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

Post by bigyabai » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 8:16 PM UTC

fny wrote: post #864

bigyabai wrote: post #803

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Developers didn't get a choice. It was either "pay for Apple's development services" or "don't publish apps" which isn't a very competitive or fair option when the App Store can arbitrarily reject you.

Of course they did: they could have just chosen to not publish apps which would have crippled iOS. The only reason it feels existential is because developers made a Faustian bargain from the beginnning.

Post by joe_mamba » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 8:18 PM UTC

ryukoposting wrote: post #736

discopicante wrote: post #626

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These were long tenured and valued employees at Apple. They likely already had healthy pile of cash and stock. Maybe it was the environment at OpenAI encouraging this behavior. Or, is this a particular set of skills some/all of the individuals mentioned were already well-practiced at? I hope this case goes to court so we can find out.

This is the caricature of Silicon Valley made real. It doesn't matter how much money Liu had, it isn't enough. It will never be enough. The entire culture is fixated on maximizing growth. Whether that's growth of the corporation or growth of one's own wealth. The Reagan-era "greed is good" thing never really died here (among other places).

Post by msabalau » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 8:19 PM UTC

overgard wrote: post #841

semiquaver wrote: post #739

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IP infringement is not theft . There’s a whole “you wouldn’t download a car” meme about this. Intellectual property has always been a made up idea that has been abused for years by big companies far in excess of its societal value. I’m not sad that the force of IP restrictions seems to be weakening, but I am surprised to see so many people in tech that previously were pretty lassez faire on IP to suddenly take it so…

Didn't Anthropic pay like $3 billion dollars or something for their IP theft? And yes, I'm going to keep calling it theft. Comparing a kid stealing a song off limewire to a company stealing the entire internet is not the same thing.

Post by joe_mamba » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 8:23 PM UTC

tcp_handshaker wrote: post #883

Aurornis wrote: post #753

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> 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…

>>Most likely the opposite: Their new job brought them into a company surrounded by high performers who got their by working hard. This is just another edition of Google "we only hire the best" with nothing to show for it for 20 years. Were these the high performers, who created the disaster called ChatGPT Work ?

Post by joe_mamba » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 8:35 PM UTC

isleyaardvark wrote: post #797

embedding-shape wrote: post #535

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> $95k does not seems like enough money to totally upend your life like that for. That's because most of us here are so used to the amount of money we earn. But for people who literally struggling with month-to-month payments, 100K feels like a life-changing amount of money. If they were just saving month by month, they might have never reached that amount in their entire life. Our perspectives here on HN are very on…

There was a thread here not too long ago about employees getting fired because they were cheating on their expense accounts. C-level execs cheating on pretty trivial amounts. And others brought up star athletes getting paid millions, then getting busted placing thousands of dollars on insider bets. There's a lot of irrationality in these decisions.