Apple Says an Ex-Engineer Took Circuit Schematics to OpenAI, Then Tried to Erase the Trail

Apple's trade secrets fight with OpenAI now has a name attached to it. In an amended complaint filed August 31, Apple accuses Chang Liu, a former senior system electrical engineer who left for OpenAI, of downloading dozens of confidential Apple files after he'd already started the new job. Circuit schematics among them, Apple says.

Then it gets worse for Liu, at least in Apple's telling. Apple claims that once he found out about the internal investigation, he directed an OpenAI coworker to "restore" Apple-issued devices, which Apple reads as an attempt to destroy forensic evidence. All of this is an allegation in an active lawsuit. Nothing has been proven, and OpenAI denies it.

What Apple says it found on the MacBook

The filing leans on a forensic examination of a MacBook Liu used. Apple says the trail shows him reaching into third-party cloud storage and pulling down confidential files, then putting the material to work in his OpenAI job by running simulations in LTspice, the circuit simulation tool electrical engineers use to model power circuits before anyone solders anything. Apple also says Liu referenced tools with names identical to its own proprietary internal engineering software.

What Apple wants out of this particular filing is speed. It's part of a push for expedited discovery, which in plain terms means getting to look at the rest of Liu's devices before anything else goes missing. Judge Edward J. Davila is scheduled to hear arguments October 1.

Why it's a hardware fight

The people at the center of the case are hardware engineers. Apple now alleges that 11 former employees shared trade secrets with OpenAI, all of it connected to its hardware business. OpenAI, meanwhile, is openly building hardware and hiring the people who know how to do it. So Apple is suing over hardware engineers who went to work on hardware for a rival, which is a different sort of problem than losing a few researchers.

Every consumer electronics company loses engineers to rivals, and there's nothing wrong with carrying your expertise across the street. The line Apple says Liu crossed is the one between what's in your head and what's on your hard drive.

What OpenAI says

OpenAI denies wrongdoing and has called Apple's charges "careless, aggressive and oddly personal," a defense that doubles as a jab. None of this has been tested in court yet. Apple assembled a detailed forensic story and filed it, and a document written to win an expedited discovery motion is going to be written for maximum impact.

Davila hears it October 1. If Apple gets the discovery it's asking for, we find out fairly quickly whether that story holds up once someone else gets to read the drives.