OpenAI says Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit is ‘rotten to its core’

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to dismiss Apple’s lawsuit that accuses the ChatGPT maker of stealing trade secrets. In a motion filed yesterday, OpenAI called the claims “meritless” and framed Apple’s case as “rotten to its core,” arguing that the complaint miscasts ordinary employee conduct and product work as theft.

The filing pushes a narrow legal and technical line: Apple is treating employee moves and “generic” product development information as if they were protected trade secrets. OpenAI’s position is that the complaint confuses confidential proprietary material with ordinary product development knowledge that people carry when they change jobs in AI, and that those facts do not support a theft theory under trade-secret law.

For engineers and builders, the fight is less about courtroom theater than about how firms define what walks out the door with talent. If courts accept Apple’s framing, teams hiring from large labs and big tech face more risk around onboarding, prior-art discussions, and any reuse of architecture patterns or product instincts learned on a previous job. If OpenAI’s dismissal theory holds, the bar for labeling “generic” product development information as a trade secret stays higher, which matters for anyone designing hiring, IP training, and clean-room processes.

The case also sits inside a broader talent war between Apple and OpenAI. Apple is treating personnel and product knowledge as strategic assets worth litigating; OpenAI is treating the suit as an overreach that would chill normal recruiting and competitive product work. That clash is familiar across the AI market: foundation-model companies and platform giants compete for the same researchers and product leads, then fight over how much of that shared craft can be claimed as exclusive.

What to watch next is whether the judge lets the complaint proceed past this motion to dismiss. A full dismissal would undercut Apple’s theory that OpenAI employee actions and product development information amount to trade-secret theft. Survival of the suit would force discovery into hiring practices, product roadmaps, and how each side draws the line between protectable secrets and generic AI product knowledge.