Editorial Team
5 min read
OpenAI has published emails and messages challenging parts of Apple’s trade-secrets case. The material confirms a misdirected lawyer email, but the redacted messages also document efforts to transfer and retrieve Apple work around a former employee’s departure, leaving the core allegation unresolved.
OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has made its answer to Apple’s trade-secrets lawsuit unusually public: emails and iMessages intended to show that Apple’s early outreach was mishandled and that Apple employees continued to seek help from a former colleague. The record does establish a lawyer’s mistake. It also makes the company’s broader defense harder to treat as a clean exoneration.
Apple, the iPhone maker, alleges that former employees took confidential hardware information to benefit OpenAI’s future consumer-hardware work. In its published response, OpenAI says it neither has nor wants Apple’s trade secrets, calls the injunction request unnecessary, and says Apple’s account relies on false information. The post is a company argument, not a judicial finding—and its most revealing evidence cuts in more than one direction.
The February correspondence concerns Che Chang, OpenAI’s general counsel. Apple’s outside lawyer, Gabriel Gross, initially emailed Chang about former Apple employees retaining confidential information, then sent a follow-up saying Chang had called to offer cooperation. Chang replied that he had never spoken with the lawyer.
Gross later wrote that the follow-up had been intended for another former Apple employee, identified only as Wang in the published material, and was accidentally sent on the Chang email chain. An Apple in-house lawyer subsequently confirmed that the firm represented Apple.
That sequence supports OpenAI’s narrow point that a message referring to a call with Chang was erroneous. OpenAI also says Apple did not raise the lawsuit’s specific allegations during the exchange and that it heard nothing more for five months. The published emails show the correction and refer to “resolving any issues”; they cannot, on their own, establish what Apple knew about the later allegations or whether it had evidence sufficient to pursue them.
Apple filed the suit on July 10, and OpenAI first issued a short public denial that day before expanding its response weeks later, as the contemporaneous account records. The mistaken email therefore matters to the story of notice and communication; it does not answer the alleged handling of files.
OpenAI-published notification included in its Jan. 23 message record. Source: OpenAI.
Chang Liu is a former Apple employee who now works at OpenAI. OpenAI says his last day at Apple was January 22, 2026. The messages it released show a former colleague discussing a 64GB drive, copying, an AirDrop attempt, files in Liu’s iCloud folder, and an effort to complete the transfer before the colleague clicked the Workday departure control.
They also include Liu’s statement that some folders were personal notes, while other files were shared by other people. Days later, a colleague says Liu’s iCloud had been signed out and that no copy was kept. Because file names and substantial content are redacted, the published exchange does not identify what was transferred, who retained it, or whether any particular Apple trade secret was involved.
That qualification is important. OpenAI uses the messages to argue that Apple employees—not Liu—were trying to locate information for Apple work and that Apple failed to remove former employees’ permissions, leaving “residual access.” Those are OpenAI’s claims about the sequence and the system. But the disclosed conversation also records active efforts to copy and move files as Liu was leaving, which is closer to the factual terrain Apple says requires examination.
The released messages contain later requests for Liu’s recollection of Apple work. On March 5, after a thread included Apple technical material, Liu replied: “Hi, this is highly irregular, please remove me from this thread.” An Apple colleague then said the discussion would continue internally.
That exchange lends support to OpenAI’s argument that Liu resisted at least that request. It does not resolve Apple’s separate allegation that confidential information was accessed after his departure. Nor can redacted screenshots settle whether information was shared internally, used by OpenAI, or remained in systems after the exchange.
The other central former Apple executive is Tang Yew Tan, now at OpenAI. Before leaving, Tan spent more than 24 years at Apple and was vice president of product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch. That record explains why Apple’s allegation is not simply an employment dispute: it says information tied to its hardware development could help an OpenAI consumer-device effort.
OpenAI says Tan instructed his team that it must not use confidential information from other companies. That is a relevant compliance claim, but the post supplies an assertion rather than an independent account of what work, records or controls existed inside OpenAI. The public sources in this package also do not establish the design, price, manufacturing plan or release timing of any OpenAI device, so those potential competitive effects remain unquantified.
Apple has asked a US court to preliminarily bar OpenAI, Liu and Tan from accessing, using or sharing the alleged material, and to speed document production and depositions, according to a report on the request. Apple said in its filing that it would be irreparably harmed without preliminary relief; OpenAI calls that request baseless and unnecessary. Those remain the parties’ competing positions.
The next consequential test is whether the dispute moves beyond selected messages. The email correction materially undercuts one detail in Apple’s account of early contact. Liu’s response to the March thread gives OpenAI evidence of a refusal. Yet neither item identifies the alleged confidential material, traces it into OpenAI, or shows whether it informed hardware work.
The records most likely to clarify the central question are the underlying files and transfer logs, the scope and timing of any residual access, and internal communications and device records capable of showing possession, sharing or use. Until those are tested alongside Apple’s specific allegations, OpenAI’s publication is best understood as a challenge to portions of Apple’s narrative—not proof that the trade-secrets case has been decided.
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