OpenAI Shoots Back at Apple Lawsuit by Publishing iMessage Receipts

OpenAI just replied to Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit, posting receipts in the form of recreated iMessage screenshots and email chains it says undercut Apple’s version of events.

The post published Sunday night, titled, “Apple is getting this wrong”, comes out swinging. “Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time, and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details,” OpenAI wrote. “This careless, aggressive and oddly personal lawsuit sadly doesn’t live up to that reputation.”

At the centre of the dispute are two former Apple employees now at OpenAI. Apple alleges that Chang Liu accessed confidential company information after leaving, and that Tang Tan tried to obtain and use Apple trade secrets. Tan spent more than 24 years at Apple before leaving.

OpenAI’s counter is that Apple’s own employees were the ones asking for the files. The company published a long stretch of iMessages between Liu, whose last day at Apple was January 22, 2026, and former colleagues who kept messaging him for help tracking down documents and technical details well after he had gone. In the exchanges, an Apple employee talks about using AirDrop to get files off Liu’s iCloud account, hunting for a drive big enough to copy everything, and at one point tells him, “I just signed out of your iCloud account. When it asked me if I wanted to keep a copy of your stuff, I said NO.”

Apple has since pointed to “residual access” as the issue. OpenAI says that’s a problem of Apple’s own making, arguing the company routinely fails to cut off system access when people leave, which means departing employees end up still holding files they never asked for and may not even know about.

Apple had claimed it reached out in February 2026 and got no response, and that it spoke with OpenAI’s General Counsel. OpenAI says neither is true, and that Apple’s outside lawyers simply emailed the wrong person after mixing up two Asian last names.

The published emails show Weil, Gotshal & Manges partner Gabriel Gross writing to OpenAI General Counsel Che Chang, then following up to thank him for a phone call that Chang says never happened.

“This guy from Weil claims to be representing you. For some reason, he is lying about speaking with me on the phone. I don’t know who he is and we have never spoken,” Chang wrote to Apple’s in-house lawyers.

Gross corrected the record the next morning, explaining he had meant to email a different former Apple employee. “After we had emailed Mr. Wang yesterday about retaining Apple information, he promptly called me and offered to cooperate with Apple in resolving any issues,” he wrote. Apple’s in-house counsel later confirmed to Chang that Weil was in fact representing the company and that there had been a miscommunication.

OpenAI says nothing more happened for five months, and then the lawsuit showed up.

As for Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction, OpenAI said it was “based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets,” adding that it would rather focus on building products than fight over documents it says it never wanted.

OpenAI’s title alone sounds like it took a page out of Steve Jobs, just shooting straight from the hip. Now that all of this is out in the open, who do you think is right here?