OpenAI publishes public rebuttal to Apple’s trade secret lawsuit
OpenAI has published a detailed public rebuttal to Apple’s trade secret lawsuit, releasing unsealed iMessages and internal correspondence that undercut the core allegations in Apple’s preliminary injunction petition. The statement, titled “Apple is getting this wrong” and dated 4 August 2026, shows that Apple’s outside legal team emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian surnames, and that Apple employees contacted a former engineer on his personal phone asking for help locating internal files after his access had already been revoked. OpenAI argues these facts demonstrate administrative failure rather than misappropriation of trade secrets.
While the dispute sits squarely in the technology sector, it is a live case study in what happens when litigation strategy outpaces evidentiary rigour. For professional services firms of every stripe, the underlying lessons concern record keeping, access management and the standard of proof required before a court will grant urgent injunctive relief.
Misdirected emails and failed offboarding: what the unsealed evidence shows
Apple filed for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI alleging systematic misappropriation of trade secrets and proprietary research. In its public response, OpenAI states that Apple originally claimed it contacted OpenAI in February 2026 and received no reply, then later admitted its outside lawyers had emailed the wrong individual after confusing two Asian surnames. OpenAI says it only learned of the error after raising the non-response directly with Apple.
The unsealed exhibits include iMessages from January 2026 showing Apple personnel contacting former engineer Chang Liu on his personal phone after his departure, asking him to help locate internal file directories. OpenAI characterises this as evidence that Apple’s own offboarding protocols failed to decommission Liu’s access on schedule, and that any residual system access Apple later relied on as proof of wrongdoing was in fact a consequence of Apple’s own IT administration lapse rather than deliberate exfiltration by OpenAI.
OpenAI’s legal position is that Apple’s petition is factually unsupported and that OpenAI does not hold and has not sought Apple’s trade secrets. The public statement is pointed in tone, noting that “Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time, and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details,” before arguing that this litigation “sadly doesn’t live up to that reputation.”
From a legal and governance perspective, the case turns on two failure points that recur across sectors: identity verification during formal legal outreach, and identity and access management during staff offboarding. Sending pre-suit notices to an incorrect recipient because of a surname mix-up weakens a claim that the respondent was non-responsive. Requesting a departed employee to retrieve files from a personal device after access revocation muddies the audit trail and makes it difficult for a court to distinguish deliberate misappropriation from administrative residue.
Access management lessons for Australian professional services firms
Australia does not have an equivalent live dispute, but the fact pattern translates to any professional services environment where staff move between competing firms carrying institutional knowledge, client relationships or access to shared data systems. Consultancies operating under Australian employment law, confidentiality deeds and the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) face the same practical risks Apple has exposed here: incomplete offboarding, ambiguous access logs and legal correspondence sent to the wrong party.
The broader lesson is that courts, both here and in the United States, require a clean evidentiary chain before granting urgent relief such as an injunction. Aggressive legal action cannot substitute for disciplined internal access management and accurate record keeping. That principle applies wherever the credibility of a submission or claim depends on the integrity of the underlying records and correspondence trail, whether the dispute concerns source code, client data or a Section 10.7 planning certificate query under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 (NSW).
How firms can audit their offboarding and legal correspondence procedures
Practitioners and firm principals should treat this case as a prompt to audit their own offboarding procedures. Access to shared project files, client portals, data systems and email should be revoked on the employee’s last working day, with a documented checklist retained as evidence of process. Firms should never ask a departed staff member to locate or retrieve internal files after their access has been revoked; any such request should be treated as a governance red flag and escalated, not handled informally over a personal phone.
Legal and compliance teams should also verify recipient identity before sending formal pre-action correspondence, and keep contemporaneous records of when notices were sent, to whom and on what basis the recipient was identified. As the Apple and OpenAI dispute shows, a claim of non-response collapses quickly when the notice never reached the right person, and residual system access created by a firm’s own administrative lapse makes poor evidence of wrongdoing by anyone else.
References and related sources
- Primary source: openai.com
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Published: 04 Aug 2026
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