Apple formally sues OpenAI for AI iPhone

"Santa Clara Pizza Hut" is finally officially launched. On July 10, local time, Apple officially filed a lawsuit, accusing OpenAI of stealing company secrets by recruiting former Apple employees. According to the lawsuit, a former Apple senior electrical engineer named Chang Liu discovered that he could still access Apple's cloud file storage after leaving the company. The reason was that he kept the company-issued laptop when he left the company, and there was a loophole in Apple's system that allowed him to continue reading internal files after leaving the company. Apple named OpenAI’s chief hardware officer Tang Tan in the lawsuit, alleging that these actions were directly directed by OpenAI’s senior leadership. Apple wrote in the lawsuit, "This is just the tip of the iceberg, where these inappropriate behaviors have become the norm and are modeled by leadership." If this statement is true, this is not just an individual mistake by a former employee, but a systematic intelligence acquisition mechanism. Tang Tan was originally a core figure at Apple and has long been responsible for the hardware development of Apple Watch and wearable devices. He joined OpenAI as "chief hardware officer" - a position that basically did not exist at OpenAI a year ago. This shows that OpenAI established the hardware department not on a whim, but as a serious team builder. Apple also mentioned in the complaint that more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI. This is not an ordinary recruitment, this is OpenAI’s organized targeted blasting of Apple’s hardware team! 01 Failed Cooperation To understand today’s lawsuit, we have to go back to the handshake in 2024. That year Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iOS. The presentation was beautifully presented, with Cook and Altman each saying something that sounded like mutual admiration. But friction behind cooperation has always been there. Apple is worried that OpenAI’s privacy standards are not strict enough, and it is not safe to hand over user data to one