OpenAI on Wednesday evening asked a federal judge to dismiss Apple’s lawsuit accusing the ChatGPT maker of stealing trade secrets, calling the complaint baseless and saying it distorted the conduct of the startup’s employees.
In a filing, OpenAI’s lawyers said the company’s hardware executive behaved in line with industry-wide recruiting practices when interviewing Apple employees, and that the employee Apple accuses of taking confidential information was in fact helping former Apple colleagues. The complaint, OpenAI argued, was built on cherry-picked chat logs and ordinary conduct stripped of context, and was, in Apple’s own phrase, “rotten to the core.”
OpenAI said Apple should not be allowed to use an unfounded, pretextual lawsuit to make up for its disadvantage in the talent market, and pointed to Apple’s own struggles to integrate artificial intelligence into its products. In many of the cited instances, the filing said, the employees in question were acting at Apple’s request, working to ensure that former colleagues’ projects could continue despite personnel changes.
The lawsuit, filed earlier this summer, accuses OpenAI of orchestrating the theft of information about Apple’s unreleased products through a campaign of poaching and coordinated hiring. Apple has asked the court to bar OpenAI from using any of the allegedly stolen secrets while the case proceeds, and the two sides are now locked in a preliminary skirmish over whether the case should survive at all.
Legal experts said motions to dismiss rarely succeed in trade-secret cases, because the legal standard at this stage is forgiving: the plaintiff only needs to plead enough facts to make its claim plausible, not prove them. Judges typically let such cases proceed to discovery, where the hard work of separating ordinary hiring from actual theft takes place. OpenAI’s filing, experts said, is aimed as much at shaping the public record and pressuring Apple to narrow its claims as at winning an early exit.
The fight has become a proxy for a deeper rivalry. Apple and OpenAI are intertwined in the AI market, with Apple at one point integrating ChatGPT into its devices, but the relationship has cooled as Apple pushes its own AI strategy and as both companies compete for the same engineers. The lawsuit, whichever way it is resolved, will force both companies to open their hiring practices to scrutiny, and the discovery process could produce embarrassing details for either side.
OpenAI’s filing also sought to reframe the dispute as a symptom of Apple’s broader problems. The company, OpenAI argued, has failed to integrate AI into its products and is using litigation to compensate for its struggles in the talent market. That argument plays to a familiar criticism of Apple, which has been slower than rivals to ship generative AI features, but it does not by itself answer the factual allegations in Apple’s complaint.
The case now moves to a briefing schedule. Apple will respond to OpenAI’s motion, and a hearing could take place within months. In the meantime, both companies are hiring aggressively, and the engineers whose chats are at the center of the dispute are likely to be deposed. The outcome will be watched closely by the broader industry, because trade-secret suits between tech giants are rare, and the rules that emerge from this one could shape how companies poach, hire and compete for years.
Apple’s complaint, filed in recent weeks, paints a picture of a coordinated campaign: OpenAI, it says, hired a hardware executive from Apple and targeted other employees, using them to extract details about products that had not been announced. Apple says the information included specifications, roadmaps and internal plans that constitute trade secrets, and it is seeking damages and an order barring OpenAI from using the information in its own products.
The case is part of a pattern of escalating fights over AI talent. Hiring wars between the big technology companies and AI startups have intensified as the value of experienced engineers has climbed, and non-disclosure agreements have become routine subjects of litigation. But cases that reach the trade-secret stage are rare, because the evidence is hard to obtain and the harm hard to prove. The Waymo case against Uber, which accused the ride-hailing company of stealing self-driving technology, ended in a settlement after years of litigation.
For OpenAI, the stakes extend beyond the courtroom. The company is preparing for what is expected to be one of the largest technology listings in years, and a court fight with Apple, one of the most valuable companies in the world, adds a new layer of risk for investors weighing its prospects. Apple, for its part, has framed the lawsuit as a defense of its engineering culture. Both companies declined to comment beyond their filings.
The discovery phase, if the case proceeds, will pull in chat logs, recruiting emails and internal communications from both companies, and the lawyers involved expect the fight over what is protected to be as contentious as the case itself. Trade-secret law protects information that a company takes reasonable steps to keep secret, and Apple’s steps, and OpenAI’s knowledge of them, will be the central question at trial.
