Aug 4, 2026
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Add us on GoogleThe mounting legal battle between two of the most powerful names in global tech, Apple and OpenAI, has been rife with enough high-stakes drama to warrant its own reality TV show, with the most recent jab taking things more public than they’ve been thus far.
Over the weekend, OpenAI presented its receipts, as Gen Z would say, posting private emails and text message threads between Apple staffers and two OpenAI employees that used to work for the iPhone maker (and who were named in its lawsuit), as well as between the firms’ legal teams.
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The employees in question are Chang Liu and Tang Yew Tan, both of whom served in senior positions at Apple before moving over to the competitor — and bringing trade secrets with them, Apple alleges. But OpenAI has pushed back against these claims, including in an open letter penned August 3, which serves as the latest development in the back-and-forth case.
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Taking the feud public
In the arguably petty publicly-available missive, posted to OpenAI’s website, the company — which is behind ChatGPT, the most-used large language model in the world — accuses the legendary Apple of being “careless, aggressive and oddly personal” with its litigation, adding that the plaintiff is getting the whole situation completely “wrong.”“Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time, and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details. This (…) lawsuit sadly doesn’t live up to that reputation,” the letter starts, going on to point out instances where Apple went back on previous claims and “tried hard to spin [a] sequence of events.”
The events include Liu purportedly downloading confidential company information after departing from Apple, and Tan “methodically” using exclusive knowledge obtained while and after he was at the brand to benefit OpenAI.
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OpenAI takes issue with how things were presented from the get go
Apple had said it contacted the artificial intelligence firm about the presence of proprietary Apple technology within new OpenAI products — the primary concern that inspired the lawsuit for “trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract” — but received no response. Monday’s open letter, meanwhile, states that not only did Apple “never raise the specific allegations in this lawsuit at that time,” but that its lawyers emailed the wrong person in the first place.“They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person (…) only after we brought this to their attention. Apple also claimed they had a discussion with our General Counsel, which they now concede never happened,” the post asserts.
Attached are emails sent from Apple’s outside lawyers to OpenAI’s legal team, which the recipient then forwarded to Apple’s in-house legal team.
“This guy from Weil [Gotshal & Manges LLP ] claims to be representing you. For some reason, he is lying about speaking with me on the phone. I don’t know who he is and we have never spoken,” the email from OpenAI General Counsel Che Chang reads.
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“I don’t know what the point of his lie is, but could you please confirm if he is actually representing you, and if so, whether you have other counsel you can use. I don’t think interacting through him is appropriate given this behavior.”
Legal action ‘completely unnecessary’ and ‘based on false information’
Along with refuting how the issues of the case were said to be communicated to them, OpenAI’s team also appears to rebut the entire basis of the lawsuit, especially a recent injunction request to bar the company, Liu or Tan from accessing or using Apple hardware files.
“Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets,” OpenAI’s post brashly states. And the public mudslinging only gets worse from there.
“We wish Apple had raised these issues with us before they filed their lawsuit and would have been happy to clarify all of this with them. We have taken the allegations in the lawsuit seriously and offered to work with Apple to resolve this,” the last few paragraphs read.
“Instead, they’re trying to change their narrative, including by making vague accusations about other former employees, and will likely keep repeating this tactic.”
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Becky Robertson is a senior staff reporter at Moneywise and a lifelong writer. Along with more than a decade covering news at outlets like blogTO and Quill & Quire, she's attended writing residencies around the world. With 33 countries visited, she finds travel to be among her greatest inspirations.
