Yeah, based on their track record (I mean, even their name is a bad joke at this point) I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Turns out there's downsides to conducting yourself with little integrity.
> Apple now tries to shift the blame to “residual access”, but they also don’t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave.
I have been fixated on this topic for some time. Most people behave in a regulated and lawful manner to be on safer side. They do not trespass into some ones home just cause the owner happened to leave the door open.
Companies are using LLMs to hack into other organizations and giving it a spin about agent escaping the sand box. I am surprised how the impacted organizations are not filing lawsuits for damages unless they themselves have something to hide, (probably their reputation). Interestingly from what I remember there is a law that binds the public companies to reveal any intrusion, unless I am missing the names of impacted companies by LLM agent great escape has not been revealed fully.
Not buying it. In the end, OpenAI will throw these people under the bus and settle out.
I'm not Apple's biggest fan either (I got super upset when they conveniently wiped out all information about the person comiting suicide in one of their conference rooms and TMZ caught the police line and the sherif said "there is a gun, next to a dead person, we can't say much at the moment" and that was it). But it is unlikely that Apple would depriortize its brand on a fake story.
Setting aside the presented evidence, it feels weird for somewhat emotionally charged complaining like this to go on an official company blog. Companies are generally pretty tight-lipped about active litigation outside court documents, right? This just seems a bit amateurish, down to the title. Is public opinion about this case so important to them?
Yea that’s what strikes me as weird too. I had to look up at the web site bar to really confirm this was OpenAI and not some employee blog site. Just weird energy. Also, that text exchange made Apple look like a fun place to work.
Yeah this is the cloest a corporate company can get to drunk texting their ex at 3 am and reiterating how it wasn't their fault. But I mean its OpenAI, it loves drama
Haha omg what if someone at openai prompted a model to write this and the model could only come up with this unhinged version. It reads like a 3am manic text fest cuz that's what the model figures it should be.
When I look at the imessage conversation, one thing strikes me: that guy looks to be using the same icloud account he used when working for Apple with OpenAI. Is he using his own personal account? Why do both Apple and OpenAI allow that in the first place, this look so amateur. I would have assumed each company would have opened a different account for him and locked him when leaving.
Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
Apparently Apple encourages their employees to use their personal iCloud accounts for company information, because their own OS doesn't support one iPhone, multiple iCloud identities.
Always found it odd that Apple don't let you have a second separate business profile to switch your phone to for work - especially when you don't necessarily want to be bringing browser history/personal apps into your workplace or wifi. Having your iphone locked to your personal account also hobbles their continuity features if you work on a business computer with its own work account (as most businesses do).
Facebook is equally bad on this front - requiring you to use your personal account to administrate business pages (don't even get me started on how they forced large businesses to use a custom 2FA method they then phased out - locking people out of their personal accounts forever).
Either with a single local account that accesses multiple Google accounts, or multiple local accounts. Though this is device specific, it may be disabled by your manufacturer/provider.
As mentioned elsewhere though, an enrolled phone is an enrolled phone so corporate wiping will wipe the entire phone and not just the profile.
It's been a while, but at a previous job (maybe 8 years ago) I was responsible for managing mobile devices and using Blackberry's MDM suite, you could have segregation of personal and private data, where you couldn't move data from one "container" to the other, including clipboard data.
I'm out of the loop now, though.
Android did have better support at the time, but if I remember correctly, devices that had a work managed profile on them could still be completely wiped, including the personal/private container.
A bit of a pain, but I've always preferred (where possible) to have separate work and personal devices.
Yeah, I had an Android phone at work with separate personal/work profiles, but using the phone to begin with required one main account that had to be my personal one at least to begin with.
Wouldn't want one phone to be both personal and work though. They owned it, idk if I could've put my own sim in, and it got wiped when I quit.
I've heard multiple times directly from Apple employees that there is no way to login to iCloud on your work machine using a company-controlled account. Many people create new Apple ID's which they only use while working there, but others just use their personal iCloud accounts. You are, of course, not supposed to store company data in iCloud. But thanks to Apple's own efforts, it's difficult to use a Mac without being logged into iCloud (for example if you want to use the App store), and some data can easily spill into the iCloud account.
If accurate, it is of course patently absurd that Apple has left this an unsolved problem.
This is what gets people subpoena'd and their entirely private messages scrutinised. Happened to a lot of people, including a friend of mine who's affair became a matter of public record after his company was investigated for anti-trust issues. Super unprofessional and legally dangerous.
I keep two phones, one for work, another for private life, and also two laptops for the same reason. The support for multi-identity is nonexistent on apple, and very poor with whatsapp, signal and, really, most apps except for Google's. Shame, really, considering how well funded Apple and Meta are, and how little effort would be needed to implement the 80% of what people need: the ability to chat using different identities, without touching the rest of the OS wiring.
> Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
This doesn't seem out of line with common practices at other big tech firms. If you go work at Meta, your personal Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp/Oculus accounts become intrinsically linked to your work login identity (though a few employees created a secondary account on of all those to prevent this).
Although there are better controls than there used to be, it's not all that uncommon for sensitive work data to leak through this linkage into the public products...
Google allowed iMessage until a few years ago, when they banned all non-work messaging apps for exfiltration reasons. But you can still sign into a personal iCloud, which iirc you need to do for certain Mac App Store apps that are corp-approved.
On the phone with some App Store support person I was told they don't like people having multiple Apple IDs. That's why I use my personal one for work as well.
Correct, because other companies are not in a position to certify the security of iCloud meeting their own standards. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Apple trusts Apple more than other people trust Apple.
Odd, regardless, OpenAI is spreading itself too thin, trying to fight wars on the enterprise, consumer, and hardware fronts, and will likely end up losing them all.
>They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.
I find it bizarre that they felt the need to specify "Asian". What does that have to do with anything?
They are definitely trying to get you to think that Apple (the company perhaps single-handedly responsible for developing Chinese manufacturing) is racist
Does US law prevent (or frown upon) defendant from publicly publishing evidence, even when the plaintiff publicly published the accusation and their evidence first? If so, how is the defendant supposed to protect their public reputation when a lawsuit is ongoing for years? Or maybe I’m missing your point on what wouldn’t be looked upon kindly?
Corporate posting in the weeks immediately surrounding a legal case or ruling impacting tech companies is definitely my favorite brand of written text. Despite not paying full attention to EU legislation, I get reliably notified by Google about every tiny bit of antitrust from them posting a "Google brings millions into the EU's [field they are getting hit with antitrust in] ecosystem" vagueblog about it.
This feels like a trumpian tantrum from someone at openai. If they’re innocent, just win the lawsuit. Is this quibbling over details supposed to win the public over? Because afaik the public doesn’t know or care about this, and publicizing it just makes it worse.
“They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.”
Appels is getting everything wrong these days. I am so disappointed after buying a Mac mini M4 last year how everything is sandboxed and behind insane numbers of security layers. I will be moving to Linus as soon as my wallet allows it.
How shitty you must be as a company to go out and write this. Kindergarteners have better public policy. I have not seen any gathering of people (other than Trump's whole whatever that circus is called) this openly and easily tell lies. Gathering non profit funds then becoming for profit, Being built to do open source development and not shipping one result, going to the congress and saying "I'm not making any profit of this company" and rigging the world's economy... Now this shit "hey I was the nice person! I said nice things to Apple, look these are facts"
> we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets. We’re much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.
The veiled implication here is hilariously petty. This entire document is hilariously petty. And apparently, ignorant of the news cycle.
This does not build more trust in OpenAI. If it's-totally-a-misunderstanding and Apple-should-have-communicated-better is the best they can offer, well, good luck in court.
To me, this looks like OpenAI is terrified and tries to come out ahead of the public opinion to control the narrative. Such a shit company.
They built their whole business model on stolen data and act surprised when another company has zero trust in them.
Based on their track record this lawsuit is not unexpected at all.
Two things can be true: OpenAI can be an aggressive company with serious credibility problems, and Apple can still have handled this case carelessly
Yeah, based on their track record (I mean, even their name is a bad joke at this point) I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Turns out there's downsides to conducting yourself with little integrity.
> Apple now tries to shift the blame to “residual access”, but they also don’t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave.
I have been fixated on this topic for some time. Most people behave in a regulated and lawful manner to be on safer side. They do not trespass into some ones home just cause the owner happened to leave the door open.
Companies are using LLMs to hack into other organizations and giving it a spin about agent escaping the sand box. I am surprised how the impacted organizations are not filing lawsuits for damages unless they themselves have something to hide, (probably their reputation). Interestingly from what I remember there is a law that binds the public companies to reveal any intrusion, unless I am missing the names of impacted companies by LLM agent great escape has not been revealed fully.
Is it normal for a company this big to make a public blog post like this with almost no introduction to what they’re on about?
I would expect them to start out with something like Apple is suing us for yada yada yada, but instead it reads like the diary of a hurt teenager.
This reads like a mypillow CEO type post.
Its insane this is coming from a company with as much scope as openai. Scope may not be the right word.
They spend a lot of the investors’ money on that. All the videos they put out are extremely high quality.
They literally have communication experts sitting there, breaking theirs head over how to influence the public opinion in the company’s favor.
I guess they learned it from Elon: if people like you, they’ll just hold your stock forever, even if you don’t make much money.
> it reads like the diary of a hurt teenager.
Yep, down to the pages of iMessage screenshots
Not buying it. In the end, OpenAI will throw these people under the bus and settle out.
I'm not Apple's biggest fan either (I got super upset when they conveniently wiped out all information about the person comiting suicide in one of their conference rooms and TMZ caught the police line and the sherif said "there is a gun, next to a dead person, we can't say much at the moment" and that was it). But it is unlikely that Apple would depriortize its brand on a fake story.
Can you clarify the information deletion/wipeout?
RIP https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Ed_Mackowiak - Apple’s statement is linked there (and the bit about the woman in the Wiki might be outdated per TMZ correction https://www.tmz.com/2016/04/27/apple-campus-body-found-cuper... )
> the person commiting suicide in one of their conference rooms
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/apple-...
Setting aside the presented evidence, it feels weird for somewhat emotionally charged complaining like this to go on an official company blog. Companies are generally pretty tight-lipped about active litigation outside court documents, right? This just seems a bit amateurish, down to the title. Is public opinion about this case so important to them?
Yea that’s what strikes me as weird too. I had to look up at the web site bar to really confirm this was OpenAI and not some employee blog site. Just weird energy. Also, that text exchange made Apple look like a fun place to work.
Yeah this is the cloest a corporate company can get to drunk texting their ex at 3 am and reiterating how it wasn't their fault. But I mean its OpenAI, it loves drama
Haha omg what if someone at openai prompted a model to write this and the model could only come up with this unhinged version. It reads like a 3am manic text fest cuz that's what the model figures it should be.
They might be head hunting other Apple staff and wish to control the narrative to avoid scaring them off.
When I look at the imessage conversation, one thing strikes me: that guy looks to be using the same icloud account he used when working for Apple with OpenAI. Is he using his own personal account? Why do both Apple and OpenAI allow that in the first place, this look so amateur. I would have assumed each company would have opened a different account for him and locked him when leaving.
Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
Apparently Apple encourages their employees to use their personal iCloud accounts for company information, because their own OS doesn't support one iPhone, multiple iCloud identities.
Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/03/confidential-appl...
So yeah.
Always found it odd that Apple don't let you have a second separate business profile to switch your phone to for work - especially when you don't necessarily want to be bringing browser history/personal apps into your workplace or wifi. Having your iphone locked to your personal account also hobbles their continuity features if you work on a business computer with its own work account (as most businesses do).
Facebook is equally bad on this front - requiring you to use your personal account to administrate business pages (don't even get me started on how they forced large businesses to use a custom 2FA method they then phased out - locking people out of their personal accounts forever).
Most companies give you a company phone with a company iCloud account.
So iOS is essentially unprofessional. A toy for those who have either no job or no private life. How does Android score in that respect?
You can have multiple users on a single device.
https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin/multi-user
Either with a single local account that accesses multiple Google accounts, or multiple local accounts. Though this is device specific, it may be disabled by your manufacturer/provider.
As mentioned elsewhere though, an enrolled phone is an enrolled phone so corporate wiping will wipe the entire phone and not just the profile.
It's been a while, but at a previous job (maybe 8 years ago) I was responsible for managing mobile devices and using Blackberry's MDM suite, you could have segregation of personal and private data, where you couldn't move data from one "container" to the other, including clipboard data.
I'm out of the loop now, though.
Android did have better support at the time, but if I remember correctly, devices that had a work managed profile on them could still be completely wiped, including the personal/private container.
A bit of a pain, but I've always preferred (where possible) to have separate work and personal devices.
Yeah, I had an Android phone at work with separate personal/work profiles, but using the phone to begin with required one main account that had to be my personal one at least to begin with.
Wouldn't want one phone to be both personal and work though. They owned it, idk if I could've put my own sim in, and it got wiped when I quit.
Well, aint no way I'm working with a realtor over green bubbles.
I've heard multiple times directly from Apple employees that there is no way to login to iCloud on your work machine using a company-controlled account. Many people create new Apple ID's which they only use while working there, but others just use their personal iCloud accounts. You are, of course, not supposed to store company data in iCloud. But thanks to Apple's own efforts, it's difficult to use a Mac without being logged into iCloud (for example if you want to use the App store), and some data can easily spill into the iCloud account.
If accurate, it is of course patently absurd that Apple has left this an unsolved problem.
Yes this seems incoherent and incompatible for a company that supposedly care about their trade secrets.
I have used a Macbook at work for 5 years without signing into any iCloud account ever.
This is what gets people subpoena'd and their entirely private messages scrutinised. Happened to a lot of people, including a friend of mine who's affair became a matter of public record after his company was investigated for anti-trust issues. Super unprofessional and legally dangerous.
I keep two phones, one for work, another for private life, and also two laptops for the same reason. The support for multi-identity is nonexistent on apple, and very poor with whatsapp, signal and, really, most apps except for Google's. Shame, really, considering how well funded Apple and Meta are, and how little effort would be needed to implement the 80% of what people need: the ability to chat using different identities, without touching the rest of the OS wiring.
> Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
This doesn't seem out of line with common practices at other big tech firms. If you go work at Meta, your personal Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp/Oculus accounts become intrinsically linked to your work login identity (though a few employees created a secondary account on of all those to prevent this).
Although there are better controls than there used to be, it's not all that uncommon for sensitive work data to leak through this linkage into the public products...
Google allowed iMessage until a few years ago, when they banned all non-work messaging apps for exfiltration reasons. But you can still sign into a personal iCloud, which iirc you need to do for certain Mac App Store apps that are corp-approved.
>Is it standard practice at both Apple and OpenAI for employees to use their personal icloud account for work?
Yes.
Somewhat relevant from yesterday.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/03/apple-icloud-sharing-ex...
On the phone with some App Store support person I was told they don't like people having multiple Apple IDs. That's why I use my personal one for work as well.
I have never worked at a place where they gave us corporate Apple accounts.
We’ve always been asked to use our personal Apple account to install apps used for work.
Which is the point I've created a work Apple id unless they specifically set it up to prevent it.
Which has happened. Bonkers configuration.
Whereas I never worked in places where IT would not see that as a security violation.
Correct, because other companies are not in a position to certify the security of iCloud meeting their own standards. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Apple trusts Apple more than other people trust Apple.
Same here
Any self respecting lawyer would normally tell you to stfu and not post stuff like this. Judges don't like trial by press.
I think they are hoping what they did with Elon will work with Apple.
Odd, regardless, OpenAI is spreading itself too thin, trying to fight wars on the enterprise, consumer, and hardware fronts, and will likely end up losing them all.
Models are a lost cause anyway - https://open.substack.com/pub/taikhooms/p/why-openrouter-can...
Yay for more cherry-picked information.
A substantial amount of evidence in Apple's complaint isn't addressed, but what's shown here throws a decent amount of shade and doubt.
I have my popcorn ready for discovery. I hope it gets to that point, and I hope it proceeds to trial...
Spot on, while reading this post I couldn't help be wonder "but what about the prototypes"?
>They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.
I find it bizarre that they felt the need to specify "Asian". What does that have to do with anything?
They are definitely trying to get you to think that Apple (the company perhaps single-handedly responsible for developing Chinese manufacturing) is racist
I can't see a judge looking kindly on this being published prior to trial.
It's in court already, fight it there. Even if you win public opinion with your point of view you can still lose in court.
Does US law prevent (or frown upon) defendant from publicly publishing evidence, even when the plaintiff publicly published the accusation and their evidence first? If so, how is the defendant supposed to protect their public reputation when a lawsuit is ongoing for years? Or maybe I’m missing your point on what wouldn’t be looked upon kindly?
Two wrongs don't make a right, even if the plaintiff is playing dirty it doesn't give you the right to join in.
Assuming the exhibits aren't sealed they're publicly available as soon as they're entered by the court during trial.
If they're sealed there's probably a good reason they shouldn't be published until the trial is over.
Corporate posting in the weeks immediately surrounding a legal case or ruling impacting tech companies is definitely my favorite brand of written text. Despite not paying full attention to EU legislation, I get reliably notified by Google about every tiny bit of antitrust from them posting a "Google brings millions into the EU's [field they are getting hit with antitrust in] ecosystem" vagueblog about it.
This feels like a trumpian tantrum from someone at openai. If they’re innocent, just win the lawsuit. Is this quibbling over details supposed to win the public over? Because afaik the public doesn’t know or care about this, and publicizing it just makes it worse.
One thing is probably true: airdrop failed
Small digression. Silicon Valley never ceases to deliver top quality entertainment. We desperately need Season 2 of Silicon Valley series.
On a serious notes, this seems like a desperate attempt to sway public opinion, but hey, Apple is no saint either. This will be a fun season.
I wonder if they are throwing a public tantrum because GPT said that the were absolutely in the right and that it had the smoking gun to prove it
Appels is getting everything wrong these days. I am so disappointed after buying a Mac mini M4 last year how everything is sandboxed and behind insane numbers of security layers. I will be moving to Linus as soon as my wallet allows it.
The F does this have to do with anything?
How shitty you must be as a company to go out and write this. Kindergarteners have better public policy. I have not seen any gathering of people (other than Trump's whole whatever that circus is called) this openly and easily tell lies. Gathering non profit funds then becoming for profit, Being built to do open source development and not shipping one result, going to the congress and saying "I'm not making any profit of this company" and rigging the world's economy... Now this shit "hey I was the nice person! I said nice things to Apple, look these are facts"
Keep your garbage for the court.
> we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets. We’re much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.
The veiled implication here is hilariously petty. This entire document is hilariously petty. And apparently, ignorant of the news cycle.
This does not build more trust in OpenAI. If it's-totally-a-misunderstanding and Apple-should-have-communicated-better is the best they can offer, well, good luck in court.
I like how this addresses very little of Apple's core complaints. OpenAI are totally fucked.
I'm looking forward to see that with popcorns and great pleasure.