One notable detail to emerge from the brewing legal battle between Apple and OpenAI isn’t about trade secrets at all — it’s about workplace culture and internal AI use.
In a series of iMessages released Tuesday as part of OpenAI’s public response to Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit against it, a former Apple engineer-turned-OpenAI staffer at the center of the case suggested that working at OpenAI was markedly different from working at Apple. “This place is crazy… hahahah we use Ai all over the place,” Chang Liu said in a text message to one of his former Apple colleagues shortly after he left the iPhone maker earlier this year to join ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
Liu, who spent eight years at Apple as a senior system electrical engineer and is named among the defendants in Apple’s lawsuit, said in another text made public by OpenAI: “This startup style company is a funny and will be very hard in a couple months😁😁.” The messages offer a rare glimpse into one engineer’s inside perspective on Apple, a 50-year-old company, and OpenAI, a decade-old startup, as the tech companies race to build the next generation of AI.
The texts were among a collection of messages and emails that OpenAI published in a blog post titled “Apple is getting this wrong,” as it defended itself against the company’s lawsuit.
Apple’s federal lawsuit accuses OpenAI, along with Liu and Tang Tan — a former Apple employee and current OpenAI hardware chief — of stealing Apple’s confidential information.
The lawsuit accuses the defendants of “exploiting Apple’s confidential information to advance OpenAI’s efforts to enter the consumer hardware market.” In the Tuesday blog post, OpenAI slammed Apple’s July lawsuit as “careless, aggressive and oddly personal” and said, “We do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets.” “Apple accuses Chang Liu of accessing Apple confidential information after leaving the company, but only now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information,” OpenAI wrote.
Beyond the legal fight, Liu’s text messages underscore a seemingly broader contrast between Apple and OpenAI’s internal approaches to artificial intelligence.
While Apple executives have publicly described AI as increasingly integrated across the company, they have offered relatively few details about how employees use large language models in their day-to-day work.
On an earnings call last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company sees AI “as one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime,” adding, “We are embedding it across our devices and platforms and across the company.” OpenAI execs, on the other hand, have openly detailed how AI is integrated across the business.
Former OpenAI chief product officer, Kevin Weil, said on “Lenny’s Podcast” last year that company employees use AI “a lot.” “I mean, every one of us is in ChatGPT all the time summarizing docs, using it to help write docs with GPTs that write product specs and things like that — all the stuff that you would imagine,” Weil said.
Representatives for OpenAI and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment by Business Insider on Tuesday.
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