Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#811

Post by neya » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

gdhvkkk wrote: post #363

neya wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice how the description never included the term "ethical". That's something you injected as an assumption to make a counter point. Not blaming you, just highlighting the flaw in your argument. Because, the lack of mention of that word IS a culture issue.

> Because, the lack of mention of that word IS a culture issue. or, how you interpret the question is part of the interview process...

That's really an apologist take on behalf of the world's largest VC whose companies have time and again proven ethics don't matter.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#812

Post by justinhj » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

jtfrench wrote: post #339

Until the industry addresses the Original Sin of Generative AI (and the ascendance of Thievery Corporations), we should expect more and more of this. So far, theft has been rewarded. As long as you make enough money, people seem to be okay with ignoring long-lasting impacts of intellectual theft. As long as you become King of the Cannibals, it seems many are happy to remember you as King and not as the Cannibal.

Unlike Uber and Airbnb that did break local laws and got away with it because people wanted their service (and also deep pockets for handling litigation and encouraging politicians to see your way), training an ai is generally not theft.

If I read a physics textbook and now I know some physics do I perform a theft when I use it practice or teach someone else?

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#813

Post by parineum » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #341

nujabe wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, who is “we”? Why are you so invested in enforcing Apple’s IP rights?

Bad people in control of AI is incredibly dangerous.

Good thing they're just in control of a bunch of LLMs.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#814

Post by FireBeyond » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

trollbridge wrote: post #287

achierius wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many devices are indeed locked down. But given that it's an OS company and hardware vendor, many employees have access to hardware with e.g. SoC fusing that allows them to install custom-signed firmware. It's very difficult to make an OS lock out the people whose job it is to build the platform that OS depends on.

I once worked at a cybersecurity firm and they had a particularly botched rollout of MDM to Macs (which would regularly put the machine into an undesirable mode of 100% CPU usage plus max out upload bandwidth repeatedly trying and failing to backup the machine to some online backup service). I had work to do, so I simply disabled the MDM profile for the machine, installed an OS to my liking, and restored the apps I w…

> I then suggested I did get hired for my cybersecurity expertise, that I do take my obligations seriously, and he could just ask me to do whatever they were planning to do from the MDM console, and it would get done. He insisted that wouldn't be necessary since in his worldview the MDM was unbreakable and he just needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi or something.

Which is hilarious. They've fixed (or at least made it more robust), but until at least Ventura, you want to know how to circumvent MDM entirely on Apple Silicon?

Do a fresh install with Internet access. When the machine goes to do the first reboot during the process, null route three hostnames on your router/DNS: deviceenrollment.apple.com, mdmenrollment.apple.com and iprofiles.apple.com.

Complete setup and get logged in.

You can now remove the null routing. Your machine will never phone home again for MDM enrollment. You can upgrade, all the way to Tahoe. No issues.

As of the more recent releases, the installer does do some checks to ensure connectivity to those hosts, that I haven't bothered or needed to try to circumvent... but yeah, the idea of Apple ensuring their MDM to be unbreakable, durable, robust is laughable.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#815

Post by Aurornis » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #760

Aurornis wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its also how some folks act like when they've done something they morally can't deal with I think you’re projecting some other ideas on to this situation. These people weren’t driven by subconscious guilt about being paid a lot which drove them to commit literal crimes, in order to solidify their new high paying job. This doesn’t even make sense. People who do this are just corporate climbers who will use anything…

You think OpenAI didn’t encourage, or even tell them to steal apple IP? Like yes, the employees are not bastions of morality, but they didn’t do it out of insecurity, but because they were recruited to steal IP

I was responding to a comment that said they did this in response to subconscious guilt about stock options.

From the complaint we can see that OpenAI at least looked the other way, but the complaint also has texts from the person to another Apple employee. When you're committed crimes and texting "LOL" as you describe the crimes to a friend, I don't believe for one second that the person is feeling guilty or ashamed.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#816

Post by FireBeyond » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

ifwinterco wrote: post #719

justusthane wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then suggested I did get hired for my cybersecurity expertise, that I do take my obligations seriously, and he could just ask me to do whatever they were planning to do from the MDM console, and it would get done. He insisted that wouldn't be necessary since in his worldview the MDM was unbreakable and he just needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi or something. > Very amusing worldview. It’s ironic that you’re displaying th…

I once had work MDM on a Mac just... disappear one day. They definitely didn't intentionally remove it, nor did I do anything to remove it, but one day it just wasn't there. Maybe accidentally removed from the MDM management console for some reason? Either way, everything still worked exactly as before, just now my Mac wasn't reporting back to the company at all. This went on for over a year until eventually I left t…

See my sibling comment - Apple MDM is, or at least was fragile, and trivial to bypass.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#817

Post by overgard » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

impulser_ wrote: post #350

This is basically the end of OpenAI hardware. This is by far worst than the Waymo vs. Uber lawsuit which killed the Uber self driving project. Also if you are a business using OpenAI models, I would highly suggest you do not because they are most likely looking at your code and IP.

Use local hardware if you can people! Chatbots are a luxury anyway and the local ones are catching up. You don't need the fanciest bells and whistles. Don't believe the narrative that you're "falling behind" if you're not using the latest model 20 hours a day.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#818

Post by overgard » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

overfeed wrote: post #90

Robdel12 wrote: post #70

OpenAI is about to get ROCKED on this. From this report, this looks open and shut. Apple has basically infinite money and incredible lawyers. Not sure what OpenAI can counter with unless they have clear, hard evidence this hasn’t been happening.

OpenAI also has infinite money, and the graph for money/lawyering gets clamped well below what OpenAI can afford. It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.

Nope, OpenAI is the equivalent of a rich kid spending his parents money (they certainly aren't making it). As soon as VC dries up and the hyper scalers stop subsidizing them the bills are going to come due very quickly.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

(This was independently verified by the Financial Times)

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#819

Post by Zigurd » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

derektank wrote: post #738

Zigurd wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame copyright law. AI training is very comparable to compiling an inverted index, which is considered transformational even though you can recover the input documents from an inverted index.

To be maximally charitable, while creating large language models has been ruled to be transformative and thus fair use under current copyright law, Anthropic did separately violate copyright law when procuring copyrighted text from LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror. That being said, I agree with you, creating LLMs from copyrighted material is very clearly not a violation of copyright under the current legal regime, so…

I am an author of a couple of books that are part of the Anthropic settlement.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#820

Post by t0mpr1c3 » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #433

paxys wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence is domain-specific. People who have put too many skill points in technical knowledge often have none left for common sense and street-smarts.

Intelligence is actually extremely general and transferrable - IQ measures meta skills and ability that predicts success in a plethora of areas. If you don’t believe in IQ consider agency and conscientiousness

No, stupidity is very general. The statistical association between different areas of ability, which is reified in the concept of IQ, is because people who are bad at one thing are bad at everything. The Stanford-Binet test was developed as a way to measure mental disability, not giftedness.

(Einstein would have had an unexceptional score on an IQ test, had he ever taken one. His schoolteachers thought him destined for failure.)

To put it another way, polymaths are unusual but idiots are everywhere. And people who are outstandingly good at say, computer engineering can be mediocre at philosophy or business administration.

Psychometrists distiguish between crystallized and fluid intelligence. Expertise is a combination of knowledge and ability. But ability itself is multifaceted, and raw talent goes untapped without the motivation to study and the opportunity to work.

For most areas of human endeavor, being smart enough is all that is required. Being a genius helped Albert Einstein reimagine physics, but did not make him a better patent clerk.