OpenAI responded to the lawsuit on Tuesday, accusing the tech giant of “hiding facts” and of being careless in suing the AI company.
For example, it said that one of Apple’s external lawyers had confused two people with different Asian last names when trying to contact OpenAI before the lawsuit.
Gabriel Gross, of law firm Weil, emailed Che Chang, OpenAI’s lawyer, in February to raise concerns about OpenAI staff. He sent a second email minutes later claiming to have spoken to him on the phone.
When Chang wrote to Apple’s in-house legal team accusing Gross of lying, Gross wrote to him again to apologise and state that the second email was a misunderstanding, having been intended for a former Apple employee whose second name was “Wang”.
OpenAI said after this incident it did not hear from Apple for five months before the iPhone maker’s lawsuit.
‘Oddly personal lawsuit’
The company also hit back at Apple’s claims that Chang Liu, a former employee, had accessed confidential information after leaving Apple for OpenAI.
It published a series of text messages between Liu and an Apple employee that appeared to show the iPhone maker was attempting to recover information on Liu’s laptop, which is why he was still connected to his work account.
“Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details. This careless, aggressive and oddly personal lawsuit sadly doesn’t live up to that reputation,” OpenAI said.
The ChatGPT maker is reportedly preparing to launch a puck-like speaker device that would be able to respond to users’ commands and compete with Apple’s Siri.
The company denies that it has or wants access to Apple’s trade secrets.
The legal case is the latest sign of growing tensions in Silicon Valley prompted by the rapid development of AI, which promises to reshape tech as well as global economies.
Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, separately appeared to criticise AI company Anthropic on Monday for attempting to “colonise” businesses who use its services.
He said there was a “small tiny group of people living in a tiny place that somehow believes because they eat vegetables and they don’t support war fighters that they deserve to have the total means of production of this country”.
This appeared to be a reference to Anthropic, which has restricted how people can use its Claude systems, including a row with the Pentagon.
Karp said: “It’s actually being done for what they believe are moral reasons. They [believe they] are superior to you. They deserve to colonise your enterprise. You deserve to be colonised.”
He made the comments as Palantir unveiled a jump in revenues and said more companies were choosing to use it to avoid dependence on major AI labs.
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.
