Apple: OpenAI Destroying Evidence in Trade Secrets Case — SkimNews
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- OpenAI filed a response Monday calling Apple's allegations a "witch hunt" and "a mess of Apple's own making," asking the judge to deny Apple's request for a preliminary injunction while the case proceeds.
- Apple escalated separately on Monday, accusing OpenAI in a court filing of actively destroying evidence in the trade-secrets case, as first reported by Bloomberg.
- The lawsuit, filed in July, alleges OpenAI executives and former Apple employees orchestrated a broader effort to obtain confidential information about unreleased Apple products and to approach Apple's partners with that information.
- OpenAI moved to dismiss the case on Aug. 5, arguing Apple's allegations lack merit and that the suit is really about Apple's struggle to retain AI engineers, a claim Apple rejected in an Aug. 19 filing pushing for discovery.
- The original Apple-OpenAI partnership began in June 2024, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman visited Apple HQ to announce ChatGPT integration across iPhone, iPad and Mac, but the relationship soured after OpenAI bought former Apple designer Jony Ive's startup io for $6.4 billion in May 2025.
- Apple partnered with Google in January to run Apple Intelligence features, including Siri, on Google's Gemini models — a signal Axios flagged that Apple had shifted toward AI partnerships outside OpenAI.
- A federal judge is scheduled to hold a court hearing on Oct. 1 to weigh the competing motions for dismissal and injunction.
Why it matters: If the case reaches discovery, both sides' lawyers can subpoena internal records on how OpenAI recruits hardware talent and how Apple guards confidential product plans — exposing practices at two of tech's most secretive companies. The Oct. 1 hearing will determine whether the trade-secret claims survive or get dismissed, with stakes tied directly to the AI-hardware ambitions both sides are now openly contesting.
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