Apple accuses OpenAI of destroying evidence in trade secrets case

There is now a court filing in which the busiest worker is an AI agent.

What the filing says

On August 31, Apple escalated its trade-secrets lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of destroying evidence. Per Bloomberg, TechCrunch and MacRumors, Apple says former iPhone engineer Chang Liu downloaded a confidential circuit schematic and, two months after leaving the company, ran it through the LTspice chip simulator in his work at OpenAI.

The detail that separates this from an ordinary trade-secrets dispute is automation. In messages cited in the filing, Liu wrote that his AI “agent learned how to run LTspice, look at result, tune compensation parameter,” cutting a day of engineering work to two hours.

Apple also says that when Liu learned about the investigation in June, he sent a colleague instructions for destroying evidence, and she confirmed she would comply. Everything here is allegation, not a court finding.

OpenAI’s response

OpenAI calls the lawsuit “careless, aggressive and oddly personal,” says it does not want Apple’s trade secrets, and attributes any “residual access” to Apple’s own offboarding failures. The hearing is set for October 1.

The wider exposure

Apple’s filing counts over 400 former Apple employees at OpenAI. Engineers have always moved between companies carrying knowledge in their heads, and trade-secrets law has a century of practice with that. What it does not yet have is practice with an autonomous agent turning that knowledge into running tooling in an afternoon. This case is positioned to produce some of the first answers on where the liability sits when the work was done by software acting on a person’s behalf.