Apple has filed its response to OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit in which it accuses two former employees, as well as OpenAI and io Products, of stealing its trade secrets. Here are the details.
A few days ago, OpenAI filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit Apple brought against the company, io Products, Chang Liu, and Tang Tan, alleging trade secret theft. It claims, for instance, that contrary to Apple’s accusations, former Apple employee Chang Liu was consulted by former colleagues after leaving the company, rather than accessing Apple information without authorization, while former Apple VP Tang Tan retained Apple’s offboarding document to help ensure new hires complied with its security procedures. The company also argues that Apple’s own information-management and offboarding practices were partly to blame, claiming that employees were encouraged to use personal iCloud accounts for work and that Apple failed to properly cut off access to company data after they left.
In its request, OpenAI says Apple filed the lawsuit “without adequate investigation,” and goes on to present its version of the events that led to Apple’s lawsuit. OpenAI structures its rebuttal around three main arguments: that Apple “has failed to demonstrate it owns a protectable trade secret,” that the company “has failed to allege conduct that plausibly supports a claim of misappropriation,” and that it “fails to plausibly allege any injury or ongoing harm.
Plus, hours before one interview with Mr. Tan, a candidate was screenshotting and downloading files about a highly confidential Apple project that Mr. Tan then probed during the interview. On a motion to dismiss, the reasonable inference from these allegations-that Mr. Tan solicited and obtained Apple’s confidential hardware information-belongs to Apple.
No one needs “show and tell” for “consumer products” that are, as Defendants put it, “widely available and in the public domain.
