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Apple hits back at OpenAI’s bid to dismiss lawsuit, reaffirms ‘pervasive trade secret misappropriation’
Apple has filed its response to OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit in which it accuses two former employees, as well as OpenAI and io Products, of stealing its trade secrets. Here are the details.
A few days ago, OpenAI filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit Apple brought against the company, io Products, Chang Liu, and Tang Tan, alleging trade secret theft.
In its request, OpenAI says Apple filed the lawsuit “without adequate investigation,” and goes on to present its version of the events that led to Apple’s lawsuit.
OpenAI structures its rebuttal around three main arguments: that Apple “has failed to demonstrate it owns a protectable trade secret,” that the company “has failed to allege conduct that plausibly supports a claim of misappropriation,” and that it “fails to plausibly allege any injury or ongoing harm.”
It claims, for instance, that contrary to Apple’s accusations, former Apple employee Chang Liu was consulted by former colleagues after leaving the company, rather than accessing Apple information without authorization, while former Apple VP Tang Tan retained Apple’s offboarding document to help ensure new hires complied with its security procedures.
The company also argues that Apple’s own information-management and offboarding practices were partly to blame, claiming that employees were encouraged to use personal iCloud accounts for work and that Apple failed to properly cut off access to company data after they left.
Today, Apple filed its response to OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, where it picks apart OpenAI’s counter-arguments, and says that “[s]imply put, Defendants do not grapple with the shocking allegations at the core of the Complaint. “
Apple argues that its original complaint “sufficiently identifies specific trade secrets that defendants misappropriated,” and cites previous cases where courts found similar levels of detail sufficient to let trade secret claims move forward.
Apple also says that OpenAI’s allegations that it didn’t do enough to protect its trade secrets “are likewise not credible,” adding that OpenAI “trivialize[s] Apple’s trade secrets as mere ‘supplier relationships’ and then question[s] whether all ‘supplier relationships’ are confidential.”
The company further argues that OpenAI is also misusing the motion-to-dismiss mechanism altogether. From the document: