Here's the thing. When a legal dispute is going badly in the court of public opinion, you publish the group chat.
OpenAI did exactly that on Tuesday, dropping a blog post titled 'Apple is getting this wrong' that includes iMessage exchanges and email threads to counter Apple's trade-secrets lawsuit. The post describes Apple's case as 'careless, aggressive, and oddly personal' — not the kind of language you'd expect from a company that also calls Apple 'one of the greatest companies' in the same breath.
What Apple actually alleged
Apple filed its lawsuit last month targeting two former employees now at OpenAI: Chang Liu, a former iPhone engineer now on OpenAI's technical team, and Tang Tan, who spent 25 years at Apple — including a stint overseeing iPhone and Apple Watch design — before becoming OpenAI's chief hardware officer. Apple alleges both men carried 'secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products' out the door.
On Monday, Apple asked a California federal court for a preliminary injunction to stop Liu, Tan, and OpenAI from accessing, acquiring, using, or disclosing the alleged confidential information while the case proceeds. Apple also wants the defendants to stop soliciting others to share secrets and to preserve all relevant evidence.
OpenAI's counter
On Liu, OpenAI says Apple's own filing now admits that Apple employees reached out to Liu after he left and asked for his help locating information. OpenAI frames the access issue as Apple's own systems failure: 'a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave.' The published iMessages are meant to show Liu was responding to requests, not snooping.
On Tan, OpenAI's defense is shorter: he 'has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies.'
On the preliminary injunction itself, OpenAI was blunt: '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 also noted that Apple's outside lawyers initially emailed the wrong person — allegedly confusing two Asian last names — and only admitted the error after OpenAI raised it. Apple had argued OpenAI never responded to its February outreach.
For context, Apple's filing says it offered to skip the injunction if OpenAI met five conditions. OpenAI agreed to three — no future access, halt existing use, preserve evidence — but rejected Apple's demand to let its counsel and third-party forensic analysts inspect all OpenAI devices, storage drives, and accounts.
Voltage's read
OpenAI's blog post is not a legal filing. It is a PR offensive — carefully curated, cherry-picked communications designed to reframe the narrative before a judge rules on the injunction. That is a legitimate tactic, and it may work. But the underlying question — whether Apple's confidential product data ended up inside OpenAI's hardware roadmap — will be settled by discovery, not by a well-designed blog post.
What is clear is that the walled garden Apple spent decades building now has a very public crack in it. The irony is rich: the company that made 'privacy' a marketing line is now arguing in federal court that it cannot keep track of who has access to its own cloud storage after employees leave. Whether the fault lies with OpenAI or with Apple's own access-management failures, the answer matters enormously for every tech company that hires from competitors. The demo is not the product — and neither is the blog post.
