OpenAI publishes iMessage receipts in bid to torch Apple's trade-secrets injunction

Apple's Aug. 3 injunction motion drew an overnight rebuttal post with screenshots, a name mix-up, and a rejected forensics request.

Less than 24 hours after Apple filed a preliminary-injunction motion in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, OpenAI answered with a blog post titled “Apple is getting this wrong,” calling the trade-secrets suit “careless, aggressive and oddly personal.” The choice to litigate on the corporate homepage, rather than only in the docket, tells you which forum OpenAI thinks it can win.

Apple’s Aug. 3 filing, first reported by Reuters, seeks to bar OpenAI and former staffers Chang Liu and Tang Yew Tan from using alleged confidential information. A concurrent expedited-discovery motion requests four depositions, including Liu, Tan, current OpenAI employee Yu-Ting Peng, and an unnamed fourth ex-Apple employee. Apple argues it “will be irreparably harmed absent a preliminary injunction.”

OpenAI’s rebuttal is built around two exhibits. The first is a February email chain in which Apple outside counsel Gabriel Gross wrote to OpenAI general counsel Che Cheng, then apologized the next day for confusing him with a different OpenAI employee named Wang. The second is a set of iMessage threads showing Apple staff pinging Liu after his Jan. 22 departure, at one point asking him to AirDrop files from his Apple-linked iCloud account.

The post also discloses the pre-injunction negotiation posture: OpenAI accepted three of Apple’s five conditions and declined two, forensic device inspections and network-location searches.

The backdrop is scale. Per Apple’s complaint, more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, and TechCrunch reports the investigation has widened to 11 additional ex-employees beyond Liu and Tan. Tan spent 24 years at Apple before co-founding io Products with Jony Ive, the hardware startup OpenAI absorbed last July in a $6.5 billion deal.

No injunction hearing has been scheduled. The venue that matters this week isn’t the courtroom.