production systems that impacted the majority of the country’s population. That simply wouldn’t happen today.
Although I’m not someone who’s dealing with PCB schematics or bleeding edge IP.
They are genuinely holding on to the one minor mishap from Apple that was corrected right after. Either way, grabbing popcorn to see how this plays out in court.
What is this kind of unprofessional blog-style rant doing on OpenAI’s website? Shouldn’t this be settled between the two companies themselves rather than trying to play the court of public opinion?
Besides, I have absolutely no idea what this is about or whether I should care.
Yikes. Big yikes. This is only showing with more clarity just how weak Altman actually is.
It almost feels as if they wanted the same clout received from the "Thoughts on Flash" Jobs article from nearly 20 years ago and thought ChatGPT could do better.
If nothing else, this case definitely points out the flaws in various architecture decisions that Apple have made, in terms of iOS multi-user functions.
It is extremely smelly that Apple doesn't isolate personal versus business accounts in its HR practices. Its also pretty lame that a multi-user operating system has been lobotomized to sell more hardware in that sense.
What I don't understand that if two companies are in legal battle, can they discuss the case and try to influence public swing by doing a blog post or sharing evidence that is not verified by anyone other than the party sharing them.
OpenAI, even after raising this much capital, had never anticipated that something like this could happen yet keeps digging it's own grave.
At this point all that's left is for them to kiss and pay else they're done.
Apple vs OpenAI will be the war of legacies, trust and innovation.
> can they discuss the case and try to influence public swing by doing a blog post or sharing evidence that is not verified by anyone other than the party sharing them.
Yeah, based on their track record (I mean, even their name is a bad joke at this point) I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Turns out there's downsides to conducting yourself with little integrity.
> Apple now tries to shift the blame to “residual access”, but they also don’t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave.
I have been fixated on this topic for some time. Most people behave in a regulated and lawful manner to be on safer side. They do not trespass into some ones home just cause the owner happened to leave the door open.
Companies are using LLMs to hack into other organizations and giving it a spin about agent escaping the sand box. I am surprised how the impacted organizations are not filing lawsuits for damages unless they themselves have something to hide, (probably their reputation). Interestingly from what I remember there is a law that binds the public companies to reveal any intrusion, unless I am missing the names of impacted companies by LLM agent great escape has not been revealed fully.
The messaging is what questionable here. This just opens up the door to commit hacks openly if other party has not secured properly. The definition of being a bad actor gets diluted here.
You can carelessly leave employee access on the confidential and private company data and in nearly all cases depending on employment agreement it will be against the law to share that data after your employment
It doesn't sound to me like Apple is pursuing individuals that merely had company data on their computers but rather these individuals then went on to share said data with other individuals.
It would be a wild defense strategy to make the point that "apple is bad at locking doors for ex-employees" (the argument to save the employee) to save them from hiring one of those ex-employers just to use his key.
>> Based on their track record this lawsuit is not unexpected at all.
Their track record, and the narcissistic tone where they talk so confidently about how they are morally superior companies than others, and all they care about is public good.
It also does specifically state that they use that to avoid detection (and only between those two people) so they could have been using multiple communication mediums.
That document has a lot of more interesting stuff, however. They also talk about an "apple proprietary metal finishing process" made by a supplier - could they have tried to steal Liquid Metal?
edit: They also state this below which may have some more specifics on what technology is in question:
"Documents sufficient to show hardware development at OpenAI involving (1) bat-
tery technology, including can size, flange specifications, and manufacturing toler-
ances; (2) the metal finishing process, including surface preparation and anodization"
> Apple also accuses Tang Tan of trying to get and use their trade secrets. However, Tang has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies.
> Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets.
Just astounding how immature a company supposedly worth billions can be. Add "no-context public legal rant" to the collection of red flags for OpenAI: CEO/"nonprofit" drama, undetected hacking, etc.
This is the kind of post I would expect from Matt at WordPress.
Is this just me or this is always a bad look when a company needs to get to these dirty little details publicy in what I consider an amateurish manner?
This looks like PR disaster to me, but of course I am only a pair of eyes and a brain without accelerated reinforcement learning.
The addition that the last names are Asian is insane and just put there to make the opposite party look bad. Ironically, all it does is reflect the spirit of OpenAI.
I guess there is something big about to happen and the Apple lawsuit situation needs to be visibly/publicly addressed in order to unblock it. And this thing is big enough that the objection “there is no good way to address the lawsuit” gets overruled with “then address it in a bad way”. So I guess it’s the IPO, closing a new funding round, or the hardware launch?
(The Elon ones also have redacted screenshots as receipts.)
Indeed, they are litigating in the court of public opinion but let's not be naive to think that this is NOT what the other parties have also been doing.
Maybe someone could help me understand what this message means.
> I think I’m going to have to hit the workday button before I’m complete. I just got a weird message that is making me nervous (see below), so I am going to go hit the workday button now.
Apple: OpenAI brazenly ignored our lawyer when he contacted them about this treacherous industrial espionage.
OpenAI: Sorry but your lawyer never really contacted us because he was incompetent and maybe even racist.
More entertaining than anything on TV /popcorn
Which makes me wonder, is it normal for giant corporations to very publicly lob lawsuits after just a couple of failed attempts to connect with the other party?
How shitty you must be as a company to go out and write this. Kindergarteners have better public policy. I have not seen any gathering of people (other than Trump's whole whatever that circus is called) this openly and easily tell lies. Gathering non profit funds then becoming for profit, Being built to do open source development and not shipping one result, going to the congress and saying "I'm not making any profit of this company" and rigging the world's economy... Now this shit "hey I was the nice person! I said nice things to Apple, look these are facts"
Why does everyone think this is out of the ordinary? OpenAI did exactly the same thing with Musk's lawsuit. I was waiting for them to post this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39611484
Can’t trust anything OpenAI says anymore. Seems like they’ve been acting in bad faith for far too long. Feels like a company run by ruthless lying sociopaths. And I used to be a fan and a customer. Not anymore.
“They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.”
What a fucking a joke - throw some cheap shots in there trying to stir things up by pointing out they were Asian
Everything I read about OpenAI makes me dislike them more and more - really can’t stand that company’s culture - I have “friends” who work there and it makes complete sense
> we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets. We’re much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.
The veiled implication here is hilariously petty. This entire document is hilariously petty. And apparently, ignorant of the news cycle.
This does not build more trust in OpenAI. If it's-totally-a-misunderstanding and Apple-should-have-communicated-better is the best they can offer, well, good luck in court.
Also a completely meaningless statement. Essentially “You didn’t need to file because your lawsuit is wrong” er… yea of course you’d say that or there wouldn’t need to be a lawsuit.
Reading through this, the Apple side of the story is actually the more fascinating one. It's frankly bizarre that a company of that scale had to rely on a former employee's (Chang Liu) personal iCloud access. It exposes a massive flaw in Apple's offboarding and internal system management. Combine that with their legal team confusing an Asian surname and emailing the wrong person, and publicly, Apple just ends up looking incompetent and deceitful.
By choosing to release these receipts to the public instead of saving them for court, OpenAI is executing a very deliberate PR strategy. They are effectively framing Apple as a sloppy, legacy company. As with most corporate litigation PR, information is selectively released. Here, OpenAI is trying to reframe Apple's own operational failures as the root cause, rather than any actual technology theft by OpenAI.
Looking at the bigger picture, it's clear who is actually at a disadvantage: OpenAI.
Whether Apple's tech was copied or not is almost secondary. The real existential threat for OpenAI is the legal discovery process, which could expose their internal AI architecture and training data to the public (and to Apple). That risk is exactly why OpenAI is playing this out in the court of public opinion—to force Apple's hand.
Ultimately, both sides have a lot to lose. Apple has always marketed itself on 'privacy, security, and perfection,' but this incident pulls back the curtain on how sloppy their internal operations can be. OpenAI has their own black boxes to protect. In the end, this isn't about truth; it's a pure media management war to see who blinks first.
> Whether Apple's tech was copied or not is almost secondary. The real existential threat for OpenAI is the legal discovery process, which could expose their internal AI architecture and training data to the public (and to Apple). That risk is exactly why OpenAI is playing this out in the court of public opinion—to force Apple's hand.
Why would that be relevant for a hardware project? Discovery doesn't mean carte blanche to dig around in arbitrary company secrets - and there's significant danger to Apple as well. Did Apple give corporate secrets gathered from the former OpenAI-Apple deal to Google for their Gemini integration, or for Apple's own AI?
I mean it makes sense. They somehow still don't have a proper product for businesses to manage Apple devices and accounts. Instead people have to rely on third party integrations.
What happens if someone is fired and had kept info only on their personal account that is highly valuable ? Or wants to steal corporate info?
> They somehow still don't have a proper product for businesses to manage Apple devices and accounts
I am not sure why that should matter. If company can handle BYOD model then they should solve that on hardware level - by issuing work phones (and other devices).
> If company can handle BYOD model then they should solve that on hardware level - by issuing work phones (and other devices).
But OpenAI's allegation is that Apple doesn't do that, either out of incompetence or malice (to add legal uncertainty when their employees go to competitors).
Honestly pretty funny watching all the Sama haters throw a tantrum in this thread, now that their little fantasy of OpenAI being killed is going down the drain. Particularly enjoying the pearl clutching over a company putting all these facts out there in public. Somehow I suspect the people whining about it wouldn't have a problem if those facts were in Apple's favor. I certainly didn't see anyone complaining when Apple dumped their side in public.
Sorry y'all, but this case will settle out of court for peanuts, OpenAI will still release their hardware (which very well might flop), and they'll still IPO.
Apple is getting everything wrong these days. I am so disappointed after buying a Mac mini M4 last year how everything is sandboxed and behind insane numbers of security layers. I will be moving to Linux as soon as my wallet allows it.
Is it normal for a company this big to make a public blog post like this with almost no introduction to what they’re on about?
I would expect them to start out with something like Apple is suing us for yada yada yada, but instead it reads like the diary of a hurt teenager.
This reads like a mypillow CEO type post.
Its insane this is coming from a company with as much scope as openai. Scope may not be the right word.
This should tell you how unserious these "companies" are when they consider themselves the grand harbinger of the one and true "AGI" because their frontier models were able to solve (with great assistance) some sort of conjecture that was never taken seriously in the mathematical world but somehow is significant now because ???
I think a lot of what Open AI has done feels insecure and looking for some sort of business validation.
I posted this in another comment but this was weird: https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/
I was wondering where this goal post would shift to next. So now instead of AI being incapable of doing something not in its training data it needs too much external help doing what no human could do, and what it came up with isn't even important anyways.
The companies can suck and their product can do amazing things at the same time.
Just more mismanagement by Sam.
My first thought was: did Sam write this?
they assume if someone wants context, they'll just ask chatGPT for it
“Nothing in my training data covers this, but if I had to guess, OpenAI may have released information about GPU support in Mac OS X early, pissing off Steve Jobs.”
sadly they are probably right
I find it refreshing that they are skipping the typical hedged corporate speak.
I think this is why companies are doing it. But interestingly it causes us to remember why we have corporate speak in the first place.
I think the pendulum will then swing back to the expectation that companies act and behave like adults rather than cringy kids trying to be cool.
Straight to unhinged speak is definitely refreshing /s
> it reads like the diary of a hurt teenager.
Yep, down to the pages of iMessage screenshots
oh my god did you see brian’s hat?
They aren't screenshots
Which, somehow, confused me even further. I get that it's a stylistic choice to make them easy to read or whatever, but my first thought was "wait, they just posted screenshots with the names censored like a bad Reddit post?"
Semantic HTML and CSS for text is infinitely better than screenshots for accessibility, as well as cheaper to process for LLMs/agents reading it.
For the first reason alone, it's worth it when you can.
They did keep the emoji though
This is pretty wild. Without context, it's barely coherent, but I guess they didn't want to say "Apple is suing us for X, Y, Z" because that makes them look bad. But there's just no upside to publishing this:
If you don't know what's going on, this blog post is nonsensical and makes OpenAI look weird.
If you do know what's going on, you'll immediately notice they don't address 80% of the stuff Apple is accusing them of, which makes OpenAI look dishonest.
It just seems incredibly unprofessional and ill-considered.
Ironically (?) I am immediately reminded of Steve Jobs by reading the first paragraph.
Specifically Thoughts on Flash, but there were probably more such press releases.
[0] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/steve-job...
Except that Jobs was a good writer and made a clear point in a succinct fashion.
Jobs was an asshole but at least you could usually see where he was coming from.
He was a complete asshole, but he wasn't an unhinged sociopath like Sam.
Sure, give us just one side of the story…
It's always suspect when one side tries to argue their case in the court of public opinion.
Frankly, it's a big red flag for me and immediately casts suspicion on said party. I mean, do you think you're going to lose in court and so you're trying to get out ahead of that?
Open AI has had some strange posts for sure:
https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/
Probably asked Siri to write it
Yes, the CEO is Sam Altman.
No. This is a fucking legal case. It will be decided in the courtroom, not on the internet.
Posting this is insane in the sense of "What will posting this possibly improve for OpenAI?"
It's not going to change the court case. It's not going to impress professional adults.
I guess... teenage reddit users with too much time on their hands who are fans of OpenAI? Though struggling to see how that demo would care about a theft of trade secrets case.
Whatever executive decision-making thread led to this being released needs to be recalibrated. I'd expect >13 year old maturity from a company even 1/10 the size of OpenAI.
Was reminded of SBF and his series of "I can explain everything" blog posts and interviews that somehow always made the thing worse...
Who would have thought that making someone with Asperger's CEO and giving them carte blanche to decide public statements was a bad idea?
OpenAI needs mass consumer buy in because a large part of their strategy is ad supported consumer use. Bad pr pushes those users away. A lot of people have teenage Reddit user mindset
I'm struggling to imagine someone like that who also cares about the minutiae of this case. Or heck, who even knows this case exists.
"OpenAI is so inept at system isolation that it accidentally hacked Huggingface" seems like a more important PR fire to put out. (Whether or not that breach was artificially manufactured)
> it reads like the diary of a hurt teenager.
...you expected more from OpenAI leadership? Based on previous incidents this seems kinda par.
Nop, that’s extremely weird
They spend a lot of the investors’ money on that. All the videos they put out are extremely high quality.
They literally have communication experts sitting there, breaking their heads over how to influence the public opinion in the company’s favor.
I guess they learned it from Elon: if people like you, they’ll just hold your stock forever, even if you don’t make much money.
Full self driving teslas on the moon any day now. AI data centers in space! We’re all going to be rich! What a whacked out timeline where this is the richest man.
Every company does that. It's literally a whole industry: Public Relations
It’s supposed to be subtle. Or at least, more subtle than whatever that is
Exactly. This reads like someone decided PR firms don't know what they're doing and decided to handle it themselves.
But... it turns out that professional people and consulting companies who have years of experience in a subject area might have something to offer. Who knew?!
Formerly known as the propaganda department. I'm not kidding, that is what these departments used to be called.
Not to that extent though. For OpenAI the PR investment is disproportionate.
Regular companies have people that talk to the media or maybe run some ads. OpenAI is trying to have in-house media.
For a frontier lab it’s striking just how much energy (and dough) goes into this.
You’re right of course that PR exists elsewhere, but that obviously true assertion misses the finer details of how PR works at OpenAI. In doing so it functions as a thought-terminating cliché.
> I guess they learned it from Elon: if people like you, they’ll just hold your stock forever, even if you don’t make much money.
Is that the Elon lesson? I see him behave terribly and suffer little consequence. Much like his political buddies.
Yeah, I think it’s backward, people like Elon because they know hi will boost their stock. Not the other way around
Maybe it should be "if the right people like you"
We're not the target of the blog post.
To be sure.
Just not clear who is…
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It reads direct and unrehearsed, instead of like something where all humanity has been sanded off by legal and PR departments.
Direct and unrehearsed doesn't seem like the right tack for a high-stakes legal dispute between two (allegedly) trillion-dollar companies. Especially since they've not been able to make a coherent point here.
Only one allegedly.
Yes, we've built a society where being two-faced and false is rewarded. The least we can do is temper our criticism when someone "fails" to adhere to that.
Or as the point was made in The Big Short movie https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TpCb3xjh-Kk&t=127s
I get what you're saying, but this seems like the wrong vehicle. I mean these are two corporations engaged in a huge and expensive legal battle—we're not talking about a personal he-said/she-said spat on X.
We've built a society where we shit in private, not in the middle of the street.
You got your crude analogy backwards - it is the calculated, tactical PR-speak that is more like shitting up the public square, than the naive, honest-if-self-serving speech.
Did no one ever explain to you why you should wear nice clothes to a job interview? Or a wedding?
Not simply that you should, but why? Conducting onesself with decorum and professionalism in certain contexts is not about deception. It's about respecting other people, both individually/directly, and the communal space.
Even if you consciously don't care about or respect anyone else, "everyone else is wrong for not being be ok with my t-shirt and flipflops" it's still simply a self-own to present this image of someone who lacks such a minimum level of perception.
A business communique like this isn't a performance art piece where it's fine if most people react badly to it because the whole point was to make people think about their reactions or reflect on some aspect of life. It's not the time or place to make a chocolate Jesus.
It's just some infants in pants they don't know how to fill, not "refreshing honesty".
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:-D Yet, it's signed "OpenAI".
I see it as the Anti-AI aesthetic. When you write using this style it is obvious this isn't LLM generated and you signal this is well thought out.
If you noticed Sam Altman's latest posts he moved to all lower case, including "I", which I see as due to the same reason
The content does not read like it's well thought out to me, but I am at least convinced it's human.
AI would have probably told you that posting this is not a good idea.
He's done that forever. For a while he stopped doing it, which made people think everything he posted was ChatGPT.
Not here at least
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sama
From: Che Chang <redacted> Date: Feb 23, 2026, at 8:04 PM Subject: Re: Former Apple Employees at OpenAI Retaining Non-public, Confidential, and Proprietary Information To: <redacted> Hi [Apple in-house legal counsel] and [Apple in-house legal counsel],
This guy from Weil claims to be representing you. For some reason, he is lying about speaking with me on the phone. I don't know who he is and we have never spoken.
I don't know what the point of his lie is, but could you please confirm if he is actually representing you, and if so, whether you have other counsel you can use. I don’t think interacting through him is appropriate given this behavior.
--- So, a lawyer emailed the wrong person. That's it. And they use that as a peg to hang their whole case on. I guess GPT 6 thought this was the real smoking gun!
It's kind of how stupid people think the law works. "The cop misspelled my last name on the ticket your honor, so I don't have to pay it, checkmate!"
What really matters is the claim that Apple never raised those issues in the lawsuit with them. OpenAI claims the emails prove this, but to me all the emails prove is Apple sent an email that said “please see the attached letters”. We don’t know what is in the attachments but I imagine those were the relevant issues they raised.
Moreover OpenAI says, “[Apple] now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information”, but the transcript they cite seems to me to show the opposite? It’s Chang Liu asking for someone to help him copy data. The part where Apple employees reach out is later and it’s not for copying data to a hard drive… it’s basically “who should I talk to about this project?” Which makes sense because when he was contacted it was after he left (so he wouldn’t have access to data)
Can someone please tell me what am I missing? None of this makes sense with what they’re saying. The fact that the lawyer emailed the wrong person is moot if they caught it and resolved it days later.
The timeline OpenAI wants to present looks like this to me:
- Leaving employee (LE) needs a USB stick to copy data off their Mac to give to their Manager (MA) so someone at Apple still has access
- After LE left, MA has access to LE Mac and iCloud to still access some data
- At some point, LE asks MA to sign out off LE's iMessage account on that Mac as they suspect they'll get OpenAI-related messages soon and don't want Apple/MA to see them
- Eventually, MA deletes the Apple files in LE's iCloud
Granted, Apple does do this weird thing where you're invited to use your personal iCloud (/Apple) account for work-related things (I suspect because they're just bad at supporting multiple accounts simultaneously). As part of the deal, your iCloud account gets upgraded during your employment.
But they're also quite explicit and repeat the directive (including during the exit interview) about removing Apple files from your account when you leave, and logging out of iCloud from the Apple devices you leave behind.
Also:
> At some point, LE asks MA to sign out off LE's iMessage account
You can sign out remotely, so this would've been stupid of everyone involved.
Then again, this whole situation demonstrates a level of stupidity from supposedly competent people that I wish I could say was unbelievable. Add "Making a public post about a topic under litigation" under that category too.
That's not just weird, that's completely ridiculous for the most valuable public US company.
And it gets more ridiculous when you realise Apple makes the software, the hardware, the OS, and the cloud services.
I... really question the rationale here.
Nit-but Apple has fallen to Nvidia and Alphabet, which is a sign of the times.
From what I saw, it's been leapfrogging for the past few weeks. Even if Apple is currently behind them, I don't think it's particularly fair to say it's "fallen to" them.
> I... really question the rationale here.
occam's razor...
Do you mean hanlon’s razor?
They did recently add the iCloud@Work compartment (right before I left), and it seemed like an OK compromise and kosher policy-wise.
Funny to hear that even Apple themself struggle with that. In the past it's been such a PITA for us to decide whether employees can use private account or shall use company apple ids. As we have a pretty lax policy, most of them use their private accounts to have iCloud sync or to simply access purchased apps but having a simple way for dual account usage would be too easy i guess.
Apple's always been ambivalent about big-E enterprise support.
Probably a Jobs-era vibe about work-life unification.
If you remotely sign out, then when you delete the Apple IP files on the device, they aren't deleted off iCloud.
So it's plausible they wanted MA to check for and delete the files first, then sign out.
I wonder how deep this integration goes. I’d never want to use my personal accounts for proprietary work items. Just seems like a recipe for disaster. Also, removing a latop from iCloud doesn’t delete the imessage data already on the device.
I am actually confused why creating an email john.doe@apple.com and separated employees work only iCloud on the email is such a problem and they want people to use personal iCloud? Not even corporate stuck in 90s does that.
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I was a bit confused too initially, but it looks like Chang was asking for the data to be copied _off his iCloud_ by the existing employee on his final day of employment. And then everything after that is just the existing employee asking for help on things Chang had prior knowledge of
Why in the world would a high-level Apple employee not sign out of his personal iCloud on his work computer, and then also use his personal iCloud for data from his new company?
Because Apple has this unorthodox policy of using iCloud for work files, and recommends employees use their personal Apple IDs.
I'm not kidding.
What's with the USB stick? Any files he had should just be checked into a GIT repo or copied to an Apple server.
So 90's…
Or relying on iCloud for “sensitive product designs”
Setting aside the presented evidence, it feels weird for somewhat emotionally charged complaining like this to go on an official company blog. Companies are generally pretty tight-lipped about active litigation outside court documents, right? This just seems a bit amateurish, down to the title. Is public opinion about this case so important to them?
Yea that’s what strikes me as weird too. I had to look up at the web site bar to really confirm this was OpenAI and not some employee blog site. Particularly, the whole Asian last name bit was so shoehorned in to imply Apple is racist I guess? Not something I have seen in a statement from a company like OpenAI. Just weird energy. Also, that text exchange made Apple look like a fun place to work.
I used to think there was an air of professionalism with really successful, powerful people and entities - until I read the kind of drivel that Epstein and friends were emailing each other.
Now seeing the worlds most powerful organisations act like children doesn't surprise me at all.
I guess that's why the PR industry is worth more than $100 billion.
Yeah this is the cloest a corporate company can get to drunk texting their ex at 3 am and reiterating how it wasn't their fault. But I mean its OpenAI, it loves drama
Haha omg what if someone at openai prompted a model to write this and the model could only come up with this unhinged version. It reads like a 3am manic text fest cuz that's what the model figures it should be.
Is there any doubt this is exactly what happened?
I mean we've had Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress make various below-the-belt comments about their competitors and other companies, something tells me that they're not the only CEO who acts in such a childish manner.
I'm sure saner heads like their legal people would prevail at some point, but until then...
> Is public opinion about this case so important to them?
They have no chance to win the court case, so public opinion is the only thing they have left to fight for.
They might be head hunting other Apple staff and wish to control the narrative to avoid scaring them off.
Is public opinion important to an industry whos future depends on datacenters being built for hundreds of billions of dollars, while the people all around them, whos utilities get more and more expensive in no small part because of datacenter buildouts, experience a constant cost of living crisis...
...yeah, that's a tough one...
When I look at the imessage conversation, one thing strikes me: that guy looks to be using the same icloud account he used when working for Apple with OpenAI. Is he using his own personal account? Why do both Apple and OpenAI allow that in the first place, this look so amateur. I would have assumed each company would have opened a different account for him and locked him when leaving.
Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
Apparently Apple encourages their employees to use their personal iCloud accounts for company information, because their own OS doesn't support one iPhone, multiple iCloud identities.
Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/03/confidential-appl...
So yeah.
Always found it odd that Apple don't let you have a second separate business profile to switch your phone to for work - especially when you don't necessarily want to be bringing browser history/personal apps into your workplace or wifi. Having your iphone locked to your personal account also hobbles their continuity features if you work on a business computer with its own work account (as most businesses do).
Facebook is equally bad on this front - requiring you to use your personal account to administrate business pages (don't even get me started on how they forced large businesses to use a custom 2FA method they then phased out - locking people out of their personal accounts forever).
however, it is quite neat for Apple if employees are "voluntarily" giving up their privacy by merging their accounts and indirectly allowing Apple to monitor their whole digital identity.
Apple is then "just" monitoring the corporate user account for security reasons, it was the employee who decided to use the same account for private purposes...
>Always found it odd that Apple don't let you have a second separate business profile to switch your phone to for work - especially when you don't necessarily want to be bringing browser history/personal apps into your workplace or wifi.
I'm guessing it's the same reason they don't offer multiple accounts on iPad. They would rather you bought more devices.
As the maker of the iPhone, shouldn't Apple just give each employee a work phone running company's account?
Yes. But that doesn’t solve the problem for every other business or even families that want to share devices between roles or people.
I knew guys at Facebook who told me this and it deterred me from ever wanting to work there (among other things).
Apple can give employees an iphone which will have an iCloud account in apples’s corp domain and can be used only for work. Many other companies do this.
Most companies give you a company phone with a company iCloud account.
According to more than a dozen former Apple employees, apparently not Apple though... despite the fact that they make iPhones.
We created dummy accounts all the time when I was at Apple.
Testing/QA generate loads of them. I still remember one of mine: test_testerson@apple.com
Even Microsoft lets you use your personal iCloud account on corp laptops. They can’t snoop your personal data without disabling SIP or showing system level privacy prompts or recording indicators.
So iOS is essentially unprofessional. A toy for those who have either no job or no private life. How does Android score in that respect?
You can have multiple users on a single device.
https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin/multi-user
Either with a single local account that accesses multiple Google accounts, or multiple local accounts. Though this is device specific, it may be disabled by your manufacturer/provider.
As mentioned elsewhere though, an enrolled phone is an enrolled phone so corporate wiping will wipe the entire phone and not just the profile.
Not true - you can do full MDM type enrolment or just the one where t can wipe the work part of the phone. On Android and iOS
> and iOS
I'm pretty sure this is a thread about how you can't do things like that on iOS.
Regardless, its been a long time since I've had to use a personal device for work purposes and at the time Android seemed to only want to lock the entire phone down. If that is now fixed them thats great.
It's been a while, but at a previous job (maybe 8 years ago) I was responsible for managing mobile devices and using Blackberry's MDM suite, you could have segregation of personal and private data, where you couldn't move data from one "container" to the other, including clipboard data.
I'm out of the loop now, though.
Android did have better support at the time, but if I remember correctly, devices that had a work managed profile on them could still be completely wiped, including the personal/private container.
A bit of a pain, but I've always preferred (where possible) to have separate work and personal devices.
Yeah, I had an Android phone at work with separate personal/work profiles, but using the phone to begin with required one main account that had to be my personal. Might've been possible to remove after, but I was afraid to mess with it.
Wouldn't want one phone to be both personal and work though. They owned it, idk if I could've put my own sim in without unforeseen issues, it could've been wiped like you said, and it ofc got wiped when I quit.
Well, aint no way I'm working with a realtor over green bubbles, and they probably have two phones.
I've heard multiple times directly from Apple employees that there is no way to login to iCloud on your work machine using a company-controlled account. Many people create new Apple ID's which they only use while working there, but others just use their personal iCloud accounts. You are, of course, not supposed to store company data in iCloud. But thanks to Apple's own efforts, it's difficult to use a Mac without being logged into iCloud (for example if you want to use the App store), and some data can easily spill into the iCloud account.
If accurate, it is of course patently absurd that Apple has left this an unsolved problem.
I have used a Macbook at work for 5 years without signing into any iCloud account ever.
I have as well but if you want to use any software that is only on the App Store like Numbers or Pages then you are out of luck.
It is a sub-standard experience and it looks like it is only going to get worse as Apple pushes iCloud into more areas of macOS.
But I don’t have to use any apps from the store, in fact I’d say that at my company there aren’t any apps available on the store that we use. So the parent is right, it’s perfectly usable without ever touching iCloud. I don’t think I’ve ever even opened the settings for it on my work laptop
Apple certainly uses Numbers, Pages, etc. internally extensively, so you really do have to sign into an iCloud account as an employee.
That's rough. Not just the iCloud thing but, Numbers is so much worse than Excel or even Google Sheets.
macOS is generally good about not forcing an iCloud account, but the Mac App Store is the one piece of nonsense that needs it.
I suppose this is harder when the company hosts everything in icloud though...
Yes, that's correct - an Apple account is tied to a person. A person can have multiple Apple accounts, if they wish. But there is no such thing as an organizationally controlled Apple account.
>A person can have multiple Apple accounts, if they wish.
I don't know if it's in the terms but Apple definitely discourages this. In particular it won't let you setup a new account on the same phone number as an existing account.
Yes this seems incoherent and incompatible for a company that supposedly care about their trade secrets.
Which is what OpenAI will argue - that Apple is negligent in protecting their trade secrets. Trade secrets are not protected in the USA if the company doesn't take reasonable effort in protecting them. I would feel quite confident as a lawyer arguing against a company that intentionally has their employees use personal accounts on their corporate devices, long after using separate work accounts and devices has become SOP for large companies with serious security concerns (almost certainly including OpenAI itself).
This is better explained in The Information article (which is paywalled): https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-icloud-policy-.... Emphasis mine:
> When new employees join Apple, the company often issues them an iPhone and Mac and pays for an iCloud account with a large amount of online storage capacity. Crucially, during the onboarding process, Apple encourages new hires to use their preexisting personal Apple IDs with this iCloud account, through which their co-workers can share internal Apple documents and other files with them.
This legal action will make anybody think twice before walking out of Cupertino with a stash of secrets.
There is a solution though. I don't like it, but we use MDM to disable iCloud file sync, scan network communication and such.
I have a company-managed Apple account on my work iPhone and Mac. So I beg to differ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
It is quite nerfed compared to a normal Apple account - for example the App store is effectively disabled and you need some MDM to be able to install or update apps. But otherwise, it allows me to not use my personal Apple account which was the main objective.
Edit for precision: I don't work at Apple. My point is that it is possible - I guess Apple doesn't want to manage these accounts, but it is not for lack of technical feasibility.
You can log into your personal account and have iCloud file sync disabled. I mean what does that prevent that you couldnt do by some other means? I could also just use a browser to drag and drop anything to my personal google drive. Or use a usb stick.
I don’t understand people that create separate Apple accounts for work.
I’ve always used my personal account on corp laptops, including MFAANG. It’s awesome being able to use side car on my personal machines, hand-off on my AirPods, or screen mirroring to my Apple TV during conference calls. What are you gaining from isolating your account? Why even bother making a fake account at all?
If you are a decision maker, you might find your personal stuff subject to a subpoena for any number of reasons. Antitrust, insider trading, harassment suits, all sorts of legal fishing expeditions. Its convenient to be able to just give them the corporate burner, and get another. I know a few people who had to go through this with their personal phones and this is a horrible experience. For once, you lose your phone there and then and are explicitly forbidden for tampering with anything replicated to iCloud.
A friend of mine is a svp of something something and his corp was sued by antitrust regulators. One day police is at his doorstep - not even a legal letter - and they took his phone then and there. Super disruptive, considering one usually has a lot of MFA tied to the phone.
You aren't gaining or losing much - but they are gaining a huge risk. Just as you above show by being able to easily move files to any USB drive or Google Drive
Are you saying that your employers prevent you from accessing any potential data-leaking avenues? No usb ports, really? That’s an insane level of paranoia. Do you work for the mob or a drug cartel? How do you even compile and debug?
My company locks down the USB ports on our macbooks so that only input devices are recognized. Flash drives and the like are not recognized. We’re a small private company in the telco space so definitely not the mob or a cartel.
Why would I need a USB drive to docker build or run a debugger?
Firmware development, IoT, basically anything embedded. Mobile devs that want a responsive debugger. Yubikey authentication. Smart card readers. Remoting into air-gapped machines.
Thats just stuff I do.I’m sure there are many other use cases.
For context, I work for a very large company in Redmond that has a renowned history of antitrust litigation.
Lot of places just lock down USB to read only. Exceptions could be made for specific machines and device IDs.
It's pretty common really - and if the internal disk is fully encrypted reasonably hard to easily exfiltrate a large amount of data.
Of course that doesn't stop taking screenshots with another device but that's a slow process
I've worked in strategically important sector and only USB devices that were allowed were keyboards and mice. The use of Bluetooth keyboard/mouse was discouraged.
This is simply bad hygene. It's such a basic thing that I can't even figure out how to back up far enough to start to explain why one should keep work and personal life seperate. I guess if I'd ever had kids I would have had to figure this out when they were like 5 or 6, and then I'd know how to explain what should be explained to every 5 or 6 year old.
This is what gets people subpoena'd and their entirely private messages scrutinised. Happened to a lot of people, including a friend of mine who's affair became a matter of public record after his company was investigated for anti-trust issues. Super unprofessional and legally dangerous.
I keep two phones, one for work, another for private life, and also two laptops for the same reason. The support for multi-identity is very inconvenient on apple[1], and very poor with whatsapp, signal and, really, most apps except for Google's. Shame, really, considering how well funded Apple and Meta are, and how little effort would be needed to implement the 80% of what people need: the ability to chat using different identities, without touching the rest of the OS wiring.
[1] on macos, its possible to create users with multiple apple id associations, but not on iphone
Somewhat relevant from yesterday.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/03/apple-icloud-sharing-ex...
> Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
This doesn't seem out of line with common practices at other big tech firms. If you go work at Meta, your personal Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp/Oculus accounts become intrinsically linked to your work login identity (though a few employees created a secondary account on of all those to prevent this).
Although there are better controls than there used to be, it's not all that uncommon for sensitive work data to leak through this linkage into the public products...
Did employees get official approval to create secondary accounts?
-
Someone went on Reddit to ask if they really had to use their personal Facebook account to manage the company page as they said their boss pushed back against the idea, saying, “Do you think when Disney manages their Facebook page that Disney marketing execs have to use their personal Facebook accounts?”
And it seemed like the answer may well have been yes. There must be some value to Zuckerberg in tying it all together.
> Did employees get official approval to create secondary accounts?
Yeah, at orientation they told us it was an option. I don't recall more than a couple of people taking advantage - if you go to work for Meta you've probably made your peace with it already.
> “Do you think when Disney manages their Facebook page that Disney marketing execs have to use their personal Facebook accounts?”
There are various business portal things that separate a business page from just one user owning them, but you still login to a business page you manage via your personal account, regardless of size of business
Google allowed iMessage until a few years ago, when they banned all non-work messaging apps for exfiltration reasons. But you can still sign into a personal iCloud, which iirc you need to do for certain Mac App Store apps that are corp-approved.
>Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
Yes.
On the phone with some App Store support person I was told they don't like people having multiple Apple IDs. That's why I use my personal one for work as well.
I have never worked at a place where they gave us corporate Apple accounts.
We’ve always been asked to use our personal Apple account to install apps used for work.
Whereas I never worked in places where IT would not see that as a security violation.
Correct, because other companies are not in a position to certify the security of iCloud meeting their own standards. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Apple trusts Apple more than other people trust Apple.
Same here
Which is the point I've created a work Apple id unless they specifically set it up to prevent it.
Which has happened. Bonkers configuration.
Many years ago, back when I was a junior, I wrote something like this to my manager, complaining about another employee who has wronged me. I eventually decided not to send it because it just seemed so unprofessional.
Wild that a company this big would post this on their official, public blog.
Yep, that's exactly what i thought at first look. This looks like one of those "letting-steam-off" mails you bin after thinking it through after cooling off.
I think this is a good way to vent. I've done that a few times. Typed up a long, angry rant. Only to delete it.
Just make sure this is on your computer and not in a Slack DM or draft email. Don't want to accidentally hit send.
This looks really bad for OpenAI. Honestly, do not post text messages on the web, you look like a messy bitch. At this point I really don't see this company going public under Altman, they're going to have to bring someone in to bring some professionalism here. Altman seems to have badly mismanaged pretty much every corporate relationship they've got going. OpenAI is such a natural fit to be a partner with Apple, yet somehow they've managed to completely burn those bridges in the most public and messy way possible.
Despite whether what OpenAI alleges in the blog post is true or not, it's super odd that a company of their size would make a blog post about it.
This looks like a company that's in a downward spiral. They're doing anything they can to attempt to salvage their reputation, maybe because when the court date finally rolls around it might already be too late.
A few years ago Epic made a whole event out of deliberately breaking AppStore rules, writing blog posts and suing Apple.
Public opinion matters, and narrative control is important if you don’t want to be perceived as “morally wrong company”.
> super odd that a company of their size would make a blog post about it.
There is no "non-company blog" that wouldn't have to trace it back to OpenAI for verification anyway.
This looks like a personal message to a specific audience, which may include the employees who are nervous about the company's positioning.
It's unusual, but this is a blog. It's literally a web log and this is something that is going on with the company.
Not buying it. In the end, OpenAI will throw these people under the bus and settle out.
I'm not Apple's biggest fan either (I got super upset when they conveniently wiped out all information about the person comiting suicide in one of their conference rooms and TMZ caught the police line and the sherif said "there is a gun, next to a dead person, we can't say much at the moment" and that was it). But it is unlikely that Apple would depriortize its brand on a fake story.
Not buying it. In the end, OpenAI will throw these people under the bus and settle out.
I think you're right, but let's not forget that Apple's goal isn't to protect themselves or to get a fat payout here. Their goal is to make their current employees less likely to leave for an offer at a company like OpenAI. This suit is telling everyone Apple employs "Hey, if you leave and we can find anything that looks a bit dubious, we're happy to screw you over."
Apple aren't a loving and caring company that nurtures people. They're as ruthless as the next trillion-dollar unicorn.
Can you clarify the information deletion/wipeout?
RIP https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Ed_Mackowiak - Apple’s statement is linked there (and the bit about the woman in the Wiki might be outdated per TMZ correction https://www.tmz.com/2016/04/27/apple-campus-body-found-cuper... )
> the person commiting suicide in one of their conference rooms
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/apple-...
This is a company that's planning on going public soon. Imagine having your eggs in this basket, a basket which is already being zip lined across the Grand Canyon, and they're posting adolescent slam pieces about an ongoing lawsuit against the most valuable company in the world. The chance that any legal team has seen this yet has to be nothing because the second they see it they're going to scream to take it down. Even if OpenAI is right they look like amateurs.
This feels like a trumpian tantrum from someone at openai. If they’re innocent, just win the lawsuit. Is this quibbling over details supposed to win the public over? Because afaik the public doesn’t know or care about this, and publicizing it just makes it worse.
This reeks of MAGAt communication style. It's tacky, classless, and completely irrelevant. Why is this a public blog post? It should be presented in a proper court, not on the internet
Odd, regardless, OpenAI is spreading itself too thin, trying to fight wars on the enterprise, consumer, and hardware fronts, and will likely end up losing them all.
Models are a lost cause anyway - https://open.substack.com/pub/taikhooms/p/why-openrouter-can...
Corporate posting in the weeks immediately surrounding a legal case or ruling impacting tech companies is definitely my favorite brand of written text. Despite not paying full attention to EU legislation, I get reliably notified by Google about every tiny bit of antitrust from them posting a "Google brings millions into the EU's [field they are getting hit with antitrust in] ecosystem" vagueblog about it.
OpenAI knows that the court of public opinion is more dangerous than a fine from a real court.
That is absolutely not true in this case. If what Apple alleges is true, the closest example we can look to is Waymo vs Uber. Where Uber ended up settling, they paid Google a quarter of a billion in stock, agreed not to use the IP they had stolen and fired the engineer involved. This could very easily just kill OpenAI's hardware product, they might literally not be able to release what they've built. At that point they have to decide whether they start again from scratch, with monitoring to ensure they aren't using any of the IP or they just give up on this expensive distraction from their core business in the run up to an IPO.
Yay for more cherry-picked information.
A substantial amount of evidence in Apple's complaint isn't addressed, but what's shown here throws a decent amount of shade and doubt.
I have my popcorn ready for discovery. I hope it gets to that point, and I hope it proceeds to trial...
Spot on, while reading this post I couldn't help be wonder "but what about the prototypes"?
I can't see a judge looking kindly on this being published prior to trial.
It's in court already, fight it there. Even if you win public opinion with your point of view you can still lose in court.
Does US law prevent (or frown upon) defendant from publicly publishing evidence, even when the plaintiff publicly published the accusation and their evidence first? If so, how is the defendant supposed to protect their public reputation when a lawsuit is ongoing for years? Or maybe I’m missing your point on what wouldn’t be looked upon kindly?
Two wrongs don't make a right, even if the plaintiff is playing dirty it doesn't give you the right to join in.
Assuming the exhibits aren't sealed they're publicly available as soon as they're entered by the court during trial.
If they're sealed there's probably a good reason they shouldn't be published until the trial is over (or ever in some cases)
Maybe there is a point but I don't see it, people in this or any community will support Apple. Publicity doesn't help at this point, the truth is the truth in this case I expect the case after discovery to be quite cut and dry.
Or maybe it isn't and stuff really is complicated like OpenAI makes it sound like. Or maybe I am cynical enough to believe OpenAI made this public post as a legal way to collude and make sure all involved parties can get their stories aligned without having to do secret communication that could be tracked and used as evidence of collusion.
(This last one is truly an unfounded claim, and just there to complicate OpenAI's narrative but the point is I don't see the point in making this public).
>They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.
I find it bizarre that they felt the need to specify "Asian". What does that have to do with anything?
Latin alphabet transcription of East Asian languages tend to be incredibly lossy and there tends to be a lot of ambiguities.
That Vietnamese surname of Nguyen is formally written as Nguyễn in the current script, or as 阮 in the old adapted Hanzi script, and practically pronounced somewhere around "gwen". Most other EA countries tend to do equivalents of "阮" -> "gwen", and East Asian cultures generally prefer Last-First ordering, which tend to put more information in the first name, and so there are going to be tons of last names in Latin that end up being barely unambiguous to be a form of identification.
These can be a problem if email addresses are going to be formulated as e.g. "阮 必成" -> "Nguyễn Tất Thành" -> "Gwen Tat Than" -> "t.gwen@example.net", even if the surname is going to be that much long(although Nguyen in particular is just identical even in Vietnamese).
(Japan may be less affected thanks to having default 2+ char random surnames farmers made up in modernization efforts, but there are still the 灘(nada) highscool, the 津(tsu) city, etc etc that can be NLP problems)
Yes, but why specify it? Why not just say „they confused 2 people with the same name“? Adding „Asian“ doesn’t add anything to the story other than flagging Apple as casually racist
they don't have the same name, the email confusion was between Wang and Chang
Even if Westerners maintained the characters for the names rather than transliterate them, there's still the problem that common surnames are used by literally hundreds of millions of people of Chinese descent, and there are a lot of commonly-used given names as well. I think in all of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese almost all given names are 1-2 syllables in length, so there's even less space for disambiguation, even before you get to the additionally ambiguities introduced by transliteration and dropping of diacritics.
Japanese has several advantages:
1. Both given names and surnames often use more than 2 syllables. This makes it more familiar to speakers of European languages, where multi-syllable words are no big deal.
2. English speakers find Japanese easier to pronounce and remember due to its simpler syllable structure and use of globally more common sounds compared to the other languages.
3. Unlike the other languages, Japanese names are always given in Given Name, Surname order in English media, while names from the other languages are inconsistently transcribed in either order.
4. Japanese is the "default" East Asian culture for the West in many ways, since it's the one that at least the US has most deeply engaged for the longest time. Many, many cultural exports that actually originated in China were introduced to the West via Japan with Japanese names. Also, Japan has been an advanced industrial economy since the late 1800s, while China only achieved that status a few decades ago.
5. Japanese transcription into Roman characters has remained consistent for a long time (helped by the simpler phonology). Chinese and Korean have been cursed with several incompatible transcription systems over the years - although Pinyin has been winning out for Chinese, there are still many names with legacy transcriptions, not to mention the other Chinese languages needing their own transcriptions. Vietnamese does exclusively use Latin characters, but the diacritics and unfamiliar pronunciation makes them harder to remember.
They are definitely trying to get you to think that Apple (the company perhaps single-handedly responsible for developing Chinese manufacturing) is racist
I’m not saying they’re racist but I will say that them using Chinese manufacturing isn’t an argument against it. Most top level leadership, which include the people who would have initiated this investigation, actually have a small representation of Asians [1] compared to the rest of the business [2].
[1] https://www.apple.com/leadership/
[2] https://www.apple.com/diversity/
Roughly one in five Koreans have surname "Kim".
Upward of 40% Vietnamese have surname "Nguyen".
"Li" is quite popular in China.
Specifying "Asian last name" in this context is quite apt.
But what makes that necessary context? That can be communicated clearly without specifying Asian, „Apple confused 2 people with the same name“. Adding Asian sort of excuse Apple for the mistake, which is strange for OpenAI to do? I would tend to believe they are implying some casual racism
Because confusing two people because of having the same name is much less likely for European names than for Asian names (there are only about 100 Chinese family names, for instance), so it's an indirect dig that Apple wasn't paying attention (since they presumably employ a lot of Asians, and thus should know better). There's no need to bang on the racism drum, it's pretty tiring.
The “Asian” part is a meaningless information to include in such a blog article, if not to imply that Apple is casually racist…
> I would tend to believe they are implying some casual racism
There's probably a little bit of that, but also simple carelessness.
"Wang" can be one of the 2 popular different last names in China and Taiwan.
The odd thing is one of the guys has the first name Chang, and the other guy has the last name Chang.
Data theft (i.e. taking corporate IP) was normalised until very recently (I'd say the last 2-3 years with the rise of the adoption of DLP and public litigation). A few examples I can think of thing I've heard _just_ in my own career; terabytes of client data taken by a former consultant, sales reps that joined _solely for the purpose_ of taking this quarter's leads and then ghosting the company, execs forcing the use of their buddy's startup/consultant/vendor (and then they later join the startup/consultancy/vendor). The latter being _the most common_. If you're a large company, your sales pipeline is so valuable to startups -- and from a single consultant perspective the ROI of ripping off your sales data is _insane_.
I think back to the questionable things _I've_ done that _don't_ amount to data theft, but _should have_ caused someone to probably kick off an incident/investigation.. But they didn't.
- git cloning every repository in the company (who am I kidding, I do this in _every_ company
- airdropping stuff to my personal phone (my profile photo, but it could have been the aforementioned git repos)
- using sharedrop/similar services (to copy my RSS/news feeds, favourites bars) from my work laptop
- enumerated staff/ops dashboards/tooling to get shit done (think: enumerating the CRM before Lazarus and Lap$u$ made it cool)
I guess I’m a dummy, I always deleted all cloned repos from companies I ever worked with. I’ve always been way too terrified to keep anything company related
Oh this was on company issued devices, I don’t keep the source code! I was just explaining how this is something that probably should have triggered an investigation, but didn’t.
It used to be a thing that dev were keeping source code and all in old time.
I remember a manager during an internship telling me to do clean code because later I might have to reuse piece of code in further work experiences. It was the time when code was shared with zip and so or net shares.
At that time there wasn't that many "software shop" and it was just a way to do things in other company like hardware manufacturers. Obviously you would have been trusted not to take or disseminate or reuse company trade secret or coffee things like expected by your non competition clause in your contact anyway.
Since then, a lot of company became like "software production" company and developers are now considered like factory workers.
And in some way I would say that you are nowadays robbed of your code and there isn't even attribution anymore.
Look, in the 80/90s it was more common to know the name of the main dev of major companies, and their contributions were clearly attributed to them. But now you will very very rarely know the dev that did the code for anything. Top manager/architect/... Might be recognized but not really for their code contributions.
You’re so right, I totally forgot how normalised it was to take common functions and classes and factories. I guess ultimately, it was all worthless anyway thanks to LLM’s.
I actually recall the lead engineers in my department coming into work on their last day with a harddrive. The same people who had access to national databases, and production systems that impacted the majority of the country’s population. That simply wouldn’t happen today.
Although I’m not someone who’s dealing with PCB schematics or bleeding edge IP.
They are genuinely holding on to the one minor mishap from Apple that was corrected right after. Either way, grabbing popcorn to see how this plays out in court.
What is this kind of unprofessional blog-style rant doing on OpenAI’s website? Shouldn’t this be settled between the two companies themselves rather than trying to play the court of public opinion?
Besides, I have absolutely no idea what this is about or whether I should care.
Any self respecting lawyer would normally tell you to stfu and not post stuff like this. Judges don't like trial by press.
I think they are hoping what they did with Elon will work with Apple.
This is a different class of lawyers, though.
Yikes. Big yikes. This is only showing with more clarity just how weak Altman actually is.
It almost feels as if they wanted the same clout received from the "Thoughts on Flash" Jobs article from nearly 20 years ago and thought ChatGPT could do better.
Lawyers would not have advised posting this.
One thing is probably true: airdrop failed
If nothing else, this case definitely points out the flaws in various architecture decisions that Apple have made, in terms of iOS multi-user functions.
It is extremely smelly that Apple doesn't isolate personal versus business accounts in its HR practices. Its also pretty lame that a multi-user operating system has been lobotomized to sell more hardware in that sense.
What I don't understand that if two companies are in legal battle, can they discuss the case and try to influence public swing by doing a blog post or sharing evidence that is not verified by anyone other than the party sharing them.
OpenAI, even after raising this much capital, had never anticipated that something like this could happen yet keeps digging it's own grave.
At this point all that's left is for them to kiss and pay else they're done.
Apple vs OpenAI will be the war of legacies, trust and innovation.
> OpenAI, even after raising this much capital, had never anticipated that something like this could happen yet keeps digging it's own grave.
Hubris.
OpenAI always has the option of transforming themselves to a 'national security corporation' as I'd like to call it.
I mean, just look at Kim Dotcom or Aaron Schwartz.
> can they discuss the case and try to influence public swing by doing a blog post or sharing evidence that is not verified by anyone other than the party sharing them.
With Trumps era, anything is possible
To me, this looks like OpenAI is terrified and tries to come out ahead of the public opinion to control the narrative. Such a shit company.
They built their whole business model on stolen data and act surprised when another company has zero trust in them.
Based on their track record this lawsuit is not unexpected at all.
Yeah, based on their track record (I mean, even their name is a bad joke at this point) I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Turns out there's downsides to conducting yourself with little integrity.
> Apple now tries to shift the blame to “residual access”, but they also don’t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave.
I have been fixated on this topic for some time. Most people behave in a regulated and lawful manner to be on safer side. They do not trespass into some ones home just cause the owner happened to leave the door open.
Companies are using LLMs to hack into other organizations and giving it a spin about agent escaping the sand box. I am surprised how the impacted organizations are not filing lawsuits for damages unless they themselves have something to hide, (probably their reputation). Interestingly from what I remember there is a law that binds the public companies to reveal any intrusion, unless I am missing the names of impacted companies by LLM agent great escape has not been revealed fully.
Hugging Face straight up asked for $100M in compute or something from OpenAI in response to the hack, if I remember correctly.
The messaging is what questionable here. This just opens up the door to commit hacks openly if other party has not secured properly. The definition of being a bad actor gets diluted here.
Two things can be true: OpenAI can be an aggressive company with serious credibility problems, and Apple can still have handled this case carelessly
You can carelessly leave employee access on the confidential and private company data and in nearly all cases depending on employment agreement it will be against the law to share that data after your employment
It doesn't sound to me like Apple is pursuing individuals that merely had company data on their computers but rather these individuals then went on to share said data with other individuals.
Such reason deprives people of the passion to take sides and argue emotionally.
It would be a wild defense strategy to make the point that "apple is bad at locking doors for ex-employees" (the argument to save the employee) to save them from hiring one of those ex-employers just to use his key.
>> Based on their track record this lawsuit is not unexpected at all.
Their track record, and the narcissistic tone where they talk so confidently about how they are morally superior companies than others, and all they care about is public good.
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Controversial! (and possible followup) Post off front page, down onto third page.
Almost wish the thread could get locked instead, but maybe only almost…-
Also, for coverage: FT picked this up, syndicated here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/openai-says-appl...
OpenAI quotes from iMessage communications between Liu and Peng
But Apple's motion states that their communications occurred "through the Line messenger app to avoid detection by Apple"
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...
Saw that - what the hell is "Line" messenger?
It also does specifically state that they use that to avoid detection (and only between those two people) so they could have been using multiple communication mediums.
That document has a lot of more interesting stuff, however. They also talk about an "apple proprietary metal finishing process" made by a supplier - could they have tried to steal Liquid Metal?
edit: They also state this below which may have some more specifics on what technology is in question:
"Documents sufficient to show hardware development at OpenAI involving (1) bat- tery technology, including can size, flange specifications, and manufacturing toler- ances; (2) the metal finishing process, including surface preparation and anodization"
It's a messenger app used in Japan and supposedly some other Asian countries (but I can only vouch for the former).
Typing in “line messenger” on Google reveals it’s a Japanese messaging app.
> Saw that - what the hell is "Line" messenger?
An Asian super-app with a few hundred million DAUs
My favorite thing about this is in 2026 it's still a major hurdle to move 200GB around.
“Hi, this is highly irregular, please remove me from this thread”
Oops.
Seriously, that was the only person with a level head. When has it ever been okay to discuss work details with an ex-coworker months after they left?
A lot of negative comments, but I read it and said the usual social. media response of "damn they got the reciepts".
> Apple also accuses Tang Tan of trying to get and use their trade secrets. However, Tang has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies.
> Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets.
Well, I guess that settles it, then! Case closed.
Seriously, what is point of this?
Why do American corporate PR statements read like a teen drama novel nowadays?
I don’t really understand this, Apple obviously wants to force discovery and publishing stuff seems like it’d just widen the net there.
Just astounding how immature a company supposedly worth billions can be. Add "no-context public legal rant" to the collection of red flags for OpenAI: CEO/"nonprofit" drama, undetected hacking, etc.
This is the kind of post I would expect from Matt at WordPress.
Is this just me or this is always a bad look when a company needs to get to these dirty little details publicy in what I consider an amateurish manner?
This looks like PR disaster to me, but of course I am only a pair of eyes and a brain without accelerated reinforcement learning.
> after confusing two Asian last names
The addition that the last names are Asian is insane and just put there to make the opposite party look bad. Ironically, all it does is reflect the spirit of OpenAI.
Controversial opinion: I don't care about disputes between trillion-dollar companies.
Do you live outside the environment? :)
I'm a simple man, all I care about is ChatGPT usage reset.
I wondering how they'd do the iMessage transcript in the voice version they've posted, spoiler: they don't, they just skip over it and the emails too.
I guess there is something big about to happen and the Apple lawsuit situation needs to be visibly/publicly addressed in order to unblock it. And this thing is big enough that the objection “there is no good way to address the lawsuit” gets overruled with “then address it in a bad way”. So I guess it’s the IPO, closing a new funding round, or the hardware launch?
Why does the iMessage screenshot look “off”.
Something about the line-height, fonts used, etc don’t look like a real iMessage chat.
Am I alone on this?
It’s not a screenshot. It’s a formatted reconstruction from a transcript.
Lots of comments about how OpenAI is posting this informal response to a lawsuit on a company blog, but ehh, they've been doing this forever:
https://openai.com/index/the-truth-elon-left-out/
https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/
https://openai.com/index/court-rejects-elon/
https://openai.com/elon-musk/
https://openai.com/index/response-to-nyt-data-demands/
https://openai.com/index/mental-health-litigation-approach/
(The Elon ones also have redacted screenshots as receipts.)
Indeed, they are litigating in the court of public opinion but let's not be naive to think that this is NOT what the other parties have also been doing.
I searched for "chips", "local", and "hardware" and realized wrong is right.
We're living through the history of how OpenAI became AppleAI, told in a teenager's diary tone - we just need some doodles in the corners.
Maybe someone could help me understand what this message means.
> I think I’m going to have to hit the workday button before I’m complete. I just got a weird message that is making me nervous (see below), so I am going to go hit the workday button now.
It’s a real Goliath vs Goliath thing we’ve got going here.
More like Goliath vs wannabe Goliath
Turns out one of the Goliaths was actually just 5 copies of Siri in a big trench-coat
This is an insane thing to publish, and I can’t believe their legal team signed off on it. Save it for the courts.
Prejudicial, wouldn't surprise me if someone gets gagged. But then again, I think they're into it (OpenAI).
Looking at the messages, we are basically at the level of twitch streamers drama? Will we see a google doc manifesto next?
It feels weird doesn't it? It's because it is. Don't buy the story, we'll see what the court says.
Small digression. Silicon Valley never ceases to deliver top quality entertainment. We desperately need new iteration of Silicon Valley series.
On a serious notes, this seems like a desperate attempt to sway public opinion, but hey, Apple is no saint either. This will be a fun season.
Season 7 you mean
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/episodes/
Yes. Corrected.
a very strong piece of evidence that apple is absolutely right, oai trying to do damage control already.
The number 1 rule of the powerful: never ever admit anything. Deny, deny, deny.
In a fight in between OpenAI and Apple, I am cheering for the fight.
Glad to see everyone dispassionately awaiting the adjudication of this dispute in the official venue!
I'm glad I don't have any ~~bookie~~ prediction app accounts, because I'd now be willing to put money on an incoming settlement.
Absolute cinema. OpenAI writing “100 reasons why it’s not my fault” post.
Apple: OpenAI brazenly ignored our lawyer when he contacted them about this treacherous industrial espionage.
OpenAI: Sorry but your lawyer never really contacted us because he was incompetent and maybe even racist.
More entertaining than anything on TV /popcorn
Which makes me wonder, is it normal for giant corporations to very publicly lob lawsuits after just a couple of failed attempts to connect with the other party?
How shitty you must be as a company to go out and write this. Kindergarteners have better public policy. I have not seen any gathering of people (other than Trump's whole whatever that circus is called) this openly and easily tell lies. Gathering non profit funds then becoming for profit, Being built to do open source development and not shipping one result, going to the congress and saying "I'm not making any profit of this company" and rigging the world's economy... Now this shit "hey I was the nice person! I said nice things to Apple, look these are facts"
Keep your garbage for the court.
so why it should be publicly posted?
Poor judgement, open ai
It reads like OpenAI has been taking PR tips from the king of juvenile, ill-advised blog posts during legal proceedings — one Matt Mullenweg.
Guys, just stop posting. Listen to your counsel.
"800 billion" dollar companies making callout blog posts now, truly this is the dumbest timeline. I want to get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride.
I wonder if they are throwing a public tantrum because GPT said that the were absolutely in the right and that it had the smoking gun to prove it
Why does everyone think this is out of the ordinary? OpenAI did exactly the same thing with Musk's lawsuit. I was waiting for them to post this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39611484
Can’t trust anything OpenAI says anymore. Seems like they’ve been acting in bad faith for far too long. Feels like a company run by ruthless lying sociopaths. And I used to be a fan and a customer. Not anymore.
OpenAI protesting too much.
> after confusing two Asian last names
What a fucking a joke - throw some cheap shots in there trying to stir things up by pointing out they were Asian
Everything I read about OpenAI makes me dislike them more and more - really can’t stand that company’s culture - I have “friends” who work there and it makes complete sense
> we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets. We’re much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.
The veiled implication here is hilariously petty. This entire document is hilariously petty. And apparently, ignorant of the news cycle.
This does not build more trust in OpenAI. If it's-totally-a-misunderstanding and Apple-should-have-communicated-better is the best they can offer, well, good luck in court.
Also a completely meaningless statement. Essentially “You didn’t need to file because your lawsuit is wrong” er… yea of course you’d say that or there wouldn’t need to be a lawsuit.
> we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets.
Is also rather funny when hiring HUNDREDS of their engineers.
> Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time
I stopped right there. I am sorry but I can't deal with promo articles that begin with incorrect claims made.
Scam Altman at it again.
PR is not a moat buddy.
Some day Ann will get her justice and Sam will get thrown in prison. There's only so much smokescreen the golden child can throw out there.
This is fucking awesome lmao, now we just need a hundred page google docky from Apple, and a 2 hour video from Mujin breaking it all down.
Finally some proper gen-z representation. Maybe a Cluely-like office comedy web series next? I sense potential.
Your "I sense potential" was the best thing I read all month :))))
I like how this addresses very little of Apple's core complaints. OpenAI are totally fucked.
I'm looking forward to see that with popcorns and great pleasure.
Reading through this, the Apple side of the story is actually the more fascinating one. It's frankly bizarre that a company of that scale had to rely on a former employee's (Chang Liu) personal iCloud access. It exposes a massive flaw in Apple's offboarding and internal system management. Combine that with their legal team confusing an Asian surname and emailing the wrong person, and publicly, Apple just ends up looking incompetent and deceitful.
By choosing to release these receipts to the public instead of saving them for court, OpenAI is executing a very deliberate PR strategy. They are effectively framing Apple as a sloppy, legacy company. As with most corporate litigation PR, information is selectively released. Here, OpenAI is trying to reframe Apple's own operational failures as the root cause, rather than any actual technology theft by OpenAI.
Looking at the bigger picture, it's clear who is actually at a disadvantage: OpenAI.
Whether Apple's tech was copied or not is almost secondary. The real existential threat for OpenAI is the legal discovery process, which could expose their internal AI architecture and training data to the public (and to Apple). That risk is exactly why OpenAI is playing this out in the court of public opinion—to force Apple's hand.
Ultimately, both sides have a lot to lose. Apple has always marketed itself on 'privacy, security, and perfection,' but this incident pulls back the curtain on how sloppy their internal operations can be. OpenAI has their own black boxes to protect. In the end, this isn't about truth; it's a pure media management war to see who blinks first.
> Whether Apple's tech was copied or not is almost secondary. The real existential threat for OpenAI is the legal discovery process, which could expose their internal AI architecture and training data to the public (and to Apple). That risk is exactly why OpenAI is playing this out in the court of public opinion—to force Apple's hand.
Why would that be relevant for a hardware project? Discovery doesn't mean carte blanche to dig around in arbitrary company secrets - and there's significant danger to Apple as well. Did Apple give corporate secrets gathered from the former OpenAI-Apple deal to Google for their Gemini integration, or for Apple's own AI?
I mean it makes sense. They somehow still don't have a proper product for businesses to manage Apple devices and accounts. Instead people have to rely on third party integrations.
What happens if someone is fired and had kept info only on their personal account that is highly valuable ? Or wants to steal corporate info?
> They somehow still don't have a proper product for businesses to manage Apple devices and accounts
I am not sure why that should matter. If company can handle BYOD model then they should solve that on hardware level - by issuing work phones (and other devices).
> If company can handle BYOD model then they should solve that on hardware level - by issuing work phones (and other devices).
But OpenAI's allegation is that Apple doesn't do that, either out of incompetence or malice (to add legal uncertainty when their employees go to competitors).
Honestly pretty funny watching all the Sama haters throw a tantrum in this thread, now that their little fantasy of OpenAI being killed is going down the drain. Particularly enjoying the pearl clutching over a company putting all these facts out there in public. Somehow I suspect the people whining about it wouldn't have a problem if those facts were in Apple's favor. I certainly didn't see anyone complaining when Apple dumped their side in public.
Sorry y'all, but this case will settle out of court for peanuts, OpenAI will still release their hardware (which very well might flop), and they'll still IPO.
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Apple is getting everything wrong these days. I am so disappointed after buying a Mac mini M4 last year how everything is sandboxed and behind insane numbers of security layers. I will be moving to Linux as soon as my wallet allows it.
The F does this have to do with anything?