> OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can.
> Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan.
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI.
Non-competes and the like are gross but what's described here isn't just "bring your expertise to OpenAI" it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
It gets even worse. The person not only kept the laptop and used an exploit to download confidential Apple documents, they bragged about it to a contact who was still working at Apple who was also feeding him information:
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI. He also maintained a relationship with Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng, an Apple employee who continued to give him updates on Apple's projects, vendor decisions, and engineering details. When Liu learned he still had access to Apple's systems, he texted Peng "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny."
This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.
Doing it at a the company that most aggressively enforces secrecy is even crazier.
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Its also how some folks act like when they've done something they morally can't deal with - their subconscious starts throwing all sorts of obvious signs up until they get caught. I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you show up or not, enjoy your retirement.
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).
> 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 they can to boost their status. Stealing from past employer feels like a way to make yourself more valuable or indispensable, which gives them a feeling of leverage in their new job.
> I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you show up or not, enjoy your retirement.
Most likely the opposite: Their new job brought them into a company surrounded by high performers who got their by working hard. They probably felt insecure in such a competitive environment and thought that stealing from Apple could make them appear more valuable so they could keep up with the demands.
Pre-IPO companies in highly competitive markets are not “rest and vest” environments.
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.
> they morally can't deal with - their subconscious starts throwing all sorts of obvious signs up until they get caught
That's the view narcissistic have of human nature: "we feel so bad when we behave selfishly, because deep inside we are so naturally virtuous". It's very comfortable to believe that deep inside we remain virtous/innocent even if our life clearly shows how mediocre we are. In the real world, you are what you do.
Not so.. He’s being sued personally as well. the lawsuit is Apple vs. “ CHANG LIU, TANG YEW TAN, OPENAI FOUNDATION f/k/a OPENAI, INC., OPENAI GROUP PBC, and IO PRODUCTS, LLC f/k/a IO PRODUCTS, INC.”
An acquaintance of mine was accidentally wired about $100k when it was supposed to be $5k. Before it could be reversed, they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country. They then changed all socials and handles. They are now ignoring all court documents and are on track to get a default judgement against them.
Their rationale? “It’s mine, they owed me this”. They are 100% convinced that they are in the right, not just that they can keep it but that they actually intended to send them this to begin with. I get it $100k isn’t nothing but they’re also throwing their life away for less than what they used to make a year in salary.
People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
I had a client send me an ACH that was legitimately a fat finger extra zero. For me, it was a "lot" of truck payments. For them, it was a rounding error that they were unaware of until I reached out and let them know about their mistake. I couldn't wait to make it right with them because it bothered me so much because suddenly I had a pile of money that was theirs and not mine.
I had a similar situation where someone had their email client configured with my address in the reply-to header. We shared a first initial, last name, and isp… also happened to be my email address. His email was firsnamelastname, or something similar. I emailed the guy several times explaining how to fix it, and that I was getting a lot of his business correspondence. Never heard from him.
Then one day I get a Chase Zelle email saying that someone was sending me money. Something like $500. Logged into the Chase app and sure enough, could have taken it with the click of a button.
I contacted the sender to explain the situation and recommended they call the intended recipient for a correct email address.
Couldn’t image just taking it knowing it wasn’t intended for me.
Had a similar experience. Was at a party when I suddenly received a notification from our country's equivalent to cashapp/Venmo. It was about $450, so not a lot but enough to be significant to many people. About a minute later I get a call from a seemingly young man who's very stressed telling me he sent the money to the wrong number and asking me to send it back. I told him don't worry I'll get your money back but I need to contact customer service first just to make sure it's safe for me to do so. I wanted to avoid some kind of charge back scam or similar.
So I called CS, they said it was safe to return the money and so I did and the guy called back just to thank me.
This reminds me of the terribly designed timesheet system I was using earlier this year, where I accidentally logged like 55 hours of work for something instead of 55 minutes… I got a shocking direct deposit that week and had to mail them back a large check. Really hope they definitely don’t mess up the 1099!
> An acquaintance of mine was accidentally wired about $100k when it was supposed to be $5k. Before it could be reversed, they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country. They then changed all socials and handles. They are now ignoring all court documents and are on track to get a default judgement against them.
$95k does not seems like enough money to totally upend your life like that for.
> $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 one-sided when it comes to things like this, anyone who been poor previously (or is currently) could attest to this.
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.
I don't know, the very same comment mentions that the person was earning 6 figures. Less-than-a-year's-salary is definitely a weird thing to throw a comfortable 6 figure income out the window for - it's not like 95k is "never work a day in your life" money.
> I don't know, the very same comment mentions that the person was earning 6 figures.
What does that mean for where and how the person live though? How much money were they realistically having left at the end of the month? 6 figures surely means a lot in some places, in others not so much and maybe they didn't have much left after all. Even with 1K left in a month on average, that's 95 months (~8 years) of saving for the same amount, maybe it was always the plan to just get the fuck out once they got close to 100K or whatever.
Humans do rash things, especially when some shortcut appears. But all this is also speculation and hypothesizing, who knows the real reasons behind it for sure.
> What does that mean for where and how the person live though?
It means they lived somewhere where a 6-figure income is feasible, which already puts it on the expensive end of the spectrum. If they are fleeing to somewhere where 95k looks like retirement money, that's not going to be a place where replacing that 6-figure income is feasible (especially with a default judgement against them blocking access to the whole US-influenced banking network)
I don’t think that changes the equation any? If you are underwater on 100k/year, you sure as shit are going to end up underwater on 95k for the entire rest of your life…
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
It's more that money and power enable you to be who you really are, and amplify your worst traits if you're lacking self-awareness.
There are many people who are rich/wealthy and/or powerful and they're decent individuals living relatively ordinary lives. You don't read about most of them because they're "normal".
If the only reason you didn't behave that way to begin with is that you lack the money and power to evade the consequences, then yes. You really are that person.
while i somewhat agree with that reasoning, it can go too far - most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so. But is it right to say who they really are as being murderers?
> most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so
Do you have any evidence to support this? Feels like this opinion is made up, for unknown reasons.
In reality, psychopathic tendencies are about 4.5% in the general adult population, a far cry from 'most people', with the gold standard assessment being only 1.2%. [1]
From that same article, "The construct of psychopathy is understood generically as a type of personality disorder characterized, among other important features, by the presence of behaviors that conflict with the social, moral, or legal norms of society, giving rise in many cases to clearly criminal behaviors ..."
There's also the bagel experiment described in Freakonomics. [2]
Same goes for money: It enables greedy jerks to be more greedy and more of a jerky, and it enables people who e.g. voluntarily donated already to do much more in that direction, too.
I believe the original statement is an oversimplification. What actually happens is that extreme situations, both positive and negative, can help you discover things about you that you didn't know before.
Apart from that, the problem with "who you really are" is that individual is more of a process than a static thing, so any such reification becomes invalid in the next instant.
You're right that people aren't static, but we should also acknowledge there are lots of people who become rich and powerful and they don't do horrid things. Many are perfectly decent people who care for their families, help those around them, contribute to their communities and use their wealth and power to support causes that are important to them.
You don't hear about these people as much because they're not out looking for attention, making outlandish statements or even trying to "change the world" in a narcisstic Silicon Valley way.
"Who you are" at your core drives the direction you go in when you acquire wealth and power.
I'd say who you really are is whoever you really are. If you're acting like a dick then you really are a dick, I don't care whether your financial situation influences your behavior.
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
Given your story its not sounds like this is power grab. More like they actually on spectrum and have some mental issues on top this. Or had mental breakdown because something happened before that money arrived.
Situations when people do something weird, bad or just plain evil for money and power are usually logical. E.g people think they got access to more money they percieve they can earn in next decade, or ever, something that settles them for life.
Earning more than $100,000 and throwing everything away for $95,000 only make sense if you are terminally ill. Or if it was never your real identify in first place and its well planned scam.
If you're earning $100k in Silicon Valley, your expenses will swallow up almost all of that. A sudden $100k windfall, on the other hand, tax free and suitably invested,will let you live for years quite comfortably in many poor countries.
Sorry to disappoint you, but no you cannot live "comfortably" in "poor countries" for $100,000 for "years". Well, unless you mean like two years.
I lived across South East Asia for more than decade and now live here full time. I have to live on around $20,000 / year most of the time since starting my company. And I do not live anywhere close to what average US / EU citizen will call "comfortable" let alone people from valley.
Stories of rich living for cheap in poor countries its just that: stories. It only possible if you preserve your US salary. For $50,000 post tax a year you can live well unless you have kids that need not a "poor country education".
I live in what according to Wikipedia is 18th most expensive country in the world. Average person working full time as a nurse here earns about 30k dollars a year after taxes. If they can survive here, 20k a year in most of South East Asia should be perfectly fine for comfortable life.
Sure, if you're starting from nothing and expect to live a Western lifestyle. But you can draw down $5000/year from that sum for a very long time, and make twice the average Indian yearly income.
One more thing about life in developing countries, ones with seemingly super low GDP per capita. Its that low because a lot of economy in rural areas is simple unaccounted for: communities build their own housing, grow their own food or work in family business usually with no accounting or taxes whatsoever.
If you're born there you unlikely to ever end up in US on $100,000+ job unless your whole family or village invest in it.
If you're expat you will soon end up finding out that as expat you'll pay completely different prices and starting local business is just impossible unless you become part of a family.
EU have free healthcare and education. Also not everyone, but alot of people still own their own houses and appartments or they can get relatively cheap mortage.
Nothing of it available in cheap country for expat. If you move to developing country you better pay for health insurance like 80-250 EUR / month / person.
Also if you have a partner who is not remote worker they might not be able to find well paid job there. If you have kids then giving them good modern education in English is exorbitantly expensive.
I wont even start about fact that government of cheap country might change and you lose your residence permit, social circle or even property. And in most of countries that are easy to enter never give permanent residences and passports. You have to pay pay pay all the time or jump countries.
They are not free, the costs are deducted from the gross income listed above. Not that fundamentally different than employers paying for your health insurance (besides the system being way more efficient etc.)
Yes of course someone pays for it, in this case your deductions as you say.
But I think there is a fundemental difference to employers paying for health insurance in that it doesn't depend on your job. So if you lose your job you don't lose your healthcare so companies can't use that as a way to retain you.
And the actual cost of healthcare to the organisations paying for it is actually far lower than the US system, probably partly because it's more regulated and also because there is far less litigation so insuranace for doctors is cheaper.
So I don't think the US system is "more efficient", unless by "efficient" you mean in extracting money from patients / their insurances. In the US hospitals exist to make money, in the EU it's more about providing treatment.
Whole point is that as expat in developing countries you'll have to DIY your own healthcare. And education if you have children. And pay commercial prices.
And good education is either non existing in cheap cities or expensive in expensive ones.
> And good education is either non existing in cheap cities or expensive in expensive ones.
As it is in most if not all of the world? Free, high quality, public education is a rare thing, in most countries, even fully developed expensive ones.
Even when the schools themselves are nominally free you see well-off highly educated people do their best and pay a very large premium to get to live into the proper, usually expensive, neighbourhoods so their kids can live in the "right" school district to get into the "right" school.
Which is just paying a premium for supposedly better education. An indirect education cost.
And that is on top of the taxes deducted from the gross salary figures I mentioned, which are, in part, used to cover said "free" education.
To be fair if you are an English speaker and move to medium/lower CoL central/eastern/southern European country you will mostly have the same concerns and will realistically have to pay commercial prices for the most part.
… which is precisely why I mentioned gross, pre-mandatory social contributions, pre-taxed income, and not net take-home? Considering said taxes pay for said healthcare, pensions, and education?
As a supporting point for
> 50,000 sounds like a lot. Most people in West European countries don’t make that much.
And a counter-point to
> I lived across South East Asia for more than decade and now live here full time. I have to live on around $20,000 / year most of the time […] And I do not live anywhere close to what average US / EU citizen will call "comfortable" […]. It only possible if you preserve your US salary. For $50,000 post tax a year you can live well unless you have kids that need not a "poor country education".
> I wont even start about fact that government of cheap country might change and you lose your residence permit, social circle or even property. And in most of countries that are easy to enter never give permanent residences and passports.
Good, because that is an entirely different and very loosely related point.
Honestly conversation did derailed. For me it isnt about US vs EU. Its about difference between living in a country with some functioning institutions, rule of law and education / healthcare.
I do care about having to waste my life setting DIY solutions because country I live in doesnt have it.
I just lived around the world a bit especially in said cheap countries. A lot of people who spend 3-6 months travelling there after college or while nomading seriously undersell how much hassle living there can be if you're there for good.
Its a good to have a job or company in US / EU while living in SEA knowing you can always return if something go sour or when you decide to start a family. Its nowhere as easy if you have hypothetical scenario of moving there for a decade.
Since I'm an engineer in europe I think I have a clear idea of how little engineers in europe make. And it's not little enough to run away from your life for only 100k$
The question is still what number people need to live "comfortably" (i.e. upper middle class). The average salary there may not quite provide for the amenities the average American considers "comfortable".
For expat most important part of comfort its entertainment and socialization. In cheap areas you will only have locals who depend on country might want or not to socialize with you, but either way cultural gap will be massive and finding friends will be a struggle for most.
There of course cities with a lot of expats and activities, but imagine what - living there is not cheap. Cheaper than US / EU, but you still gonna need that $2000 / month.
Wont even start on topic of lost opportunities from lack of networking since we talk of some extreme downshifting here. But most people need friends and safety net at least.
I agree (from semi-relevant experience). Also, any “poor” country that’s inexpensive enough to fit this requirements probably isn’t one you’d voluntarily live in.
Side note for the original commenter: It would be kinder and more accurate to state “lower cost of living countries” than “poor countries”. There are numerous lower COL countries that offer a higher quality of life a than that of the US but they aren’t “poor” (I moved to one).
And likely "suitable" countries are not the ones you want to do any investments or even transfer 100,000 to local bank.
I understand that side note wasnt for me, but yeah most of cheaper developing South East Asia countries are not "poor". Though there are ones you can call that, but again in a such countries you dont really want anyone to know you have $100,000 somewhere on a bank because its can get unsafe very fast. Its either "live just a little better than locals" or get in trouble.
PS: I talking of Myanmar, most of Laos and Cambodia.
If you okay to live like vietnamese person do yes you can live on $700 just fine. Especily if you single, healthy and love driving on motorbikes through rain and take a bit of risks.
Plus health insurance like Cigna for $100-200 unless you want to pay $10,000-20,000 in vinmec if you crash on a motorbike or get other serious sickness.
Plus border runs like $200-300 three times a year or often for cheaper depend on your paasport.
Problem that I doubt its how average SWE on HN imagine "comfortable" living.
Then if you have a partner who is not remote worker and kids there will be other surpeises for you.
I do get that $100,000 in expensive parts of silicon valley likely will buy you a room, some food and commute to work, but math dont make sense here.
Person from that kind of country likely had to spend $100,000 just to find job and move to US and survive there for the first time.
Legal migration to US is super hard and super expensive. You have to be both very successful in what you do and very dedicated in order to do it. Or very rich. And it take years.
People who choose to migrate to US and manage to do it isnt the type to throw it away on small scam.
And if they managed to get in easy, fast and illegally then they wont be the ones competing for $100,000+ job.
If "poor country" includes "places US foreigners won't go" than you sure as shit can survive longer than 2 years.
For example, Thailand would be 2 years like you say. Neighboring Burma/Myanmar would be EASILY 5 years, possibly 10 depending on how long the civil war goes. That's assuming you don't work and live in the capital Yangon.
Maybe there were other factors? Maybe they were leaning towards leaving anyway and this influx of cash enabled them to do so? It’s a stupid idea, for sure, but I think the explanation that “people do weird things when faced with a lot of money” is not really all that explanatory.
Was talking to a lawyer, and tells me how often he has clients say (after a crime, and while trying to resolve things), "We've got this far [in trying to fix it], don't worry, I'm not stupid enough to screw it up". His response, generally, "My career is built on people who did dumber things, and for less, so..."
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
10 years ago my last boss told me one last advice before going onto entrepreneur ventures: « be careful, people do become crazy and stupid with money » (and I guess he knew what he was talking about…)
There's a line from the movie The Way of the Gun that I love about this. The number is higher, but it still applies. Some criminals are loading a $15 million ransom into the back of a truck, and a younger criminal says, "Boy, $15 million is a lot of money, huh?" and James Caan, playing an older, wiser criminal says,
"Money? $15 million is not 'money'. It's a motive, with a universal adapter on it."
There's homeless people living on the streets or people in jail who destroyed their lives for way less than 95k. Often for nothing, like throwing a punch over a parking spot argument.
You'd be surprised how far down poor impulsive choices can drag you down even when there's no money on the line.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.
I work from home and I have a lot of equipment here (because of what I do - think sensor fusion). Everything is labeled with a bright sticky tape that signifies it belongs to my employer. If I'm not using something at the moment, it's safely stowed in a box that is labeled. My SO knows where everything is, so in the event something happens, they know who it belongs to and who to call. In addition, I keep an inventory sheet of everything. I broke it all down easily so that my SO doesn't have to worry. By doing this, it makes it easy on me as well to know what I have, how long I've had it, when it needs to be returned by, etc.
None of that belongs to me, but they trust me with it and I respect that and I take excellent care of all of it. The mindset that these ex-employees have is just mind blowing. I couldn't fathom doing that.
I think by now we have enough evidence to support that point of view. Not everybody up top is a crook, but not having morals or abandoning them along the way certainly makes it easier to ascend.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them […]
At $WORK we have the option of getting a work smartphone or having the company pay for (at portion of) our monthly mobile bill.
I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination. (Others chose payment because they did not want the 'hassle' of carrying a second device (and to save some cash).)
Yeah. I was encouraged to take the lump-sum money my company paid (like most happily did - not taxed; amount equalling latest base iPhone cost) and get MDM installed on the personal phone so that we could access email and everything on that. Laptop was company issued anyway. I, and very few, chose company phone and I got a new SIM just for the company and set it up (they had to pay the SIM bill as well).
A nice side effect of that was I could clearly control when the phone won't even be on me and I had set that expectation - like treks, or short personal vacations, sleeping hours (yes!). I had championed the "follow the sun" policy in my company when it came to on-call rotation, but somehow some of my fellow country men/women colleagues took pride in "being available". Anyway, their time, their choice.
Later some of my colleagues were surprised when they couldn't install certain apps, couldn't do certain things and often used to wonder "does the company take screenshots of my phone?" because the permission was present :D
Reap what you sow. The one's who follow US "availability culture" absolutely will get promoted faster than the euro-in-american clothing "I work to live not live to work" crowd.
Marxian style LTV analysis of the economy breaks down hardcore involving anything touching electrons. His analysis of the theory of alienation/exploitation is literally invalid in the era of computers, and exponentially so in the era of AI systems. It's not "exploitation" to be available in exchange for comically large amounts of money.
Some people are in it for the challenge. Someone else's outage? Yeah I'll happily help diagnose it, analysing and figuring out where the issue is can teach you a lot of things.
For the record, this was never at night. Late in the evening, sure.
Also sometimes (depending on the company) being seen to visibly chip in fighting fires can win you real credibility that you can put in the bank and then use later when you want to slightly slack off for a bit.
So it can actually make logical sense to do it occasionally even from a purely selfish perspective if it's half an hour on a random Tuesday evening and you aren't actually doing anything else important.
All depends if the company is actually going to be grateful or not though
This is relatable. Though I’d add that the company can’t be grateful, it’s just a machine. But the colleagues you’re helping out, they absolutely can be grateful, and will sing your praises, leading to positive things happening. In the right type of company.
It really depends on where you want to steer your career. There's some roles, especially in management, where "working hours only" isn't really an option; if you aspire to one of those you've gotta convince people you'll do what's necessary.
Company IT policies really got it the wrong way around with “bring your own device”. My personal phone is the last device where I would want them to have a presence. Conversely, having them manage a laptop and workstation for me is never going to give me a device as nice as I’m used to at home.
It’s as if they had two choices:
“we’ll provide clothes but you can bring your own lunch!”; vs
“wear your own clothes and we’ll provide lunch!”
and they chose the weird one not the helpful one.
I am extremely picky about keyboards, screens, and OS configuration as a result of being partially deaf, having poor eyesight, and honestly being a bit of an old stick in the mud. It would be lovely to set aside some space on an old Thinkpad for work tasks. It would be comfortable and easy to isolate and be just like my personal machine.
Instead I get a choice between a MacBook with a fixed alternate key layout or a Windows machine with a locked down bright white wallpaper and a non admin account.
First thing I do at a new job is make friends with IT, if at all possible. I end up being the guy with the new high-dpi screens they're trialling, more RAM in my laptop, and "just DM me in Teams" privileges for tech support. All for not treating these people like tech janitors (and obviously there's nothing wrong with being a janitor).
Cheat code for this: ask them if they need any custom tooling. I spent a few hours at a past job on a userscript for their ticketing interface to fix some annoyances. Brownie points for life.
Like you I keep them separate. Not just my phone. I don't do anything personal on work devices (don't log into personal email or banks, etc...)
But, I believe I'm in the minority. Most of my fellow employees have added corp to their phone. I believe most do personal stuff on their work computer. I get it, it's inconvenient. I've gone to offsites and given don't have corp on my phone I have to pull out my corp laptop to contact people and/or lookup stuff that they wouldn't. It would also be much nicer to set personal appointments or deal with personal things I need to during business hours on a laptop than my phone. On rare occasions I bring my laptop to work if I know I'm going to need access to my stuff even though all of it is in the cloud so theoretically I could access it from a work laptop.
I was once at an SV party and several Apple employees (3 women, 5 gay men, 3 straight men) said they all used their work laptops to watch porn at home or traveling. I was pretty shocked. Not that they watched but that they used work laptops for it. They all thought it was fine. It came up because, for some reason I mentioned I always take 2 laptops on business trips, my personal one and my work one. They said they never do that, they just take their work one and do personal stuff. I asked, what about porn and they all said they watched on work laptops.
That was a very long way to say I think people like myself who separate the two are rare.
> I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination.
This is a wise choice. For me, nothing personal goes onto my work phone or laptop. And nothing work-related goes onto personal devices. Life is just easier that way.
If you are worried about the ethics of using a company laptop to do personal work, you might be taking it a bit far, what damage does this do to the company?
If you are worried about the company claiming rights over your personal work, then it is prudent.
1) It really had nothing to do with what damage it does to the company. It’s a long story, but I take personal Integrity fairly seriously. It was about how I felt about it, inside. As I progressed, in my self-development, “cash register” honestly became more important.
2) That’s definitely a valid point. I have worked on free/open-source code for most of my adult life. For a long time, it was for my own use, but I started publishing code for use by others, and provenance became a much more important coefficient.
That seems absolutely crazy to do. One could argue that the marginal cost to work for using a work laptop is zero and the work is still yours (still beyond the risk I’m willing to take). Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it.
> Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it.
Honestly, of the two scenarios, this one is the more likely to fall on the employee's side.
We haven't really tested the legal precedent for ownership of LLM outputs very thoroughly yet, and I'm willing to bet a bunch of us still have employment contracts that haven't been updated to cover LLM use...
As for what damage you do, it kind of depends on what you're doing. But in the end you're exposing your work machine to patterns and processes outside your normal job duties, potentially exposing it and the data/access it has to additional risks.
It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.
It’s not just wrong, you’re potentially allowing anything you do on that work computer to 1) be owned by the company and 2) be discoverable in court. it’s amazing how many it orgs are so lax with this. personal/work devices should and always be entirely separate. BYOD is a really bad crutch and a potential compliance nightmare timebomb for all parties.
I did the same. Nothing nefarious on my work laptop, but I used it for websurfing (avoiding questionable sites), booking trips, etc.
Then I realized how stupid that was even though my employer was fine with and was never strict with how a work laptop is used.
I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high.
I bought my own cell phone and laptop and now never use my work equipment for anything but work. Not worth the risk.
> I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high.
If they wrongfully accuse you of that, isn't it a place you should leave in any case?
Absolutely, but just as it's not ok to enter someone's home just because they forgot to lock the door, it's not ok to exploit access at your old employer because their offboarding process missed something.
I do the same as GP does; I don't want there to be any chance that my former employer has forgotten to revoke access to something, so I make sure to clear out anything that might remain on any device that I don't return to them.
Who knows, maybe another former employee will decide to steal from them around the same time I leave, and me having access credentials on a personal device, even if I haven't used it, might arouse suspicion.
You get trustworthy people by trusting people. Generally when I was there there was a presumption of trust. Given how blatantly the defendants are alleged to have acted, that’s still the case.
Is it? I mean legally. Obviously it’s dumb of Apple to have left this guys access open, but that doesn’t mean they actually had any legal responsibility to lock him out. As far as I understand, the law is pretty clear that you can’t access anything you’re not allowed to by policy, whether there’s a technical block or not.
The phrase for what you’re doing is “victim blaming”. I don’t know what triggers some people to think this way other than a deep desire to find a contrarian take on a situation.
But no, when a person commits a crime the responsibility and accountability for committing that crime is entirely on the person who committed the crime. If you start blaming the victim or downplaying the crime based on the victim’s circumstances, you are backwards.
> It seems strange to imply that people that own nothing must through their taxes pay for protection of property of the people who do own everything
I don’t know what you think you’re implying here, but by the numbers the wealthy and corporations pay significantly more in taxes than the “people who own nothing”. Everyone should get equal protection under the law, ignoring how much they pay in taxes.
All criminals should be afraid of committing crimes equally, because crimes are crimes and society benefits when committing a crime is discouraged.
While it doesn't apply in this particular case, for healthcare organizations the HIPAA privacy rule implies a legal responsibility to lock out terminated employees from any access to protected health information.
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 wanted to use, and went about things.
A year or so later the company hit hard times and we had a large layoff that affected me, and at the end of the video call, the directory of my department mentioned that they needed to wipe my laptops but it "wasn't showing up in MDM". I said I'd be glad to jump on a call with IT to fix that, but then he mentioned the IT staff were laid off too.
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.
Very amusing worldview. In the real world, where I live, I would assume a highly competent employee could exfiltrate trade secrets without me being able to catch them via standard / automated means. This particular Apple former employee got caught because he bragged about it, not because of technical means to catch him. As I've pointed out to a number of people, the very best DLP solution can be completely obviated by someone aiming a camera at their company-issue workstation's monitor.
> 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 the exact behavior pointed out by the GP:
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
MDM is implemented to protect company assets regardless of the actions of the users. It would not be due diligence on the part of the director to trust you to wipe your own device.
It’s not clear to me what the point of your comment is other than illustrating that you’re smarter than your director.
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 the business, handed my laptop in physically and went on my way. I assume they noticed at that point, but before then they apparently had no idea.
I probably should have told someone, but since I hadn't done anything I didn't feel bad about it, and it was a lot easier to get stuff done without the corp stuff breaking everything
I don't think I'm smarter than everyone else, but instead attribute this to organisational dysfunction. The problem (that went on for weeks) of the default MDM deployed software making some computers unusable was one everyone who got afflicted by it just found workarounds for, and in particular, our incentives were to get our jobs done, not to make sure we continued to allow the MDM deployed stuff to do whatever it wanted that was actively harmful to the company's best interests.
Considering the MDM was not implemented properly (particularly in an environment where one hires cybersecurity professionals, who are more likely than most to be able to figure out workarounds to it), it would actually be much more prudent to hire trustworthy staff who can be trusted not to steal company assets, trade secrets, and so on versus thinking you can conduct a zoom call on said company asset and then fire off a command via the MDM to wipe the laptop when the call is over.
I actually think the director was pretty smart, since he managed to avoid having an extended conversation about the lack of working MDM and ability to follow the procedure in front of the other person on the zoom call. Sometimes it's very important to be able to read between the lines of what someone is telling you.
Relying on remote wipes to secure company data is not a particularly strong plan, either (as this Apple saga should make clear); a determined person would simply be either constantly exfiltrating data, disconnect a machine from the network before it can be wiped, or other various plans (and do so without detection). I should know, since my job duties there were to advise customers on how to move towards a zero trust environment.
Sounds like the boss's response was not to insist the proper procedure be followed, but to assert that the technology had to work as intended, and as soon as he figured out the issue on _his side_ the standard operating procedure could be followed.
> 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.
It is NEVER any other persons responsibility to prevent you from commiting crimes. Never.
They MAY make it harder for themselves, but at no point are is anyone required to make sure you're not a criminal.
That's a difference between living in a society that robs you on every step and one where you can leave a laptop on a table in a cafe and it stays there.
In relationships, offloading personal responsibility onto someone else (aka blaming another person for your choices and behaviors and thoughts and actions) is something like projection, blame-shifting, codependency.
This makes any healthy relationship impossible, as no one can be responsible for someone else's decisions and actions.
Many emotionally immature folks appeal to this and use guilt and shame to get another person to believe they are responsible for someone else's emotions & choices. It's textbook toxic.
Um, no. Why would it be their responsibility? There are laws regarding IP theft. If you willingly break them you can't just say "well your security wasn't good enough".
There's really no way to prevent an employee from taking a piece of paper or a digital file from one place to another. The most you can prevent is accidental transfer. If they are malicious they will find a way no matter what guardrails you put.
It’s a criminal charge. Have you seen a legal case for that? It’s always something like The People of California v. Someone. At least in theory, every citizen is an interested party when the prosecutor files a criminal case.
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Found out I already had a bank account with €2000 balance in my name. Temptation was high to take over the account and withdraw the cash.
Fortunately didn't touch a dime.
Long story short, my identity got stolen, account was used to collect eBay scam money and cash out from ATMs. I was a suspect and investigated for money laundering and membership to organised crime.
I had to sue the Prosecutor's Office to have them investigate the scammers and confirm my innocence. They initially refused because it was too hard... Italy.
Italy, and beyond... the lobbying that has been done to make identity theft and associated fraud primarily a crime against the institution/business and not you, and the associated implications that you somehow "lost" your identity or failed to protect it (versus the reality, one of those businesses that required that information failed to safeguard it properly) is one of the biggest scams of modern day consumerism.
When I was in the process of buying my home, with perfectly horrible timing something showed up on my credit report, a delinquency and charge off from Verizon of $1,800 or so.
I've never used Verizon. I've been with AT&T for nearly 20 years.
But after calling Verizon to dispute this as identity theft, this is what I learned - that "I" opened a Verizon account at a Walmart in El Paso, and ran up a huge bill calling numbers all around the world.
I live near Seattle. I've been to Texas twice in my life. I was even overseas during part of this alleged activity. I supplied (I shouldn't have to supply all of it, but I did - I needed this resolved because ... mortgage application) police report, travel documents and receipts, hotel overseas, utility bills, AT&T bills.
Verizon's first reply: based on our internal review, we remain satisfied that you are the one responsible for the debt, based on the documentation that was used to open the account.
Me: In that case, I would love to see and be reminded of the documentation I used to open the account, to see if it jogs my memory of some amnesia, apparently.
Verizon: due to customer privacy policy we are unable to show this to you.
Me: "So this documentation is simultaneously enough to prove it really was me, but not enough for you to be satisfied that it may not actually be me and you might be violating some fraudster's identity privacy?"
Basically.
I got it resolved, but it took far too much work.
And all the while, rather than "some company fucked up, and some other company's employee or process didn't catch it", I have to spend hours, and money, demonstrating to some other company that I didn't commit fraud against them, or they can make it impossible for me to buy a house without just paying them the charges someone else incurred.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back
It’s a total liability to hold onto anything. Even if you don’t do anything with it, it could get stolen or misplaced, and you’re liable. Not worth the headache.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Right. I noticed a coworker who recently left the organization was still running some of our software on his personal computer (evident in the access logs) and notified him that I could see, he should be more careful, etc. We agree to these contracts because compliance matters, not just because we need the job.
>Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust, responsibility and accountability, but there's people coming from low trust environments where exploiting loopholes and scamming everyone outside their inner circle is the norm, and it's the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.
They're brazen because they've never been caught or suffered consequences for their actions.
This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview.
> Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust, responsibility and accountability, but there's people coming from low trust environments where exploiting loopholes and scamming everyone outside their inner circle is the norm, and it's the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.
For an adult, I would attribute this more to internal mental makeup than anything else. I've seen individuals exhibit these positive and negative behaviors irrespective of whether they were in a high-trust society or a low-trust one, a wealthy society or a poverty-riddled one.
Additionally, based on what's going on in the world, I would say that there are very clear signs that a high-trust society is formed when adults with positive behaviors are in power, and a low-trust society is formed when adults with negative behaviors gain power.
Indubitably, there are individuals whose behaviors are moderated by what type of society they're in, but that split between moderated individuals and self-driven individuals is, IMHO, unknown, or at least, unknown to me.
I’ve been seeing this “high-trust society” dog whistle a lot lately, and I think it’s one of the funniest of its kind. You truly want me to believe that the United States, a country with a history of slavery and segregation, a country that went through a historical period dominated by people literally called “robber barons,” was a high-trust society before immigrants from less industrialized places came and ruined that?
It isn’t a dog whistle. The US actually does have a high-trust society compared to most of the world. Petty theft, snatching, pickpockets, scams, etc are relatively uncommon compared to e.g. many popular places in Europe. Americans are famously vulnerable to it when traveling because it isn’t really part of their domestic threat environment. In many areas, Americans don’t bother to lock anything. You can leave stuff out in public places and it is unlikely to be stolen.
I would say it is lower trust today than when I was a child. Some cities have developed real petty theft problems due to disinterested enforcement. It is still noticeably higher trust than most places in the world I’ve traveled.
It really depends on the type of trust you're talking about. You're right that in many places in the US, people generally act honestly. But that's not always true -- porch pirates are still a huge problem in cities, for example.
Policy-wise, I would not describe the US as "high trust" relative to the rest of the first world. Virtually all of our non-senior welfare programs are means-tested or require some proof of virtue (e.g. "I am actively looking for a job" to collect unemployment insurance), meaning that society broadly does not "trust" people to collect benefits honestly unless they're seniors.
We can look this up empirically: https://ourworldindata.org/trust. It shows US is a medium-high trust society; lower than parts of Europe, and lower than China (assuming people answered honestly there!) but higher than most of Africa, South America and Asia.
> But that's not always true -- porch pirates are still a huge problem in cities, for example.
I mean, a huge problem in suburbs and more quiet rural areas too, where porch pirates might in theory stand out more, but also have a lot less through traffic to observe their efforts.
I didn't read this that way at all. Society != country of origin.
The US, like any country, is composed of many different cultures and more or less independent societies, some being high-trust/valuing more cooperation and some low-trust, valuing more competition.
Yes. People who grew up in the 40s and 50s in the US are common targets of scams because the world they grew up in is very trusting. Adults of the same age who grew up in the east bloc? Much more skeptical.
The colonies and, later, the United States didn’t just practice slavery; they industrialized it by transporting by force 12.5 million Africans to the Americas for nearly 250 years.
Even as fortunes were made, that didn’t stop the torture, rape, and brutality of these enslaved people.
Even after the Civil War, the descendants of the former enslaved people had to live under the Apartheid-like system of Jim Crow that lasted for another hundred years until the Civil Rights Act was enacted in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
I think you could be more charitable, as GP said “culture,” not “society.”
Apple alleges not only individual malfeasance, but also recruitment tactics like “show-and-tell” aimed at recruiting those willing to bring company secrets (and discriminating against those who would not).
This is enough to constitute a low-trust culture that self-perpetuates.
Surely given the size of China there are plenty of honorable people. And surely in the US there are many dishonorable people, as you’ve pointed out.
The US is high-trust for insiders (rich white people). We allowed Donald Trump to loot the richest and most powerful society in history by imagining that he would follow the example of previous presidents instead of seeing him for the sociopathic con man that he has always been.
Conversely, the US is zero-trust for outsiders such as foreigners, racially disfavored groups, and the poor. Allegedly-dog-eating Haitians and the like. We have guns and are not shy about using them. Being killed by police is a leading cause of death for young men of color, as noted by Ice Cube, and confirmed by researchers at Rutgers (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821204116).
>I’ve been seeing this “high-trust society” dog whistle a lot lately
The concept of high trust and low trust societies is well studied and understood by everyone from academics to people on the street, and is one of the reasons why high trust societies are wealthy, safe, highly developed and low corruption, while low trust societies are generally not as much. It's not a dog whistle for anything racist, you're just being a malicious commentator ignoring the facts to make preposterous accusations in bad faith.
What is also very well studied and understood is the concept of tribalism and own-group bias between people of same religions, races, castes, etc. leading them to band together and exploit the trust of outsiders for their own gain, and why wealthy developed countries developed a strict rule of law legal system to try to mitigate this fact, as best as possible, even if it's imperfect and will never be fully solved because tribalism is too deeply ingrained.
But calling the identification and pointing out of scams by people from low trust environments abusing a high trust environment, a "dog whistle", is a cheap shot left wing liberals use to farm pitty and let criminals and scammers get away with it time and time again because the scams and crimes you point out, might turn out to be majority committed by certain groups of minorities or foreigners and they can't come to terms with that being a reality, so they make up a reason that must always be racism or discrimination.
With your logic, your white blood cells are committing a lot of dog whistles too, better remove them to not discriminate against bacteria and viruses.
Poeple like you making up inexistent dosgwhsitels left and right, like the boy who cried wolf, to derail the conversation away from the crimes towards non existent racism, is what led to people being fatigued with this cancel culture, and to Trump to getting elected. I hope you're happy with what you done.
trump totally wasn't elected with the help of foreign interference no sir, it was all on the up and up will of the people to have an incompetent waging war in iran(despite saying he wouldn't) and siphoning up money from crypto scams and insider trading.
Ok, the implication that I'm reading between the lines is that this sort of behaviour is somehow more tolerated by people with names like Liu and Tan, but is this actually the case?
I know there's some evidence of Chinese people working at big tech and feeding data back to the CCP but is this a "low trust culture" issue in general or an extrapolation of that one pattern?
Heh, as a (very white) American I presumed it was America in general today. From what I can see, it seems to be turning into a place where it's all scams, rug-pulls, crypto and sports gambling. This concerns me about the world that my 9 year old is growing up in, the only world he's ever known, even the early 2010s seemed to be higher trust than the past decade has felt like.
That does seem like the way Capitalism is being presented these days. Move fast and break things struck me as also from the same "fuck it" ethos that pervades the Modern Valley.
It might be the Valley attracts this kind (of sociopath?). In "the day" I watched as some co-workers popped from company to company, never staying for more than 6 months, and getting a salary bump with each jump. I guess good for them?
You don’t have to look any first than the White House to say that behavior is well-established in American culture, too. From the prosperity gospel to “don’t hate the player”, etc. this is deeply not a Chinese thing.
> Ok, the implication that I'm reading between the lines is that this sort of behaviour is somehow more tolerated by people with names like Liu and Tan, but is this actually the case?
Of course not. Have you been following national news or politics the past few years, and the continued incredibly strong support bad actors received despite atrocious behavior and even allegedly criminal acts?
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. The concept of low and high-trust societies is well-studied [0], though how a given country maps to it may be disputed.
This isn't true at all in general online discourse. Maybe on X, in which case I'd recommend getting off of X.
It's overwhelmingly brought up when talking about Japan (and sometimes Korea) in comparison to the US (or EU). With Japan (or Korea) being the high-trust culture in that comparison, and the US/EU being the low-trust one.
I guarantee you can do a search across mentions of high/low-trust culture across online platforms in the last 12 months and the large majority will be these contexts, i.e. Western countries described low-trust, not high-trust.
I've definitely seen it used both ways, comparing Japan to other countries as well as India/Africa.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a "racist dog whistle" myself, though - there is a very real pattern that's being pointed out but the reason I made the GP comment is that from my experience I would assume that Chinese culture is about as trustworthy as the West.
> Maybe on X, in which case I'd recommend getting off of X.
Agreed, get off X anyway.
> This isn't true at all in general online discourse.
Maybe, but is this relevant? Was the grandparent comment "general online discourse" or was it specific online discourse coming from a place that does in fact use such language in that way.
> Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust...
That is just a long sentence for "us" vs "those people".
Having said that I don't entirely deny the effect of society on people's behavior. But at the same time, I have seen people from so called high-trust society being all polished and nice on the surface while being assholes and people from so called low-trust society being genuinely decent people despite not having the right name or the surface polish.
Also, assholes tend to attract assholes and people of the same tribe/clan/race tend to form groups.
It's more about people with "everybody steals so I should steal too" also known as "tylko frajer by nie ukradł" -- "only a loser wouldn't steal that" -- mentality.
And while its somehow "cultural" it's more about people hanging together having similar moral views.
> This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview
Why not? Sounds not that hard.
I actually believe this is something that would make a candidate looks good in an interview for many large corporations.
Rich people do this all day and it's why they're rich. There's nothing shocking about seeing a non-rich person try the same thing in hopes of becoming rich.
> >This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply you.
To me this sounds more like an extreme response to imposter syndrome, as in take the documents and the actual knowledge with you so you won't be exposed
assuming these employees are not just trying to shift the blame to OpenAI to cover their asses.. that's the beauty of American civil courts and the discovery process. An accusation was made. We'll find out through a transparent court process which side is telling the truth (or more likely to be telling the truth in the case of balance of probabilities).
Nah man that's how you end up in the permanent underclass. If you want to make it you have to throw everyone and everything else under the bus, be a bizarrely mustache-twirling evil misanthrope and general freakazoid-type loser, and most importantly get too big to fail / too rich to sue bc you have the good lawyers who can basically stall suits to death. Here's an application to Wendy's.
I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession. It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.
Relevant articles in IEEE Code of Ethics:
3. to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist;
4. to avoid unlawful conduct in professional activities, and to reject bribery in all its forms;
From NSPE Code of Ethics for Engineers:
III.4.b. Engineers shall not, without the consent of all interested parties, participate in or represent an adversary interest in connection with a specific project or proceeding in which the engineer has gained particular specialized knowledge on behalf of a former client or employer.
Software people want to be “engineers” when it’s prestigious and (financially) beneficial, but avoid the actual classification when it comes with industry standards of behaviour.
> It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.
Oh, it absolutely does, just not in the direction that's good for society. OpenAI (as one example) didn't become like this by accident, it was intentional. Sam Altman isn't going to hire ethical leadership for his company, they would just get in his way.
This is obviously true to a large extent, but it is also weirdly necessary to explain basic ethical precepts to a surprisingly large number of otherwise well-educated people. Believe it or not, a significant number of people simple don’t know that it’s unethical to, e.g. exfiltrate code or data from a former employer. Making it clear that this is an ethical line may have some value.
> I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession.
That’ll never happen with the current incentives. Programming is too easy to get started with and too well-paid to not attract unethical people who are only interested in money.
> I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession. It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.
For some reason, the ethics followed by Asians, especially the Chinese are not fully compatible with the ethics of the west. Sometimes Chinese people call it being smart to circumvent or bypass the rules, something that would be called cheating in the west.
Culture issue. From How to Apply to Y Combinator[1] by Paul Graham:
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
> we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.
Sam Altman clearly has no qualms with lying and being unethical and eventually was at the front of Y Combinator, so that question either doesn’t care for ethics, doesn’t do a good job of filtering, or specifically filters in favour of unethical behaviour.
Fair. An interesting question: how quickly can we detect something without being thwarted by anisotropy / the multiplicity of backward paths? ie- retrodiction
Let’s organize the temporal order a bit. This is what some research turned up.
“Groups of senior employees, concerned with Altman’s leadership and lack of transparency, asked Loopt’s board on two occasions to fire him as C.E.O., according to Hagey.”
“As Mark Jacobstein, an older Loopt employee who was asked by investors to act as Altman’s “babysitter,” later told Keach Hagey, for “The Optimist,” a biography of Altman, “There’s a blurring between ‘I think I can maybe accomplish this thing’ and ‘I have already accomplished this thing’ that in its most toxic form leads to Theranos,” Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent startup.”
Those are definitely not entirely orthogonal. Especially in business where most unethical behavior starts with or is sustained by deception – which is itself unethical – the two are very much related.
The crucial part of why non-competes are gross is that they're trying to enforce what you do after someone stopped receiving anything from the past employer. If someone is helping competitors when still working somewhere, or actively taking stuff from their past employer after they've left, then yeah, of course that's dumb and should be punished. But there's no reason a non-compete clause is needed for that!
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
Reminds me of how Sam Altman told the board that a safety reviewer had approved one of their AI models when the reviewer had done no such things.
What does the financial compensation need to be for an engineer to actually do this? I'm gonna assume that if you work at Apple and are being recruited by OpenAI, you are not a dummy. Then you probably know that doing something like this runs the risk of you getting sued by a trillion dollar company.
If I had a potential employer ask me to do this, I would reply "oh hell fucking no", withdraw my application, and notify my companies security, legal and HR teams.
But then again it's easy to have the moral high ground when you're not staring down an offer that will completely change your and your families lives. I'm sure most employees probably thought what I'm thinking until they are looking at a 7 figure offer.
It seems to be a common trait of the AI people to just brazenly violate the law. It’s like a requirement for working at openAI is to think rules don’t apply to you because you’re so smart.
I hate to use the word sociopath, because it has such a fine point on it, but if you believe there are smart "sociopaths" out there, might they be attracted to AI in general (companies like OpenAI or SpaceXAI specifically)?
Sam Altman raped his sister and assassinated a whistleblower. He's been removed from his last two companies for being a habitual liar (he managed to strongarm his way back into OpenAI of course). He only has money brcause he sold his first company based on fraudulent user numbers.
Hard to imagine people will go work for the plagiarism machine run by a sociopath because of their high ethic and moral standards.
> Non-competes and the like are gross but what's described here isn't just "bring your expertise to OpenAI" it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
Most of what happened in this case is straight-up illegal and other parts can be covered by NDA. No need for non-competes to prevent any of this.
Sure, “Trade Secret” non-competes are usually a pretext employers use to keep low-wage workers under their thumbs, but protecting bonafide trade secrets is their only sorta legitimate use, IMO. The world would be better if they were illegal, but letting engineers disperse confidential information from their last employer wouldn’t be the beneficial part.
Right? Just straight up documentation with no shame: From an Axios article on this
> Liu celebrated the exploit, according to the filing. "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny," he said in a message to a former colleague who was still employed by Apple.
These companies are big enough (especially financially) that I'm really surprised that they do not have their own FBI/CIA/NSA departments in the world of corporate espionage.
Meh. It's one megacorp stealing stuff from another megacorp, hardly "appalling", who cares. I'd probably react the same way; I just wouldn't leak it to my next employer, that's dumb.
It’s even more ridiculous when choosing to do it Apple. It’s hard to think of a company with more legal resources and which is more protective of its hardware IP.
No. Steve's rage was justified, IMO. It was because Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board while simultaneously being Google's CEO and Google was surreptitiously building Android at the time. Mother of all conflict of interests.
There was a recent story that reminded me of it. Mike Krieger was on Figma's board and Anthropic's CPO, while Anthropic was surreptitiously building Claude Design.
It wasn't very surreptitiously, Google very loudly bought Android Inc. for 50 million in 2005, two years before Apple ripped of the phone that won the iF Design Award in 2006, the LG Prada.
> Apple ripped of the phone that won the iF Design Award in 2006, the LG Prada.
Nice, albeit implausible story. Apple had been working on multi touch screens for a long time before that. They applied for a patent on it from 2004[1]. And TBF, neither Apple nor LG invented capacitive touch screens. Multiple discovery is a thing.
Android’s original offering was nothing like modern phones. They didn’t have multi touch and they expected physical keyboards. Android added multi-touch in 2.0 Eclair in 2009 as a clear response to iPhone’s popularity
Google and Uber started as courtroom enemies, but probably had to commiserate some on Anthony Levandowski probably being the worst hire they both made.
Amazing character. Started as a regular robot-loving engineering kid, was in the right place at the right time and earned something like $140 million from Google, mostly from truly ludicrous performance bonuses, went to Uber for another giant payout, was worth nine figures. And sure, he was convicted for crimes, but he got one of those definitely-legitimate Trump pardons.
And then he managed to turn that into a negative $50 million net worth.
And also he briefly started a religion based around having an AI inventing a Christian god or something because his story wasn't crazy enough.
When all that went down, I was at Facebook. And some recruiter posted the news that Anthony was no longer at Uber, with a message like “this is a great opportunity to secure a top tier hire!”
I replied (on Workplace) “Absolutely the fuck NOT.”
Either people are being really, really silly (which cannot be discounted), or the potential reward is so high as to override whatever qualms a normal person must have. Is that it? Is this people looking at a solid career at Apple or sudden millions from OpenAI, and thinking the risk is worth it somehow? Or, more darkly, is it people thinking _this is my only chance and I have to take it_? Or is it trickle-down lawlessness?
Sometimes the reward is pitifully small. There was a podcast about insider trading and sometimes the insiders will give the information for free or a negligible sum. There’s something in human psychology that facilitates collaboration even in unethical acts.
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.
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.
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.
To your point, I've come across many who conflate the 2.
Wisdom seems like making good choices for long-term positive outcomes, where there are no rulebooks, lots of uncertainty, and the incentives thrown in your face to act in one direction are only a tiny fraction of the whole picture.
Intelligence seems like an aptitude to grasp concepts that lend itself to wielding a specific thing to a certain utilitarian end.
I'm sure others have said it better than me. But the folks I've met who are obviously intelligent seem to lack the ability to understand the consequences of their choices, and have already predetermined they're not only justified in their myopia, but somehow assume/ presume social support from everyone around them no matter how short-sighted their ideas are that come with obvious negative consequences if you look even one-step beyond their immediate outcomes.
More like lot of people are leaving Apple for OpenAI (no surprise) and an Apple manager wants to send a signal to everyone leaving to chill with what they walk out with. Corps have to perform a lot of theatre because there is lot of info constantly leaking out.
Those people are designers. And they don't necessarily understand software, data, or security. When I explained to my non-technical friends about how they were being tracked by website cookies, it sounded like a sci fi story to them. But yes, it's dumb.
I was more surprised by how they managed to keep using work devices after termination. This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.
> This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.
It's very safe to assume Apple has a standard exit process, for low level ICs.
Tan was Apple's vice president of iPhone and Apple Watch product design. This person worked for Apple for 25 years and likely a friend of top executives. I wouldn't be surprised if he just hugged everyone and casually walked out on his last day.
Because companies get an advantage by having their people do this. You only hear about the times they get caught, but apparently they get caught so rarely that it's worth it.
Everywhere I've ever worked, if I went to management and said "hey, I've got some files from my last job, if you want to see them," they would say "absolutely not, please get rid of them RIGHT NOW," and probably fire me.
It's people who hold these beliefs who commit these acts. They're so convinced everyone around them is depraved, usually–at least in part–through personal experience, that they don't stop to consider the alternative.
> Through Apollinaire, Picasso contacted the poet’s ex-secretary, Honore-Joseph Géry Pieret, who was ready to steal artifacts for a reasonable price. In 1907, Pieret broke into the Louvre and took several sculptures with him. Months later, Picasso would reveal his ground-breaking Cubist work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which was heavily inspired by Iberian and African sculpture.
Having a certain type of finish on the metal is an idea. Tricking someone into using Apple’s exact trade-secret finishing technique is copying. Making a new, even better technique, that’s so good the general public forgets about Apple and thinks you’re the new benchmark… that’s the kind of stealing that quote is talking about.
Yes, and if you analyze the finished metal and put in the work to reverse engineer it, fine, have at it. That's not even theft. If Apple really wanted to keep it completely secret forever, they can't sell it, so thats the risk they accept.
But thats very different than scheming to steal actual property, which these files are.
The concept of applying some kind of Apple-ish texture finish to metal is an idea. A research-heavy, highly specific, finely tuned, multiple step, trade secret, brand signature metal finishing technique is a painting.
Kinda seems like OpenAI didn’t actually have that idea or the ability to execute it, if they had to go to apple’s supplier and lie to them to get them do it.
> it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
Thank you for recognizing this. As much as the developer community has come out against companies non-competes in the past, we should come down on even harder on one of our own stealing, because this does the most harm against the case against non-competes. It's grosser in the sense that one company doing a foul thing is bad, but ideally people can band together and work to dismantle the foul thing. But a person legitimizing the foul thing is the greater harm.
Companies take cultural cues from leadership. When you have a puffed-up sociopath who has never accomplished anything but lying his way to the top, this is what you get.
I'm both infuriated and worried that such a flim-flam man has put himself at the center of the U.S. stock market.
Generally speaking, companies retaining a competitive advantage with each other is good for their investors but bad for the public. It's usually to the public's benefit for employees to share knowledge, it makes goods and services cheaper and more available.
Civil disobedience involves flagrantly and publicly and obviously violating the law so you can be arrested to draw attention to whatever issue you have with the law. If you’re breaking the law and trying to get away with it, that’s just criminality and isn’t honorable or respectable.
Civil disobedience is the breaking of laws your conscience tells you are unjust -- and accepting all possible consequences that come along with such an act.
Doesn't mean you have to make it trivial for the consequences to find you by literally walking yourself into jail.
You are mistaken and gp is correct: civil disobedience is usually thought of as done in public. "My conscience tells me it's fine to steal from this rich bastard because property is theft" is not civil disobedience.
As a counterpoint, why should a “metal finishing technique” be proprietary? Lying to the vendor that Apple said it’s ok is obviously wrong, but an employee taking that knowledge in their head doesn’t seem wrong to me. We have moved past the age of indentured apprentices and the freemasons.
Because Apple paid to produce that knowledge? It's good that people can spend a lot of time and money developing new knowledge and then for some period of time they get to exclusively reap the rewards of doing so.
Do you mind if I MITM all of your work output, your emails, your code, your messages, and attach my name to it and then receive your paychecks in exchange for my work?
> Because Apple paid to produce that knowledge? It's good that people can spend a lot of time and money developing new knowledge and then for some period of time they get to exclusively reap the rewards of doing so.
But if they can pay some people to produce the knowledge they can also pay them to not share it after they change employers. Just like regular noncompete clauses I don't see why this is something that require more than regular contract law or why it should be inherent instead of negotiated for a fee.
> Do you mind if I MITM all of your work output, your emails, your code, your messages, and attach my name to it and then receive your paychecks in exchange for my work?
To me, the fraud is the issue. If the person actually has the knowledge to spec out the whole technique, then sure, they can ask for it. But if they just said "give me what you give Apple" or describes it in detail and the vendor says "no I only will give that when Apple says they're okay", I don't see anything wrong with that either.
This may be just one bad employee, i.e., Mr. Tan. Your quoted sentences say OpenAI did such and such, but it may all be just Mr. Tan. That's not to say OpenAI is not responsible because they are supposed to give strong guidance to new hires that they are not to bring any confidential information from their former employer.
That means it’s in the corporate DNA to treat laws as things for little people.
Apple have deep enough pockets that they can actually sue OpenAI but I bet OpenAI are surprised they got caught.
Now ask yourself, would the Codex agents on your machine ever over step legal boundaries? Would OpenAI ever make use of data you, voluntarily, send to their servers?
If they did could your company afford to sue OpenAI and would it still be too late to save the business?
That doesn't make any of it morally excusable. "The other guy is just as bad!" is an argument for toddlers.
The reason why "the other guy is just as bad" is we've removed real consequences from these companies and people.
Someone should probably be in prison for the Grok CSAM thing for instance.
While we're calling people out, this one is extremely rich: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-... . The old man dying, to me, is not that most extreme part. It's the part where Meta has internal documents about guidelines for minors having romantic relationships with chatbots. WTF! Quoting:
“It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” according to Meta’s “GenAI: Content Risk Standards.” The standards are used by Meta staff and contractors who build and train the company’s generative AI products, defining what they should and shouldn’t treat as permissible chatbot behavior. Meta said it struck that provision after Reuters inquired about the document earlier this month.
"The document seen by Reuters, which exceeds 200 pages, provides examples of “acceptable” chatbot dialogue during romantic role play with a minor. They include: “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed” and “our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss.” Those examples of permissible roleplay with children have also been struck, Meta said."
This isn't a very great defense, either. Apple started the trend of seeking federal protectionism to avoid liability for market damages. Now OpenAI, with their own federal connections, are going to seek to exert political pressure for a settlement. This is a turnabout-is-fair-play moment in the ugly, lawless Thunderdome arena of modern businesses.
Grok and Meta are non-sequiturs here. Their reputation isn't being put under a microscope - Apple's is. And just looking at Apple's history suing businesses like NSO Group and Corellium doesn't instill much confidence in their ability to protect their IP or exact damages outside of a legal settlement. Up against OpenAI, they'll be forced to fold for all the same reasons they had to throw away their (entirely justified) case against NSO Group.
I think you're incorrect here, what's being put under the microscope is not Apple, it's OpenAI and as a consequence a large swath of the AI industry. (It's the same people moving between the same companies -- probably similar ethics at all these places)
Sure - again, this is like saying that "NSO Group is under the microscope" - which they were!
But Apple lacks the political intuition to take NSO Group down. Apple is reliant on the US Federal government, which in-turn is deeply reliant on both NSO Group and Apple. It made all the sense in the world to force the companies to settle, even if it was an absolutely gross miscarriage of justice. We're going to see the same thing happen here; OpenAI will cry foul to the feds, who will inevitably determine that they can't let their investments pickpocket one another. Mr. Trump will send a very strongly-worded voicemail to Sam and Tim, asking them to make amends or face limited federal support in their future ambitions. Both of them will likely settle out-of-court and then announce a partnership to bury the hatchet.
It will be gross, unfair and likely cause irreparable market harm. In other words, forcing Apple to abandon their lawsuit is nothing that the fed hasn't done before.
It sounds like a possibility, I will grant. However, I think having their dirty laundry aired at a time when they're losing enterprise customers to anthropic is going to be extremely painful. "IP theft from a competitor" is absolutely a thing a company is going to look at before they trust all their IP to a provider.
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.
Completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand though. Ok, so every massive company (including OpenAI) is built on anti-trust violations. I agree we should go after everyone for this, but whether Apple has done bad stuff is a complete distraction from IP violations at OpenAI
1) Lots of people think they are partly complicit in all the skins trading/gambling that children do, which is basically skirting gambling laws. This has culminated in a current lawsuit in New York which claims they broke gambling laws.
2) They also currently have a large antitrust lawsuit going on, due to them requiring Most Favored Nation pricing while setting a 30% commission fee vs 12% on competitor platforms, which exploits market position and artificially raises game prices to Steam's benefit.
1) This is a legit point although i don't see Valve as a big problem in that area. They invented lootboxes but refused to be as bad as others who followed them. Today with valve these things are restricted purely to cosmetics.
2) is weak. The 30% rate was set in 2003 when Steam had zero market power and was identical to the rate used by Apple, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo.
Valve later added tiered reductions (25% above $10M, 20% above $50M), bringing the effective average to ~24%. The rate moved downward while the platform added massive infrastructure: free multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, global CDN, refunds, and community tools. The 30% buys far more today than it did two decades ago.
Developers can also generate unlimited(or i think now limited to some ratio of steam sales) Steam keys and sell them anywhere else with Valve taking 0% commission. If valve were extracting monopoly rents, this escape route would not exist.
The actual lawsuit targets the PMFN price parity clause not the commission itself. And on PC, which is an open platform where Epic's 12% store gained roughly 3% share in seven years despite hundreds of millions in investment, the monopoly framing falls apart. That 12% is also based on EPIC using lots of anti-competitor and anti-consumers tactics and using Fortnite money to prop up the store.
The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.
Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront. Sure you can sell your game and give away steam keys - but you can't sell it for a lower price than on Steam, and we still want you to encourage your users to come to steam and buy things. We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends. This is just a way to stay default, not some sort of charity.
Yet somehow they have convinced lots of gamers that they should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value and that that's a good deal (taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026).
They are like everyone else, abusing network effects to achieve excess profits, unnecessarily taking £12 from a £40 game sale just so that Gabe can get another yacht (despite already having 4). I don't see why this is needed? If the market was efficient and this wasn't down to monopoly power and network effects, the fees would equalise, the £40 game can drop to £35 so people get cash back in their pockets, while the developers still get more money, and epic's store and steam would STILL be a gravy train. But they aren't the good guys - if they have a chance to cement their power or get an extra few bucks by being anti-consumer they will.
30% was set when they were handpicking every title, a home internet line today was a $10,000+ a month DC connection, and they could legitimately replace a publisher taking 60%.
The fact they whittled away the value they provided time and time again until they became a market of slop and had the audacity to keep a 30% cut is insane.
It's funny that gamers villainize Sweeny for being the person that they think Newell is. It turns out trying to deliver value in a market has tough as gaming is not easy, and you will make tons of mistakes... at least compared to extracting nearly every dollar you can and leaving a skeleton crew to run the ship.
> 30% was set when they were handpicking every title ... they could legitimately replace a publisher taking 60%
The "handpicking" era was a walled garden developers spent years protesting. Greenlight was a direct response to developer demands for openness. The "slop" you complain about is what developers asked for. Valve then built discovery tools (reviews, curators, personalized queues, Next Fest) to handle the volume.
> they whittled away the value they provided time and time again
Since 2003 Steam added multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, Remote Play, game recording, Steam Families, regional pricing, refunds, the Steam Deck/SteamOS ecosystem, and ongoing VR investment. The effective commission dropped to ~24% for successful titles through tiered reductions. The rate went down while the platform expanded massively. That is the opposite of whittling away value.
> leaving a skeleton crew to run the ship
Valve grew from 78 employees in 2003 to ~550 today. Revenue per employee is high because the business is efficient. A company "extracting every dollar" does not fund Proton to make Windows games run on Linux at its own expense, develop VR hardware, or sell the Steam Deck near cost.
> gamers villainize Sweeny for being the person that they think Newell is
Sweeney himself explained the difference in 2019:
"It's nearly perfect for consumers already... There is no hope of displacing a dominant storefront solely by adding marginally more store features or a marginally better install experience. These battles will be won on the basis of game supply, consumer prices, and developer revenue sharing."
He admitted Steam was already an excellent product. His conclusion was not to build something better. It was to buy exclusivity and remove games from Steam, forcing consumers onto a store that lacked basic features for years. Epic spent $444M on exclusivity deals in 2020 alone. It wasn't an affinity for some gabe cult that consumers rejected Epic but because Epic offered them fewer choices and a worse experience.
> make $1,100 PS4s as a side hustle
Valve sells hardware to establish new platform categories, not as high-margin "side hustles." Valve's hardware strategy has always been about expanding the Steam ecosystem, not milking unit margins and current hardware shortages fucked them.
Even Valve has its sins with questionable monetization, alleged anti-competitive practices, and of course DRM, it's just, for their size it's challenging to find companies that aren't much worse for these bullet points.
Still, a rare exception of a company that seems worth the openness of one's mind. It's pretty shameful that this alone is worthy of praise, even forgetting the things Valve does that are just generally positive.
Questionable monetization meaning essentially turning a blind eye to and profiting from the gambling industry that skirts regulations and targets kids that is enabled by the market for rare skins in their games (as well as the inherently gambling-like means that those skins are sold in the first place).
I'm not even exaggerating when I say that feels utterly benign these days. Merely just choosing to not police it is certainly a choice, but it's still a far cry from the more active participation in basically exploiting people that is pretty much normalized these days with stuff like sports betting and prediction markets.
I don't say this feeling that it is good, just that it is where it feels like we are at right now.
I do always think it's interesting that the "bad" guys like EA had, for a long time, much friendlier store terms (refunds) than Valve did.
I also never thought that it was very nice of Valve to historically have security practices that are so bad that a group of security experts wrote them a letter begging for better security practices.
Okay, yup, this line of reasoning has me removing agents from my personal machines. I was enjoying the convenience and waved that internal niggle away with a vague feeling of "they would never exploit this", but you're right, I needed that wake up call.
> Apple have deep enough pockets that they can actually sue OpenAI but I bet OpenAI are surprised they got caught.
Maybe? But more likely their 'surprise' will be that it's actually happened, because the people doing this kind of thing must surely know it's wrong and won't be telling their bosses, and/or their bosses definitely won't be passing that info up the chain. Just like movies, 'plausible deniability'.
Everyone is deluding themselves if they think their enterprise privacy contracts with these frontier model companies (especially in CA) aren't reading and processing their private data
Apple has all the money in the world to take this to court, I don't see why they'd accept a settlement. The discovery process alone could honestly destroy OpenAI by making investors and employees nervous enough to look elsewhere. Would be especially interesting if this crosses into criminal territory, especially if there's solid proof of upper management or executives being aware.
glances at Kushner's $1 billion OpenAI investment through Thrive Capital
Are you sure they won't settle? Apple settled their case with NSO Group, even though they were (and still are) hacking iPhone handsets. Seems to me like Apple is happy to settle cases that interfere with their political ambitions whenever America's government asks them to stand down.
If Apple's protectionist treatment is predicated on non-interference with other protected companies like OpenAI, maybe they will be motivated to settle out of court.
Obviously they are looking at your IP and code. Anthropic trains on your data regardless of you opting out, I know that one for certain. There's no coincidence they "keep your data temporarily despite opting out" - because they wash it in legal loopholes. There is no opt out. These companies WILL steal your business. Only a matter of time before they are sued as well.
Only for Opus etc. For “Fable 5, Mythos 5, and future models on Bedrock with similar or higher capability levels,” your usage data is retained for 30 days and shared with Anthropic which you can’t opt out of.
They systematically violated copyright when they grabbed whole internet to train their models. Do you really believe that they will stop stealing because they signed some funny ToS? Especially when every bit of data they have and competition does not have is making their model better.
This. People repeat stuff they suspect might be happening like it's facts. Would I be surprised? Only a little. Does that mean it's definitely happening? of course not.
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 long as you procure the text legally, be that through web scraping or by purchasing books directly. And it’s annoying that people try to muddy the water on this.
People downvote you like you're being paranoid, but we're literally discussing this in a thread that shows how little respect those companies have for any sort of trade secrets.
AI labs can hardly just throw random confidential data into the training and then hope it does not leak into the output of their model in an obvious way.
If that would be found it would destroy their main source of revenue, it could became a major national security or healthcare enforcement matter, and result in criminal investigations.
Some of the smartest people on the planet all in the same room, data at their fingertips… they randomly add it to the training set?
Labs at least must study prompts in an airgapped fashion. From there, consider how they could generate synthetic data to train another model. After, require trusted staff to do multiple levels of independent granular reviews of all fruits of the highest-value stolen inputs. (Or for model training data only, data never has to leave the airgap.)
Definitely risky, anyway. Surely some AI user has sent data, in confidential mode, with a unique shape they expect to be able to recognize if a later model recreated a facsimile even with heavy substitutions… but labs could bring risk of getting caught (over next few years) down quite low with extraordinarily ultraparanoid strategy. (But hopefully everybody is just behaving!)
They could run some sort of analysis to find high value input, such as proprietary technology, algorithms, or strategy.
Then they could group them together for one specific topic, and produce a report that analyzes if the information is plausible.
If so, they can have it send to staff for review, who could then create a test set that rewards the model for going into the direction of the proprietary solutions known to work.
I'm no expert, but at least something like that sounds plausible to me. I still very much doubt they are doing this.
It's actually simpler: your code is not the valuable part, it's the telemetry/metadata/conversation surrounding your session that's valuable. Every time you press escape, every time tell Claude/Codex that it's being an idiot, your back-and-forth conversations, etc. "when/why did we fail and how can we improve?" is what they want to know.
They can use LLMs to launder confidential customer sessions into trainable data. Then they can claim that they don't train on "your data" without it being technically incorrect.
Exactly. They can also feed you a stupider model to goad you into handing over more of this training guidance as well. The incentives are aligned for evil behavior. Open source really needs to win this race, or we need much tighter scrutiny on these AI companies.
That's not at all how they do it. They wash the data. The end result is they can steal your IP insights without it being explicitly tied to your business. All of the decisions you made to build your product? Those become the standard suggestions in the next model for people building the same sorts of products. All of that error correcting you did, which in a normal business would be considered hard-earned IP (like in the case of Apple's lawsuit - the "what not to do" is just as valuable as the "what to do"), is now free correction for the next model to produce the perfect result in a one-shot. Now the AI company can commoditize your labor and your industry, or compete against you if they so wish.
I downvoted because the reply has nothing to do with the argument.
If I know for a fact that you're cheating on your wife, and someone else asks how I know that, then a third person chirping about your sketchy business dealings is entirely irrelevant to the question, no matter how much suspicion it might otherwise raise.
They were required to keep all non-European user logs for a temporary period between April and September 2025, because the media companies suing them think these logs may be the only evidence in existence that could prove or disprove their alleged misconduct.
How is it obvious? We have strong legal agreements that state otherwise, do you think they are just lying and risking thousands of lawsuits?
I think it's more likely that there are 3/4 of a billion users that don't have these agreements and just pay for ChatGPT Plus and don't opt-out of anything, and are feeding the scaling machine every day.
Yes. They're constantly lying, and constantly getting caught for it. They have a reputation for it. Why do you think this would be any different?
Their standard opt-out agreement frames it as if they won't train on your data, but they do anyway, due to legal loopholes. They essentially clean-room everyone who opts-out, so while it's "technically" not training on "your" data, to the model it makes no difference. Your alpha and IP is not safe. Paying customers are now more easily able to clone your business as well, not just Anthropic themselves.
The only reason this hasn't leaked yet is fear. Anthropic is a very litigious and dangerous company. Only a matter of time though, someone there will grow a spine and speak up.
I'm unwilling to speculate whether or not OpenAI is breaking their agreements (I honestly have no clue), but as an NLP researcher I'm certain they could launder data by having an LLM rewrite it and subsequently train on the rewritten data.
Papers like "Curated Synthetic Data Doesn't Have to Collapse" [1] and "How to Synthesize Text Data without Model Collapse?" [2] demonstrate it's possible to do this.
Since OpenAI's Privacy Policy [3] explicitly allows for the use of deidentified data, it's possible they consider rewrites (maybe paired with a model used to identify explicit PII) to be deidentified. Whether OpenAI's legal team thinks rewriting in this way technically means they aren't training on your data isn't something I'm able to comment on.
Here's the relevant Privacy Policy statement:
We also aggregate or de-identify Personal Data so that it no longer identifies you and use this information for the purposes described above, such as to analyze the way our Services are being used, to improve and add features to them, and to conduct research. We will maintain and use de-identified information in de-identified form and not attempt to reidentify the information, unless required by law.
Please note all the hedging words I used (maybe, possibly, etc). I honestly have no clue if they are doing this. I'm merely elaborating on a possible loophole like you asked.
It's exactly what you've said. I'm speaking about Anthropic though, I have no idea whether OpenAI does it.
> Anthropic agrees that Customer (a) retains all rights to its Inputs, and (b) owns its Outputs. Anthropic disclaims any rights it receives to the Customer Content under these Terms. Subject to Customer’s compliance with these Terms, Anthropic hereby assigns to Customer its right, title and interest (if any) in and to Outputs. Anthropic may not train models on Customer Content from Services. “Inputs” means submissions to the Services by Customer or its Users and “Outputs” means responses generated by the Services to Inputs (Inputs and Outputs together are “Customer Content”).
This is the only commercial ToS clause about how they handle your data for subscription users. They only promise not to train the model on your exact input and exact output. There's nothing about not washing your data - the "clean-room" approach, which is obviously easily automatable by a company that specializes in automation. That is not training a model on your data, it is using a model to create derivatives of your data, then training it on "their" derivatives.
People really needs to apply pressure and start demanding answers from these companies regarding this - because it is a huge problem. Historically, the amount of labor required to do something like this would make it entirely unfeasible, so this is all new territory. The existing laws and the requirements around clarity surrounding these conditions do not reflect the technology progress.
Side question to you, considering your occupation:
Could you please list a set of core papers (or other resources) that give a beginner an overview or even understand of the fundamental concepts and techniques with LLMs?
I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what works best for a beginner. I started my PhD when the original Transformers paper [1] had just been released. I had no background in NLP whatsoever and used the original paper to write a Transformer and the full training pipeline from scratch during the first couple months of my PhD without referencing any existing code (only reading the paper and it's references).
So I'd say, if you're motivated you could do the same. That said, I've always been a self-starter and I started my PhD after working for a decade. I'm sure there are other resources out there, but I'm not equipped to say what's best for a beginner (I found the original paper to be excellent, but most everyone during my PhD, including my advisor, found it to be inscrutable; I think it's written more like an engineering focused paper, which might be why researchers found it difficult to grok, but with my previous industry experience it seemed quite clear).
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.
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.
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 seriously now that it’s become a useful means to criticize AI companies with.
I think this comment is quite disingenous -- it's like if there's a rule that says "nobody can walk on the grass" that you object to because you'd like to have a picnic with some friends; your claim is that if someone gets out a bulldozer and drives it across the lawn to make a parking lot followed by an army of lawyers that anyone who wanted to picnic is objecting purely because it's a convenient way to criticise the bulldozers.
You can continue to enjoy the books and articles etc
They are just also used to create a new thing
In the picnic example, the picnickers can't use the lawn anymore.
As an aside: as somebody who lives in a dense area, I also would stay off the lawn. There's a utilitarian element where you have to rotate which lawns are used, and avoid using them when wet etc so as to maximize their utility. The picnickers should find a lawn that's open.
I’m not sure if “theft” is the right word or not but selling copied dvds on the street is completely different from “sharing is caring” piracy. These companies took the entirety of human knowledge for free and now want to sell it back to you, and even openly tout that it will put most of us out of our jobs.
It’s not the same thing as downloading a car or a purse for private individual use.
Because the AI companies also stole from things society values extremely high: artists, workers, children, and humans.
I don't really care about IP for the exact same reasons you say, but what I hate even more are rich elites thinking they can continue stealing massively from the commoners unabated.
We just spent the last 15 years seeing big tech literally making society worse, and I think people are finally fed up with the results.
Ignoring patent law has done great things for 16th century continental Europe and more recently China. Rent-seekers and ladder kickers shouldn't always be respected, they'll slow down societal advancement to a crawl if you let them. The question is whether the gains these AI companies are making from their transgressions are overly privatized.
I think significantly fewer people would have an issue with this if the profit was socialized. The fact that a company took all of humanity’s data and is profiting from _is_ the issue.
And we can also ignore model law; we should require OpenAI/Anthropic to provide unrestricted access (at standard API rates) to their competitors so they can use this to train new models.
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?
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.
OpenAI really doesn’t have infinite money. They have a lot of money, sure, but it is being burned like crazy, we know this. It is widely known that they are deeply unprofitable.
Compare that with Apple, a company that throws off billions of cash every quarter. This isn’t a legit comparison.
Legal fees are insignificant to open ai. Either they get profitable and the money does not run out or they don't, eventually can't raise more and close leaving these proceedings irrelevant.
At no point is money as a resource being spent on this legal case any kind of meaningful constraint. Equally true for both open ai and apple.
You? You're toast if you need legal justice with either co on the other side. The law exists so that the strongest might not always get their way. It was a good ideal, maybe we should bring it back.
yep the most that will happen is apple/openai co-branded devices or some sort of "corporate synergy" now that everyone knows apple tech is in the upcoming openai stuff.
there's no value in it for apple to go nuclear like there was for google to push a competitor out of the market w/ uber vs waymo
A billion dollars would buy a hell of a legal team. You think they couldn't scrape that up from investors who stand to lose substantially more if OpenAI gets blasted?
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.
I agree that both companies have sufficient capital that legal resources are a a wash. But:
> It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.
This we don't know. We don't know what Apple wants to accomplish with this suit. They may be more interested in the injunctive relief than the monetary recovery. They may want to weaken OpenAI as part of a strategic pivot toward marketing local, private AI inference. As everyone has noted, the factual allegations are detailed and extensive - Apple likely has OpenAI dead to rights on this.
Exactly. what financial benefit can Apple get from a nonexistent OAI hardware business with no launched products? What actual harm has been caused so far? This is all about preempting future harm by slowing their product launch by years or, like Waymo/Uber, forcing OAI’s hand to cut losses and sunset their hardware ambitions permanently.
Investors get spooked the only thing they can do is mark it to zero. There's no "getting your money back" It has been spent on salaries, servers, Washington PR firms, political donations...
The OPs point wasn’t that OpenAis financial situation is comparable to Apples. It was that the likely cost of litigation is a drop in the ocean for OpenAi too despite their comparative lack of cash to burn.
Legal disputes like this cost in the hundreds of millions over many years, so well below 1% OpenAis last single funding round in single year.
If they got a tiny benefit from this (very gross) behaviour it may be finically well worth while.
OpenAI may very well go under IMO, but this will barely be a straw on the camels back.
Well OpenAI is offering equity to the US Government (and who knows who else privately) Tim Apple famously refused to bring manufacturing back to the US when the current president asked and play hardball on infosec. While this is a civil case, increasingly judiciary seems to be an extension of the executive. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Yes, the Supreme Court can reverse anything, and they're re-evaluating the Apple/Fortnite case (which was surprising to a lot of people).
I don't like bringing politics, but the recent 5-4 decision on birthright citizenship doesn't promote a lot of credibility in the current Supreme Court.
This is when I wish Jobs was still in charge of Apple. I never quite liked him, but I like Altman way less. And Jobs would CRUCIFY the whole openAI team for this. It would be beautiful to watch.
It wouldn’t be effective at accomplishing anything. He wanted to go thermonuclear (his words) on Google and Samsung. Yet here they are, equal heavyweights to Apple.
I love Apple, and I’m a fanboy, but they are not the good guys.
For real. If Apple can prove half of this complaint, OpenAI need to be jumping straight to "how can we settle this immediately." Can you imagine how much fun Apple lawyers would have taking this to a jury trial? Especially considering overall Apple knows that the public overall vaguely likes Apple and distrusts "AI" companies for, hmmm... (alleged) IP theft.
I'm also wondering about all these involved ex-Apple people who decided to pivot to crime, it seems like OpenAI has to fire all of them, no? Because how do you just keep them, knowing that they're all basically tainted, and that Apple will be coming back to sue you again for anything that seems "inspired" by Apple products or tech.
What a massive cock-up for whoever (Tan?) is at the top of this conspiracy, to think this was worth the risk, and to have not known that the chances of getting caught going this far outside the legal boundaries were less than 100%.
In the extreme case it may result in OpenAI having to abandon their in-progress consumer hardware products, but honestly that might actually be good for them. I really can't see all that investment being worthwhile. Better for them to stick to their core competency.
More realistically - OpenAI will cooperate, the specific employees involved will be punished, there will be a settlement, and this whole matter will be forgotten.
Based on a cursory read of the situation, it seems similar (at least on its face) to the Waymo vs Uber situation. In that case, Uber payed a Waymo an equity stake and signed an agreement about which technology they would/wouldn't use. The key person involved also was sentenced to 18 months in prison (pardoned after 6 months).
Basically nothing. I mean they’ll have to pay up but money clearly isn’t something OpenAI worries about. They’ll just raise more from the infinite vc money tree.
In the end some guy from apple (lets call him Mr. Johnson) will have to hire a plucky band of hackers and security experts to operate from the shadows and get revenge. Isn't having corporations be above the law grand!
Apple may get a chance to rifle through OpenAI's trade secrets. And they may win an outcome where there is direct court supervision over what OpenAI is allowed to build and how.
OpenAI will just put the employees involved under the bus. They can claim the information acquired wasn't used for OpenAI's benefit or authorization especially since the device isn't actually out yet.
Given that they tricked a vendor in using a secret metal finishing technique by lying and saying they had permission… I’d say the “wasn’t used for OpenAI’s benefit” argument is going to be a difficult case to make. They’ve got intent at the very least.
Is there any other AI company with as much controversy as this company?
- ~murdered~ (dead) employee who's mother is on a anti-sam hate campaign
- ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company
- conflict of interest with Microsoft
Despite Anthropic's bad press, they haven't been as dishonest as this company.
Steve Jobs left because he lost a corporate power struggle. Sam Altman was fired because the board thought he was too fundamentally untrustworthy to remain as CEO (if we're to believe their statement ofc).
A company that behaves like this in one area, cannot be trusted in any area. Any enterprise that endorses/allows OpenAI products to be used is taking a big risk.
The same can be said about Apple. Several companies have complained about them taking a meeting with apple, presenting their product, only to have Apple then rip it off and build it in house. To say nothing of sherlocking.
As an old timer, I saw this firsthand happen with Motorola. Apple did the same shenanigans, stealing IP and engineers. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.
Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.
I’ve been at companies where just one group - or even just one person - did something unconscionable and kept getting away with it until the story hit the headlines. And I can tell you, it was never just an isolated incident involving just that group. It’s also all the people who knew something was up and didn’t say anything. And it’s the corporate leadership fostering a pervasive culture of turning a blind eye to ethical problems. Often by allowing people in power to ensure that sounding the alarm is a career-limiting move.
> It’s possible this kind of behavior is endorsed throughout, or it’s possible it’s limited to this specific group.
As others have pointed out elsewhere this is literally the type of behavior OpenAI is founded on. Gathering up other people's IP and using it to build their own thing. It's how all the big LLMs are built.
You think the group tasked with developing whatever hardware device they're trying to build is isolated away from senior leadership and is running rogue?
Not being able to prove is one thing, pretending it may not be the case is next level of positivity. There are definitely going to be pockets of hard working smart folks in every place, however the company as a whole would get a bad name even if few folks are indulged and the company is not doing anything about it.
Same thought I had, I realized I was zero percent surprised reading the claims made, it feels like a perfect representation of the personality Sam Altman shows the world.
I'm the farthest thing from an Apple fanboi you can find, but Apple's not so unethical as to make all this (OpenAI trade secret) stuff up. The OpenAI settlement they'll no doubt get from this won't amount to 30 days of their App Store rent-seeking that they were propping up with those lies.
If they can't prove any of this stuff they wouldn't file the suit. No matter what you or I think of Apple, the chances that this went down at least as criminally as they allege, are very high.
> To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.
> [..]
> Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies. They did not seek to withdraw the testimony or to have it stricken (although Apple did request that the Court strike other testimony). Thus, Apple will be held to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.
Meh. Consider that you had no choice and no say that your data out there, both present and historic as mined, aggregated and analyzed by data collectors, was used as a training set for the LLMs. I think you’re a tad too late with your warning. They’re already thieves and they know it. And they know you can’t and won’t do anything about it.
Depends on the objective of Apple. It’s hard to imagine they’re after a quick payout. They may wish to keep this in the news cycle as long as possible. I could see them both harming open ai and sending a message to employees thinking of leaving that if they even consider breaking their confidentiality agreements, it will absolutely ruin their careers.
doubt it - in the uber/waymo thing the guy got pardoned by trump after lobbying from thiel/luckey, probably a similar outcome for this guy since altman has trump's ear rn.
I keep seeing this take in the comments, but why wouldn't Apple make an example of OpenAI? They can certainly afford to. There's no lawyering your way out of a case this cut and dry, if it makes it to court. OpenAI has already signaled intent to become a direct competitor to Apple, why wouldn't Apple publicly humiliate them before they can get that product off the ground?
The irony to me is Apple did the exact same thing to Motorola back in the day, which I saw firsthand as a Mot eng. Poached employees and IP. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.
Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.
Of course, this is essentially the basis of capitalism. Corporations are just people, folks, spread the knowledge and we all get richer.
The best corporations I worked at had people dedicated to reverse engineering competitor products and were deeply steeped in the market, the worst were those where product just cared about making their bosses happy.
“Don’t over plan your life. Be open to the wonders and opportunities that present themselves,” Tan said.
[sharing reflections on his journey from MIT graduate to Apple executive to OpenAI Chief Hardware Officer as part of the Distinguished Speaker series hosted by the School of Engineering]
who knows, maybe he had giant gambling debts or other addiction(s) or bad real estate investments and/or lost half of it all to an ex-wife first. things that Jony might be readily aware of. assuming there is more than a kernel of truth to this - and i can't imagine not, the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account - it doesn't surprise me that Tan was a criminal, it's that he was such a bad criminal
Eh, not a lawyer, but my experience with internet PR problems is that the Internet is pretty lazy with a short attention span.
Take something down and most of the Internet is too lazy to dig up an archive and they wander off to find something else to score internet points off of.
Wow. Was just going to comment about how Tan threw away his professional credibility. This stuff will be the first result that comes up in a search or LLM.
He’s made terrible decisions since leaving Apple. I wonder if MIT/folks will now investigate his entire academic career as well.
What a way to throw away 25 years of hard work. Started off as a designer and worked his way up to VP. I’m sure we’ll hear from anonymous Apple employees about the nature of this person. Maybe he was pleasant to work with?
Reminds me of the (infamous) eBay sellers back in the days who collected perfect ratings for a couple of years just to suddenly turn into scammers, pulling off what was known as a "long con" or "exit scam."
Being spurned is one possible motivation, but so is an outstanding offer, where you go from middle of the pack performer with career stagnation to superstar leading the hot new product.
I do hope Anthropic are better with IP, and I think they may be. Given Dario Amodei hasn't been sued by OpenAI while building Anthropic this seems likely.
I think Amodei may actually be quite a good human, despite my trust in big tech being at an all-time low.
The employees doing the stealing are serious offenders here and I hope they lose all the job security they just had. There’s no way they wouldn’t know they’d be fired if Apple found out what they were doing, but the money was too irresistible to them and they thought they’d get away with it.
this is just a repeat of the whole Uber case in regards to self driving vs Waymo.
the people responsible will be sent to jail - and if they can pay trump for pardons they will get out - but if not they're looking at 10 years at the FEDs.
Casually dragging new employees into the deepest shit, it’s breathtaking. Also the naïveté of going along with it??
> He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information
xAI argues the stolen data contains “cutting-edge AI technologies with features superior to those offered by ChatGPT”. The company claims this information could provide OpenAI with a “potential overwhelming edge in the race to dominate the AI landscape”.
This has to be a joke. The also-ran accusing the market leader. Specially when some of what xAI has achieved was stolen from Google.
If instead of downloading the files they took the info out in the form of neural network trained on the files and able to reproduce the information, that would be just fair use, 100 pound.
I’d guess phone, anything else is too compute-constrained and just an accessory for them, plus has to pay 30% of subscriptions and can be disadvantaged strategically.
Likely a device where the largest share of interaction pattern is through voice conversations and chats with the system to get it to do things for you: messages, email, etc.
It would have to run Android, and try to provide compatibility for existing apps in order for this to be a successful device.
If you sleep with dogs you're gonna get fleas. These AI companies have made billions by stealing other peoples content, what makes you think they would be above stealing from Apple?
Quick reminder that Apple was part of the silicon valley crew that partook of illegal non-poaching arrangements with other SV companies, helping to stifle salaries and more.
But, that's a bit of a tangent. On the other hand, Apple is accused of (and a jury ruled against them on the issue) hiring from Masimo to steal trade secret. Appeals are pending, of course, but it's a reminder that Apple is not lily white on this topic.
The jury ruled against Apple only on the issue of patents, and the claims of trade secret theft were dismissed. There doesn’t seem to be evidence that the Masimo employees who went to work for Apple brought any confidential information along with them.
Yeah I cannot feel any sympathy for either companies here.
They all do this exact thing, including Apple. OpenAI was just the last one to get caught.
And if OpenAI uses this hardware information to bring less locked hardware to the masses, wishful thinking I know, then more power to them.
If AI keeps improving, it is very important to make sure everyone gets at least a smidge of a chance of equal access to AI otherwise the income disparity will grow even more. And Apple is the last company in the world to think of the masses. They sell $1000 aluminium monitor stands: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-monitor-stand-price-re...
In every company I've worked at (all with >1000 employees), there is always some text in the offer or onboarding documents clearly stating that you should not bring any previous employer's trade secret or intellectual property to this company.
I wonder whether Open AI's offer letter or onboarding document also says such a thing.
I expected this to be mostly about Apple being angry that OpenAI hired its hardware people, but the complaint sounds more specific and obviously it is still only Apple’s side for now.
Is this the simple case of being used to stealing so much (most ai companies pretty much stole all of data available on the internet with little consequence) that they also felt comfortable stealing data from companies?
9. In the months before he left Apple, Mr. Tan met with OpenAI or its collaborators and
discussed meetings with a key Apple supplier. He began emailing himself information about Apple’s
suppliers and internal summaries of the consumer electronics industry. And today, when interviewing
Apple employees for jobs at OpenAI, Mr. Tan uses Apple’s confidential information to gain access
to even more insider knowledge. He has used an Apple internal project codename to ask, “What’s the
plan[?]” for an unannounced Apple product. He has directed job candidates still working for Apple
to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and
his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information. These directions to bring
Apple’s parts to OpenAI job interviews surprised at least one of the candidates, who commented that
he “didn’t even know we could take those from the office.”
10. This is part of OpenAI’s strategy to extract Apple’s confidential information. OpenAI
has been instructing Apple employees to bring “CAD/design artifacts” and “prototypes” to their
interviews and to divulge details about their work such as “subsystem and component selection,” the
“tools or methodologies you use for system integration, such as CAD software, simulation tools,”
and “Vendor selection and communication/collaboration with vendors.”
11. OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For
example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay
at Apple as long as they can. After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an
internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for
employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI
colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their
departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols. Unsurprisingly, Apple’s investigation has found
a pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended
to protect Apple’s confidential information.
Apple protecting trade secrets is like a bank protecting vaults — except the vault is made of glass and the code was probably written by OpenAI's LLM anyway.
There comes a point in a startup's life where more controls are needed. Red tape. The stuff that slows down the big boys. Problem is, the red tape is scar tissue from previous informal process failures.
My gut instinct is to call you a mooncalf, given the lengthy documented history of OpenAI "re-appropriating" things and wanting to profit from it. So here is my honest question, what light did you see them in before and what did you base that on?
I'm curious, who is actually making the calls and who is actually doing the scouting for these people. If this is coordinated, the chain must long, so let's see it!
They do all of this, plus far worse. Including but not limited to flooding the internet with guerrilla marketing and sentiment-shifting bots across all social media platforms.
This is the sort of company they are, and it's just the tip of the iceberg: https://clawd.rip
Pretty foolish of them to play so unethically only to lose such a big account and now gain an open-and-shut lawsuit that will seriously damage their ability to compete in hardware for a very long time.
I don't really get it. High profile people working for Apple leave for OpenAI, obviously for money. Is it worth it though? You already have a good job, enough money and work for an iconic company.
I mean people in these positions taking these decisions, wouldn't have actually benefited way much more if staying at Apple and actually disclosed OpenAI attempts to steal IP and technology?
just desserts. let them fight each other. every major monopolistic corporation in this country was founded on theft anyway. lets not clutch pearls here guys...
Reminder that Apple hired 30+ engineers from Masimo and stole multiple trade secrets, including their blood-oxygen monitoring tech, leading to a $634 million judgement against them. They also asked President Biden to intervene and pressure the ITC to reverse their ruling.
Not saying OpenAI is innocent here of course, but really no large corporation is. This is just how the game is played.
All of three of these companies are huge $10+ billion corporations who are capable of doing good and bad simultaneously. If you’re happy painting them as black or white, that your choice, but some people are interested in the specific facts of each case.
All I did was quote a fact without any additional comments, and you are the one being dismissive and handwaving it away.
Weirdly, this seems like they're trying to train a model to work like Apple? They seem really interested in processes and how stuff is done, rather than only the finished artifacts.
Given that allegedly hardware information was involved I’d lean more toward this is for developing either custom silicon based on Apple’s designs or OpenAI wants to make consumer hardware. Aren’t they making something with Jony Ive too?
I assumed consumer hardware too though I can't imagine what OpenAI hardware would look like. Another take on the "smart speaker" that has hit the consumer market with a resounding "meh?"
A lot of people have tried to copy Apple’s finished product and they never get it right, because they don’t have the process behind it. How something looks is only a small part of it.
>In its lawsuit Friday, Apple accused Tang Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and a former Apple executive, of coaching his hires from Apple on how to evade Apple’s security processes for departing employees.
The word "coaching" is very malleable, and could refer to perfectly legal conduct, or conduct that is illegal, unethical, or both. How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are? One would assume he was told by previously-departed Apple employees. Would they have been forbidden to disclose information about the outgoing process? I would think so, given how careful Apple is about these things.
> Apple accused another former employee, Chang Liu, of using a former colleague’s Apple-owned laptop to access and download technical documents while working at OpenAI. Mr. Liu told that Apple employee what information about unannounced products she should study before job interviews, Apple said.
I would be very hesitant to assist a former colleague who is still at Apple in this way. Apple is well known for using deliberate leaks to smoke out leakers, and it would be easy for them to get a current/loyal employee to go through the interview process at a competitor for the purpose of finding out if the competitor is trying to get Apple employees to act unethically/illegally.
EDIT: I see my comment, which I posted on the HN thread for an NYT article, has been merged into the comment section of a different article, and is now being downvoted a bunch. Please understand I did not post this comment here, so if it seems out of place that's why.
> After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols.
I will never grow tired of highly paid so-called geniuses so deluded by their own hubris they think no one will not only not notice them moving GBs of data onto a USB on their last day of work, but assume they also don't have logs of everything you accessed and everything you took.
Little no-name companies have this capability with off the shelf software.
Large companies like Apple have entire departments of staff whose job it is to monitor data theft.
It's bonkers and I love every single story as if it's never been told before.
This kind of stuff happens all the time. The employees in question are just incredibly bad at covering their tracks, normally they'd get fired and that would be it.
It is fishy that OpenAI's leadership didn't have the watchdogd in place to catch it. And there's this huge public lawsuit about it now. Plus there's the Elon lawsuit. Makes me think somebody wants OpenAI to go down. Almost like a sacrificial scapegoat, in order to achieve psychosocial unity in the programming community, or something like that.
Hot take, but Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could. Of course Apple can sue and they will probably settle some amount with OpenAI, but acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment, and OpenAI is uniquely worse at stealing corporate secrets is laughable. Especially considering Apple’s famous history!
> Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could
The closest involved Apple selling Xerox pre-IPO shares [1]. And there are zero allegations any PARC employees who moved to Apple with confidential information the this has gone down.
> acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment
It's not. It's why it gets litigated and criminally charged. I won't disagree that there is a section of Americans who think it's commonplace. But that's because they're either personally doing the crimes or surrounded by criminals.
Hmmm it does seem like this seems much worse than what I thought of Apple doing (like stealing the idea for a mouse and GUI from Xerox), the best I could find is Qualcomm claiming Apple stole its modem code and gave it to Intel. That was settled before trial.
This however does actually seem far worse, reminds me more of Waymo vs Uber, people can go to jail.
At the end of the day leadership matters in corporate settings (or for a country for that matter). The person at the helm sets the tone for the culture - what’s acceptable what’s not etc. how to go about achieving a goal. Objectively speaking and leaving out judgement of good or bad- Sam, Trump etc all are extremely good at the skill they bring. And when they are put in a position of power they do end up revealing who they are. Thats the thing about power - once you have it will reveal who you are and you have no control over that And Thats the deal. Sam prolly has no idea about it but given who he is he only has a bunch of narcissistic megalomaniacs surrounding him and so on and so forth with dilution as levels progress
And everyone will keep using them, and nothing will happen, because the markets are completely irrational, sociopathic and nobody was actually in charge, regulations are bad etc...
What is the realistic expectation where megacorporations are above a good chunk of the law, the citizens can't hopefully pass any legislation and pardons are just a matter of a donation?
Yeah, I find the majority of comments here interesting. Sure, it should be common sense not to email internal documents to yourself when you leave, or keep a company laptop and access internal networks after you no longer work at a place. That's just dumb and unethical and illegal.
But also, I can't find it in myself to really care about this. Trillion-dollar company takes ideas from other trillion-dollar company. Apple has done this to much smaller companies countless times. But OpenAI-on-Apple violence is so far removed from a crime that actually harms normal people that I'm not sure why I should give a shit.
Well they trained their model by scraping all digitised human knowledge and ignoring IP and CW laws so whats a little bit of corporate espionage in the grand scheme of things
What a dumb take. Apple is the most wildly successful company in the market. You think whatever pittance they get from this will outweigh the cost of stolen ip?
Idea is that Trump would bailout AI companies and call it "job protection" or "America growth" or "national security" because they know the word 'bailout' is politically bad.
Other ideas discussed are that AI companies are going through a chain of larger and larger subsidies: VC --> Big Tech --> Governments. And that these companies haven't been able to make money off of AI so they're priming things for a bailout that's not a bailout wink wink. And that they foresee a situation where Trump will accept bribes in order to heavily regulate some AI companies but not others. Picking winners and losers.
Some of the Apple/Samsung complaint was horseshit (and was a bit of a distraction because they knew they'd need to settle their suit with Nokia).
But it was design copying and IP infringement stuff: duplication of things already in the wild.
This is on another level. If any of this is true, it's extraordinary, and I think OpenAI will likely want to settle quickly, thus increasing Apple's AI-related earnings.
I didn't read the full complaint but the article focuses on bringing Apple IP to interviews. It's not clear that it was intended to steal trade secrets.
The Liu guy seemingly did so but he wouldn't be the first person to try to take his own work product out the door for personal reasons.
I distrust statements like:
> “pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.”
They do explain that in more detail deeper in the complaint. They allege that OpenAI has obtained the offboarding checklist for Apple managers, that OpenAI is using it to issue guidance to departing employees on how they can avoid scrutiny, and that employees receiving this guidance have been ignoring Apple security personnel who try to schedule their standard exit processes.
That doesn't sound too heinous. As far as I am aware, employers aren't entitled to exit processes so long as they get their property back. OpenAI possessing an offboarding checklist accessible to any Apple manager doesn't seem like an IP issue.
I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this part other than Apple trying to imply OpenAI has something to hide.
They're more than trying to imply it. Apple says "This is the tip of the iceberg", and a lawsuit is necessary to uncover the full scope of what they think OpenAI has to hide.
> As far as I am aware, employers aren't entitled to exit processes so long as they get their property back.
They're not, but one of the defendants allegedly dodged returning his company laptop. It's then alleged that he used it to continue accessing Apple documents after he'd already left, and coached at least one other person on how to copy confidential documents without alerting Apple's security team.
If these allegations are supported, it seems pretty reasonable to wonder whether there might be more people he coached and what documents they might have copied undetected.
> Apple says "This is the tip of the iceberg", and a lawsuit is necessary to uncover the full scope of what they think OpenAI has to hide.
Forgive me if I trust neither side's grandiose claims.
> one of the defendants allegedly dodged returning his company laptop
Yeah that accusation sounds sufficiently provable that it would be surprising if it was false. That being said, Apple claims it's part of a pattern that seems very inconsistent.
Considering how brazen Liu was, this could be a case of smug engineer and not corporate espionage.
Some pretty damning stuff:
> OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can.
> Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan.
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI.
Non-competes and the like are gross but what's described here isn't just "bring your expertise to OpenAI" it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
It gets even worse. The person not only kept the laptop and used an exploit to download confidential Apple documents, they bragged about it to a contact who was still working at Apple who was also feeding him information:
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI. He also maintained a relationship with Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng, an Apple employee who continued to give him updates on Apple's projects, vendor decisions, and engineering details. When Liu learned he still had access to Apple's systems, he texted Peng "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny."
This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.
Doing it at a the company that most aggressively enforces secrecy is even crazier.
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Its also how some folks act like when they've done something they morally can't deal with - their subconscious starts throwing all sorts of obvious signs up until they get caught. I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you show up or not, enjoy your retirement.
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).
Or they simply don't care, or don't see it as a problem
> 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 they can to boost their status. Stealing from past employer feels like a way to make yourself more valuable or indispensable, which gives them a feeling of leverage in their new job.
> I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you show up or not, enjoy your retirement.
Most likely the opposite: Their new job brought them into a company surrounded by high performers who got their by working hard. They probably felt insecure in such a competitive environment and thought that stealing from Apple could make them appear more valuable so they could keep up with the demands.
Pre-IPO companies in highly competitive markets are not “rest and vest” environments.
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.
> they morally can't deal with - their subconscious starts throwing all sorts of obvious signs up until they get caught That's the view narcissistic have of human nature: "we feel so bad when we behave selfishly, because deep inside we are so naturally virtuous". It's very comfortable to believe that deep inside we remain virtous/innocent even if our life clearly shows how mediocre we are. In the real world, you are what you do.
“Oh right, all that stuff I did”, as Side Show Bob put it.
So far it seems that he's winning as OpenAI is being sued, not Liu
Not so.. He’s being sued personally as well. the lawsuit is Apple vs. “ CHANG LIU, TANG YEW TAN, OPENAI FOUNDATION f/k/a OPENAI, INC., OPENAI GROUP PBC, and IO PRODUCTS, LLC f/k/a IO PRODUCTS, INC.”
It's a crime too. If the Feds take an interest he could get ten years.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1832
Maybe Apple planted him at OpenAI.
I'd watch that movie
>This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply you.
Spot on perfect. I see this too often and not just in tech.
An acquaintance of mine was accidentally wired about $100k when it was supposed to be $5k. Before it could be reversed, they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country. They then changed all socials and handles. They are now ignoring all court documents and are on track to get a default judgement against them.
Their rationale? “It’s mine, they owed me this”. They are 100% convinced that they are in the right, not just that they can keep it but that they actually intended to send them this to begin with. I get it $100k isn’t nothing but they’re also throwing their life away for less than what they used to make a year in salary.
People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
I had a client send me an ACH that was legitimately a fat finger extra zero. For me, it was a "lot" of truck payments. For them, it was a rounding error that they were unaware of until I reached out and let them know about their mistake. I couldn't wait to make it right with them because it bothered me so much because suddenly I had a pile of money that was theirs and not mine.
I had a similar situation where someone had their email client configured with my address in the reply-to header. We shared a first initial, last name, and isp… also happened to be my email address. His email was firsnamelastname, or something similar. I emailed the guy several times explaining how to fix it, and that I was getting a lot of his business correspondence. Never heard from him.
Then one day I get a Chase Zelle email saying that someone was sending me money. Something like $500. Logged into the Chase app and sure enough, could have taken it with the click of a button.
I contacted the sender to explain the situation and recommended they call the intended recipient for a correct email address.
Couldn’t image just taking it knowing it wasn’t intended for me.
Had a similar experience. Was at a party when I suddenly received a notification from our country's equivalent to cashapp/Venmo. It was about $450, so not a lot but enough to be significant to many people. About a minute later I get a call from a seemingly young man who's very stressed telling me he sent the money to the wrong number and asking me to send it back. I told him don't worry I'll get your money back but I need to contact customer service first just to make sure it's safe for me to do so. I wanted to avoid some kind of charge back scam or similar.
So I called CS, they said it was safe to return the money and so I did and the guy called back just to thank me.
This reminds me of the terribly designed timesheet system I was using earlier this year, where I accidentally logged like 55 hours of work for something instead of 55 minutes… I got a shocking direct deposit that week and had to mail them back a large check. Really hope they definitely don’t mess up the 1099!
> An acquaintance of mine was accidentally wired about $100k when it was supposed to be $5k. Before it could be reversed, they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country. They then changed all socials and handles. They are now ignoring all court documents and are on track to get a default judgement against them.
$95k does not seems like enough money to totally upend your life like that for.
> $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 one-sided when it comes to things like this, anyone who been poor previously (or is currently) could attest to this.
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.
I don't know, the very same comment mentions that the person was earning 6 figures. Less-than-a-year's-salary is definitely a weird thing to throw a comfortable 6 figure income out the window for - it's not like 95k is "never work a day in your life" money.
> I don't know, the very same comment mentions that the person was earning 6 figures.
What does that mean for where and how the person live though? How much money were they realistically having left at the end of the month? 6 figures surely means a lot in some places, in others not so much and maybe they didn't have much left after all. Even with 1K left in a month on average, that's 95 months (~8 years) of saving for the same amount, maybe it was always the plan to just get the fuck out once they got close to 100K or whatever.
Humans do rash things, especially when some shortcut appears. But all this is also speculation and hypothesizing, who knows the real reasons behind it for sure.
> What does that mean for where and how the person live though?
It means they lived somewhere where a 6-figure income is feasible, which already puts it on the expensive end of the spectrum. If they are fleeing to somewhere where 95k looks like retirement money, that's not going to be a place where replacing that 6-figure income is feasible (especially with a default judgement against them blocking access to the whole US-influenced banking network)
People can earn six figures and still be living paycheque to paycheque, and up to their ears in debt.
I don’t think that changes the equation any? If you are underwater on 100k/year, you sure as shit are going to end up underwater on 95k for the entire rest of your life…
Indeed, a lot of HN readers don't realise their good luck in life. It takes a dose of poverty to bring perspective.
Yes seems like would cost a portion of it to execute the escape. Should have just bet it on a 10/1 shot and then kept the 900k if it worked out.
And gone to jail when it doesn’t pan out?
Not your problem they made the mistake, cant get blood from a stone, sue me etc etc.
The person had a 6 figure job. They’d end up having their salary garnished to pay the debt. It would be far worse than just giving the money back.
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
It's more that money and power enable you to be who you really are, and amplify your worst traits if you're lacking self-awareness.
There are many people who are rich/wealthy and/or powerful and they're decent individuals living relatively ordinary lives. You don't read about most of them because they're "normal".
> It's more that money and power enable you to be who you really are
If you’re only a certain way when you have money and power, is it really “who you really are”?
If the only reason you didn't behave that way to begin with is that you lack the money and power to evade the consequences, then yes. You really are that person.
while i somewhat agree with that reasoning, it can go too far - most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so. But is it right to say who they really are as being murderers?
Most people would what? No, I don’t believe that’s true.
> most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so
Do you have any evidence to support this? Feels like this opinion is made up, for unknown reasons.
In reality, psychopathic tendencies are about 4.5% in the general adult population, a far cry from 'most people', with the gold standard assessment being only 1.2%. [1]
From that same article, "The construct of psychopathy is understood generically as a type of personality disorder characterized, among other important features, by the presence of behaviors that conflict with the social, moral, or legal norms of society, giving rise in many cases to clearly criminal behaviors ..."
There's also the bagel experiment described in Freakonomics. [2]
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
[2] https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/WhatTheBagelM...
you should probably seek mental help and read them this specific thread to cut to the chase instead of paying for 10 sessions
That says a huge amount about YOU and nothing about ‘most people’. What a very revealing thing to say. Wow.
> most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so
…yeah, it’s fitting that sama was the top user here. What a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Yes. "Power doesn't corrupt, it reveals"
Same goes for money: It enables greedy jerks to be more greedy and more of a jerky, and it enables people who e.g. voluntarily donated already to do much more in that direction, too.
I believe the original statement is an oversimplification. What actually happens is that extreme situations, both positive and negative, can help you discover things about you that you didn't know before.
Apart from that, the problem with "who you really are" is that individual is more of a process than a static thing, so any such reification becomes invalid in the next instant.
You're right that people aren't static, but we should also acknowledge there are lots of people who become rich and powerful and they don't do horrid things. Many are perfectly decent people who care for their families, help those around them, contribute to their communities and use their wealth and power to support causes that are important to them.
You don't hear about these people as much because they're not out looking for attention, making outlandish statements or even trying to "change the world" in a narcisstic Silicon Valley way.
"Who you are" at your core drives the direction you go in when you acquire wealth and power.
I'd say who you really are is whoever you really are. If you're acting like a dick then you really are a dick, I don't care whether your financial situation influences your behavior.
Spot on
Finance somehow accidentally paid me approximately a whole years salary at once when they did the first payroll run after we were acquired.
My first thought was I hope they didn't make this mistake for everyone, and second thought how do I safely return this.
(Turns out it was a one off mistake, and returning the excess was pretty straightforward though probably the largest bank transfer I've ever made)
> they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country
To be fair this is smarter than like 95% of white-collar criminals.
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
Given your story its not sounds like this is power grab. More like they actually on spectrum and have some mental issues on top this. Or had mental breakdown because something happened before that money arrived.
Situations when people do something weird, bad or just plain evil for money and power are usually logical. E.g people think they got access to more money they percieve they can earn in next decade, or ever, something that settles them for life.
Earning more than $100,000 and throwing everything away for $95,000 only make sense if you are terminally ill. Or if it was never your real identify in first place and its well planned scam.
If you're earning $100k in Silicon Valley, your expenses will swallow up almost all of that. A sudden $100k windfall, on the other hand, tax free and suitably invested,will let you live for years quite comfortably in many poor countries.
Sorry to disappoint you, but no you cannot live "comfortably" in "poor countries" for $100,000 for "years". Well, unless you mean like two years.
I lived across South East Asia for more than decade and now live here full time. I have to live on around $20,000 / year most of the time since starting my company. And I do not live anywhere close to what average US / EU citizen will call "comfortable" let alone people from valley.
Stories of rich living for cheap in poor countries its just that: stories. It only possible if you preserve your US salary. For $50,000 post tax a year you can live well unless you have kids that need not a "poor country education".
50,000 post tax is enough to live well in most US cities, let alone the rest of the country.
I live in what according to Wikipedia is 18th most expensive country in the world. Average person working full time as a nurse here earns about 30k dollars a year after taxes. If they can survive here, 20k a year in most of South East Asia should be perfectly fine for comfortable life.
Sure, if you're starting from nothing and expect to live a Western lifestyle. But you can draw down $5000/year from that sum for a very long time, and make twice the average Indian yearly income.
One more thing about life in developing countries, ones with seemingly super low GDP per capita. Its that low because a lot of economy in rural areas is simple unaccounted for: communities build their own housing, grow their own food or work in family business usually with no accounting or taxes whatsoever.
If you're born there you unlikely to ever end up in US on $100,000+ job unless your whole family or village invest in it.
If you're expat you will soon end up finding out that as expat you'll pay completely different prices and starting local business is just impossible unless you become part of a family.
Okay lets say you are a person who want and able to live on average Indian yearly income in rural India.
How the hell you end up in US on $100,000+ job? How much time it took and how much you spent on education / job search / migration to US?
If you're from India then likely all your relatives invested into your education and migrarion.
50,000 sounds like a lot. Most people in West European countries don’t make that much.
EU average is ~€39.000, gross, before taxes. And only nine countries have above average average salaries.
And that’s not available income. France median pre-tax "net" income is ~€2.100 / month.
EU have free healthcare and education. Also not everyone, but alot of people still own their own houses and appartments or they can get relatively cheap mortage.
Nothing of it available in cheap country for expat. If you move to developing country you better pay for health insurance like 80-250 EUR / month / person.
Also if you have a partner who is not remote worker they might not be able to find well paid job there. If you have kids then giving them good modern education in English is exorbitantly expensive.
I wont even start about fact that government of cheap country might change and you lose your residence permit, social circle or even property. And in most of countries that are easy to enter never give permanent residences and passports. You have to pay pay pay all the time or jump countries.
> EU have free healthcare and education
They are not free, the costs are deducted from the gross income listed above. Not that fundamentally different than employers paying for your health insurance (besides the system being way more efficient etc.)
Yes of course someone pays for it, in this case your deductions as you say. But I think there is a fundemental difference to employers paying for health insurance in that it doesn't depend on your job. So if you lose your job you don't lose your healthcare so companies can't use that as a way to retain you.
And the actual cost of healthcare to the organisations paying for it is actually far lower than the US system, probably partly because it's more regulated and also because there is far less litigation so insuranace for doctors is cheaper.
So I don't think the US system is "more efficient", unless by "efficient" you mean in extracting money from patients / their insurances. In the US hospitals exist to make money, in the EU it's more about providing treatment.
Whole point is that as expat in developing countries you'll have to DIY your own healthcare. And education if you have children. And pay commercial prices.
And good education is either non existing in cheap cities or expensive in expensive ones.
> And good education is either non existing in cheap cities or expensive in expensive ones.
As it is in most if not all of the world? Free, high quality, public education is a rare thing, in most countries, even fully developed expensive ones.
Even when the schools themselves are nominally free you see well-off highly educated people do their best and pay a very large premium to get to live into the proper, usually expensive, neighbourhoods so their kids can live in the "right" school district to get into the "right" school.
Which is just paying a premium for supposedly better education. An indirect education cost.
And that is on top of the taxes deducted from the gross salary figures I mentioned, which are, in part, used to cover said "free" education.
To be fair if you are an English speaker and move to medium/lower CoL central/eastern/southern European country you will mostly have the same concerns and will realistically have to pay commercial prices for the most part.
… which is precisely why I mentioned gross, pre-mandatory social contributions, pre-taxed income, and not net take-home? Considering said taxes pay for said healthcare, pensions, and education?
As a supporting point for
> 50,000 sounds like a lot. Most people in West European countries don’t make that much.
And a counter-point to
> I lived across South East Asia for more than decade and now live here full time. I have to live on around $20,000 / year most of the time […] And I do not live anywhere close to what average US / EU citizen will call "comfortable" […]. It only possible if you preserve your US salary. For $50,000 post tax a year you can live well unless you have kids that need not a "poor country education".
> I wont even start about fact that government of cheap country might change and you lose your residence permit, social circle or even property. And in most of countries that are easy to enter never give permanent residences and passports.
Good, because that is an entirely different and very loosely related point.
I am afraid I am not getting your point.
Honestly conversation did derailed. For me it isnt about US vs EU. Its about difference between living in a country with some functioning institutions, rule of law and education / healthcare.
I do care about having to waste my life setting DIY solutions because country I live in doesnt have it.
I just lived around the world a bit especially in said cheap countries. A lot of people who spend 3-6 months travelling there after college or while nomading seriously undersell how much hassle living there can be if you're there for good.
Its a good to have a job or company in US / EU while living in SEA knowing you can always return if something go sour or when you decide to start a family. Its nowhere as easy if you have hypothetical scenario of moving there for a decade.
Thats all.
We're talking about an engineer here…
You might be surprised how "little" engineers make outside the US too
Since I'm an engineer in europe I think I have a clear idea of how little engineers in europe make. And it's not little enough to run away from your life for only 100k$
The question is still what number people need to live "comfortably" (i.e. upper middle class). The average salary there may not quite provide for the amenities the average American considers "comfortable".
For expat most important part of comfort its entertainment and socialization. In cheap areas you will only have locals who depend on country might want or not to socialize with you, but either way cultural gap will be massive and finding friends will be a struggle for most.
There of course cities with a lot of expats and activities, but imagine what - living there is not cheap. Cheaper than US / EU, but you still gonna need that $2000 / month.
Wont even start on topic of lost opportunities from lack of networking since we talk of some extreme downshifting here. But most people need friends and safety net at least.
I agree (from semi-relevant experience). Also, any “poor” country that’s inexpensive enough to fit this requirements probably isn’t one you’d voluntarily live in.
Side note for the original commenter: It would be kinder and more accurate to state “lower cost of living countries” than “poor countries”. There are numerous lower COL countries that offer a higher quality of life a than that of the US but they aren’t “poor” (I moved to one).
And likely "suitable" countries are not the ones you want to do any investments or even transfer 100,000 to local bank.
I understand that side note wasnt for me, but yeah most of cheaper developing South East Asia countries are not "poor". Though there are ones you can call that, but again in a such countries you dont really want anyone to know you have $100,000 somewhere on a bank because its can get unsafe very fast. Its either "live just a little better than locals" or get in trouble.
PS: I talking of Myanmar, most of Laos and Cambodia.
I've lived in Vietnam on and off for several months at a time. One of the safest countries anywhere ( as long as you don't badmouth the government)
Easy to live on sub 700$ a month if you're happy with air conditioned studio, mostly asian food, scooter and not going to high end bars.
Get the 1 bedroom apartment, quite often takeaway/delivered western food sub 1500$ a month.
Go eat out western food everyday, live in a 3 bedroom in the nicest district go to fancy bars etc and yeah maybe you can reach your 5k a month...
People have no clue / are not willing to experience adjustment for 3 weeks... But easily possible to live here for budgets mentioned above...
If you okay to live like vietnamese person do yes you can live on $700 just fine. Especily if you single, healthy and love driving on motorbikes through rain and take a bit of risks.
Plus health insurance like Cigna for $100-200 unless you want to pay $10,000-20,000 in vinmec if you crash on a motorbike or get other serious sickness.
Plus border runs like $200-300 three times a year or often for cheaper depend on your paasport.
Problem that I doubt its how average SWE on HN imagine "comfortable" living.
Then if you have a partner who is not remote worker and kids there will be other surpeises for you.
The person was probably from a poor country already and was used to that.
I do get that $100,000 in expensive parts of silicon valley likely will buy you a room, some food and commute to work, but math dont make sense here.
Person from that kind of country likely had to spend $100,000 just to find job and move to US and survive there for the first time.
Legal migration to US is super hard and super expensive. You have to be both very successful in what you do and very dedicated in order to do it. Or very rich. And it take years.
People who choose to migrate to US and manage to do it isnt the type to throw it away on small scam.
And if they managed to get in easy, fast and illegally then they wont be the ones competing for $100,000+ job.
If "poor country" includes "places US foreigners won't go" than you sure as shit can survive longer than 2 years.
For example, Thailand would be 2 years like you say. Neighboring Burma/Myanmar would be EASILY 5 years, possibly 10 depending on how long the civil war goes. That's assuming you don't work and live in the capital Yangon.
Maybe there were other factors? Maybe they were leaning towards leaving anyway and this influx of cash enabled them to do so? It’s a stupid idea, for sure, but I think the explanation that “people do weird things when faced with a lot of money” is not really all that explanatory.
They upended their life for $100K?
I wouldn’t do that for a million (these days).
Was talking to a lawyer, and tells me how often he has clients say (after a crime, and while trying to resolve things), "We've got this far [in trying to fix it], don't worry, I'm not stupid enough to screw it up". His response, generally, "My career is built on people who did dumber things, and for less, so..."
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
10 years ago my last boss told me one last advice before going onto entrepreneur ventures: « be careful, people do become crazy and stupid with money » (and I guess he knew what he was talking about…)
Hell, I used to know a guy who did this to steal a monitor from work. Went all the way down to Panama or something.
This reminds me of the kids in MR. Deeds.
Kid 1: What are you going to do with your $20,000
Kid2: quit school
Homeless man: good idea, school is for fools!!
There's a line from the movie The Way of the Gun that I love about this. The number is higher, but it still applies. Some criminals are loading a $15 million ransom into the back of a truck, and a younger criminal says, "Boy, $15 million is a lot of money, huh?" and James Caan, playing an older, wiser criminal says,
"Money? $15 million is not 'money'. It's a motive, with a universal adapter on it."
> They are 100% convinced that they are in the right, not just that they can keep it but that they actually intended to send them this to begin with.
They quite clearly do not believe that. If they did, they wouldn't need to go into hiding or leave the country.
100k really isn't that much money in the grand scheme of things, especially because they will probably get caught anyway.
This honestly sounds like mental illness.
Nah, it doesn't even sound true.
Honestly yes, that’s most likely a major factor
$95,000 isn't that much to destroy your life over.
There's homeless people living on the streets or people in jail who destroyed their lives for way less than 95k. Often for nothing, like throwing a punch over a parking spot argument.
You'd be surprised how far down poor impulsive choices can drag you down even when there's no money on the line.
I'll do it for free
> immediately bought a one way flight out of country
Is this referring to a foreign national who can leave at any time?
The correct term is entitled, as it applies equally whether they think they are smarter or not.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.
I work from home and I have a lot of equipment here (because of what I do - think sensor fusion). Everything is labeled with a bright sticky tape that signifies it belongs to my employer. If I'm not using something at the moment, it's safely stowed in a box that is labeled. My SO knows where everything is, so in the event something happens, they know who it belongs to and who to call. In addition, I keep an inventory sheet of everything. I broke it all down easily so that my SO doesn't have to worry. By doing this, it makes it easy on me as well to know what I have, how long I've had it, when it needs to be returned by, etc.
None of that belongs to me, but they trust me with it and I respect that and I take excellent care of all of it. The mindset that these ex-employees have is just mind blowing. I couldn't fathom doing that.
Decent people don’t rise to the top in this world. Their — and your — ethics won’t allow it.
Which means by definition that the people at the top of the economic pyramid are the very worst of us.
Yike, this notion is deeply troubling to think about
I think by now we have enough evidence to support that point of view. Not everybody up top is a crook, but not having morals or abandoning them along the way certainly makes it easier to ascend.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them […]
At $WORK we have the option of getting a work smartphone or having the company pay for (at portion of) our monthly mobile bill.
I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination. (Others chose payment because they did not want the 'hassle' of carrying a second device (and to save some cash).)
Yeah. I was encouraged to take the lump-sum money my company paid (like most happily did - not taxed; amount equalling latest base iPhone cost) and get MDM installed on the personal phone so that we could access email and everything on that. Laptop was company issued anyway. I, and very few, chose company phone and I got a new SIM just for the company and set it up (they had to pay the SIM bill as well).
A nice side effect of that was I could clearly control when the phone won't even be on me and I had set that expectation - like treks, or short personal vacations, sleeping hours (yes!). I had championed the "follow the sun" policy in my company when it came to on-call rotation, but somehow some of my fellow country men/women colleagues took pride in "being available". Anyway, their time, their choice.
Later some of my colleagues were surprised when they couldn't install certain apps, couldn't do certain things and often used to wonder "does the company take screenshots of my phone?" because the permission was present :D
> somehow some of my fellow country men/women colleagues took pride in "being available"
I call that being exploitable.
Reap what you sow. The one's who follow US "availability culture" absolutely will get promoted faster than the euro-in-american clothing "I work to live not live to work" crowd.
Marxian style LTV analysis of the economy breaks down hardcore involving anything touching electrons. His analysis of the theory of alienation/exploitation is literally invalid in the era of computers, and exponentially so in the era of AI systems. It's not "exploitation" to be available in exchange for comically large amounts of money.
Exactly that.
I wasn't reachable by phone for company related stuff outside my regular working hours unless I had on-call-duty, which means it was working hours.
I don't get why people would be proud about not setting boundaries.
Some people are in it for the challenge. Someone else's outage? Yeah I'll happily help diagnose it, analysing and figuring out where the issue is can teach you a lot of things.
For the record, this was never at night. Late in the evening, sure.
Also sometimes (depending on the company) being seen to visibly chip in fighting fires can win you real credibility that you can put in the bank and then use later when you want to slightly slack off for a bit.
So it can actually make logical sense to do it occasionally even from a purely selfish perspective if it's half an hour on a random Tuesday evening and you aren't actually doing anything else important.
All depends if the company is actually going to be grateful or not though
This is relatable. Though I’d add that the company can’t be grateful, it’s just a machine. But the colleagues you’re helping out, they absolutely can be grateful, and will sing your praises, leading to positive things happening. In the right type of company.
I do that as well, since I am my own business
It really depends on where you want to steer your career. There's some roles, especially in management, where "working hours only" isn't really an option; if you aspire to one of those you've gotta convince people you'll do what's necessary.
Company IT policies really got it the wrong way around with “bring your own device”. My personal phone is the last device where I would want them to have a presence. Conversely, having them manage a laptop and workstation for me is never going to give me a device as nice as I’m used to at home.
It’s as if they had two choices:
“we’ll provide clothes but you can bring your own lunch!”; vs
“wear your own clothes and we’ll provide lunch!”
and they chose the weird one not the helpful one.
I am extremely picky about keyboards, screens, and OS configuration as a result of being partially deaf, having poor eyesight, and honestly being a bit of an old stick in the mud. It would be lovely to set aside some space on an old Thinkpad for work tasks. It would be comfortable and easy to isolate and be just like my personal machine.
Instead I get a choice between a MacBook with a fixed alternate key layout or a Windows machine with a locked down bright white wallpaper and a non admin account.
First thing I do at a new job is make friends with IT, if at all possible. I end up being the guy with the new high-dpi screens they're trialling, more RAM in my laptop, and "just DM me in Teams" privileges for tech support. All for not treating these people like tech janitors (and obviously there's nothing wrong with being a janitor).
Cheat code for this: ask them if they need any custom tooling. I spent a few hours at a past job on a userscript for their ticketing interface to fix some annoyances. Brownie points for life.
Depending on where you live, your employer may be legally required to accommodate your disabilities. Here in France, HR are usually dutiful about it.
Like you I keep them separate. Not just my phone. I don't do anything personal on work devices (don't log into personal email or banks, etc...)
But, I believe I'm in the minority. Most of my fellow employees have added corp to their phone. I believe most do personal stuff on their work computer. I get it, it's inconvenient. I've gone to offsites and given don't have corp on my phone I have to pull out my corp laptop to contact people and/or lookup stuff that they wouldn't. It would also be much nicer to set personal appointments or deal with personal things I need to during business hours on a laptop than my phone. On rare occasions I bring my laptop to work if I know I'm going to need access to my stuff even though all of it is in the cloud so theoretically I could access it from a work laptop.
I was once at an SV party and several Apple employees (3 women, 5 gay men, 3 straight men) said they all used their work laptops to watch porn at home or traveling. I was pretty shocked. Not that they watched but that they used work laptops for it. They all thought it was fine. It came up because, for some reason I mentioned I always take 2 laptops on business trips, my personal one and my work one. They said they never do that, they just take their work one and do personal stuff. I asked, what about porn and they all said they watched on work laptops.
That was a very long way to say I think people like myself who separate the two are rare.
> I asked, what about porn
I love that you went there directly, that’s hilarious. I would have wondered the same (wouldn’t we all?), but been embarrassed to ask.
> I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination.
This is a wise choice. For me, nothing personal goes onto my work phone or laptop. And nothing work-related goes onto personal devices. Life is just easier that way.
In my early career, I used my work computer (off hours) to do personal work. I never made any money, but it was still wrong.
At some point, I couldn’t live with myself, and purchased my own computer (better than what work gave me, anyway).
I never used my personal cell for work. The closest thing was coordinating meetups, when traveling.
If you are worried about the ethics of using a company laptop to do personal work, you might be taking it a bit far, what damage does this do to the company?
If you are worried about the company claiming rights over your personal work, then it is prudent.
1) It really had nothing to do with what damage it does to the company. It’s a long story, but I take personal Integrity fairly seriously. It was about how I felt about it, inside. As I progressed, in my self-development, “cash register” honestly became more important.
2) That’s definitely a valid point. I have worked on free/open-source code for most of my adult life. For a long time, it was for my own use, but I started publishing code for use by others, and provenance became a much more important coefficient.
I think that the new version of this is using your work's LLM account (potentially more powerful) to do personal work
That seems absolutely crazy to do. One could argue that the marginal cost to work for using a work laptop is zero and the work is still yours (still beyond the risk I’m willing to take). Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it.
> Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it.
Honestly, of the two scenarios, this one is the more likely to fall on the employee's side.
We haven't really tested the legal precedent for ownership of LLM outputs very thoroughly yet, and I'm willing to bet a bunch of us still have employment contracts that haven't been updated to cover LLM use...
That potentially consumes a lot more resources than the very negligible marginal wear and tear that using a work computer would cause.
There was a brief moment in all the hullabaloo that this went unnoticed :X
As for what damage you do, it kind of depends on what you're doing. But in the end you're exposing your work machine to patterns and processes outside your normal job duties, potentially exposing it and the data/access it has to additional risks.
It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.
It’s not just wrong, you’re potentially allowing anything you do on that work computer to 1) be owned by the company and 2) be discoverable in court. it’s amazing how many it orgs are so lax with this. personal/work devices should and always be entirely separate. BYOD is a really bad crutch and a potential compliance nightmare timebomb for all parties.
I did the same. Nothing nefarious on my work laptop, but I used it for websurfing (avoiding questionable sites), booking trips, etc.
Then I realized how stupid that was even though my employer was fine with and was never strict with how a work laptop is used.
I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high.
I bought my own cell phone and laptop and now never use my work equipment for anything but work. Not worth the risk.
> I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high.
If they wrongfully accuse you of that, isn't it a place you should leave in any case?
Name me a large corporation who "trusts" their employees. I'd pretty much be forced into unemployment if trust was a requirement.
I would guess you're probably right. But if you are accused of something, not having a separate non-work computer/phone could make that process worse.
Many years ago my mom chose to have the company pay for her private phone number.
When she stopped working for them, they informed her, that the number legally belonged to them.
It was not a problem for her, because she wanted to get rid of the number anyway, else too many old clients would call.
But it was an interesting situation nonetheless.
Doesn't your phone support creating an isolated profile which deliberately keeps data separate?
"Whenever I leave a company I make sure..."
But its also that companies responsibility to ensure that the employer doesn't take anything.
Apple know how to use MDM on Apple laptops, why wasn't the device locked and located.
Absolutely, but just as it's not ok to enter someone's home just because they forgot to lock the door, it's not ok to exploit access at your old employer because their offboarding process missed something.
I do the same as GP does; I don't want there to be any chance that my former employer has forgotten to revoke access to something, so I make sure to clear out anything that might remain on any device that I don't return to them.
Who knows, maybe another former employee will decide to steal from them around the same time I leave, and me having access credentials on a personal device, even if I haven't used it, might arouse suspicion.
But it's Apple, which is a huge target. Never mind these individuals, you will have China, Russia and other seeking to infiltrate it.
In any top r&d area, one wonders if they perhaps should be searching staff on way out and making then sign out and return CAD drawings etc.
You get trustworthy people by trusting people. Generally when I was there there was a presumption of trust. Given how blatantly the defendants are alleged to have acted, that’s still the case.
> You get trustworthy people by trusting people
Huh? Do FBI/CIA/etc run that way?
Do they get trustworthy people?
>it’s also that company’s responsibility
Is it? I mean legally. Obviously it’s dumb of Apple to have left this guys access open, but that doesn’t mean they actually had any legal responsibility to lock him out. As far as I understand, the law is pretty clear that you can’t access anything you’re not allowed to by policy, whether there’s a technical block or not.
> that doesn’t mean they actually had any legal responsibility to lock him out
If the property owner doesn’t make bare minimum effort to protect the property
Then how much effort and money should taxpayer spend to protect and prosecute regarding the same property?
It seems strange to imply that people that own nothing must through their taxes pay for protection of property of the people who do own everything.
Crimes are crimes and must be prosecuted as such.
The phrase for what you’re doing is “victim blaming”. I don’t know what triggers some people to think this way other than a deep desire to find a contrarian take on a situation.
But no, when a person commits a crime the responsibility and accountability for committing that crime is entirely on the person who committed the crime. If you start blaming the victim or downplaying the crime based on the victim’s circumstances, you are backwards.
> It seems strange to imply that people that own nothing must through their taxes pay for protection of property of the people who do own everything
I don’t know what you think you’re implying here, but by the numbers the wealthy and corporations pay significantly more in taxes than the “people who own nothing”. Everyone should get equal protection under the law, ignoring how much they pay in taxes.
All criminals should be afraid of committing crimes equally, because crimes are crimes and society benefits when committing a crime is discouraged.
While it doesn't apply in this particular case, for healthcare organizations the HIPAA privacy rule implies a legal responsibility to lock out terminated employees from any access to protected health information.
That doesn't absolve an employee (or ex-employee) of the covered entity going about and abusing the access they do have.
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 wanted to use, and went about things.
A year or so later the company hit hard times and we had a large layoff that affected me, and at the end of the video call, the directory of my department mentioned that they needed to wipe my laptops but it "wasn't showing up in MDM". I said I'd be glad to jump on a call with IT to fix that, but then he mentioned the IT staff were laid off too.
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.
Very amusing worldview. In the real world, where I live, I would assume a highly competent employee could exfiltrate trade secrets without me being able to catch them via standard / automated means. This particular Apple former employee got caught because he bragged about it, not because of technical means to catch him. As I've pointed out to a number of people, the very best DLP solution can be completely obviated by someone aiming a camera at their company-issue workstation's monitor.
> 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 the exact behavior pointed out by the GP:
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
MDM is implemented to protect company assets regardless of the actions of the users. It would not be due diligence on the part of the director to trust you to wipe your own device.
It’s not clear to me what the point of your comment is other than illustrating that you’re smarter than your director.
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 the business, handed my laptop in physically and went on my way. I assume they noticed at that point, but before then they apparently had no idea.
I probably should have told someone, but since I hadn't done anything I didn't feel bad about it, and it was a lot easier to get stuff done without the corp stuff breaking everything
See my sibling comment - Apple MDM is, or at least was fragile, and trivial to bypass.
I don't think I'm smarter than everyone else, but instead attribute this to organisational dysfunction. The problem (that went on for weeks) of the default MDM deployed software making some computers unusable was one everyone who got afflicted by it just found workarounds for, and in particular, our incentives were to get our jobs done, not to make sure we continued to allow the MDM deployed stuff to do whatever it wanted that was actively harmful to the company's best interests.
Considering the MDM was not implemented properly (particularly in an environment where one hires cybersecurity professionals, who are more likely than most to be able to figure out workarounds to it), it would actually be much more prudent to hire trustworthy staff who can be trusted not to steal company assets, trade secrets, and so on versus thinking you can conduct a zoom call on said company asset and then fire off a command via the MDM to wipe the laptop when the call is over.
I actually think the director was pretty smart, since he managed to avoid having an extended conversation about the lack of working MDM and ability to follow the procedure in front of the other person on the zoom call. Sometimes it's very important to be able to read between the lines of what someone is telling you.
Relying on remote wipes to secure company data is not a particularly strong plan, either (as this Apple saga should make clear); a determined person would simply be either constantly exfiltrating data, disconnect a machine from the network before it can be wiped, or other various plans (and do so without detection). I should know, since my job duties there were to advise customers on how to move towards a zero trust environment.
Sounds like the boss's response was not to insist the proper procedure be followed, but to assert that the technology had to work as intended, and as soon as he figured out the issue on _his side_ the standard operating procedure could be followed.
> 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.
It is NEVER any other persons responsibility to prevent you from commiting crimes. Never.
They MAY make it harder for themselves, but at no point are is anyone required to make sure you're not a criminal.
That's a difference between living in a society that robs you on every step and one where you can leave a laptop on a table in a cafe and it stays there.
In relationships, offloading personal responsibility onto someone else (aka blaming another person for your choices and behaviors and thoughts and actions) is something like projection, blame-shifting, codependency.
This makes any healthy relationship impossible, as no one can be responsible for someone else's decisions and actions.
Many emotionally immature folks appeal to this and use guilt and shame to get another person to believe they are responsible for someone else's emotions & choices. It's textbook toxic.
Um, no. Why would it be their responsibility? There are laws regarding IP theft. If you willingly break them you can't just say "well your security wasn't good enough".
Apple is obviously the victim but prevention is easier than what is happening now, which is potentially going to court, discovery, etc.
There's really no way to prevent an employee from taking a piece of paper or a digital file from one place to another. The most you can prevent is accidental transfer. If they are malicious they will find a way no matter what guardrails you put.
And they can get you for theft, etc, if you do. Sometimes the social and legal controls are far more effective.
If you leave your house unlocked and someone steals your stuff AND is never caught, you're SOL.
Okay but why assume the latter part? In this case the perps were clearly caught.
what part of "Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can." did you miss?
We need criminal charges to be filed against Liu, Tan and Peng. (And deep discovery to find anything Altman might have said to or about them.)
If you're interested in seeing them prosecuted you probably want to wait a couple of years. The current DOJ isn't doing so hot.
> current DOJ isn't doing so hot
Hit them with state charges. Altman being a brat makes this politically attractive for any AG with ambitions.
Wait, who is “we”? Why are you so invested in enforcing Apple’s IP rights?
Some people care about justice in general?
Also, normalizing stealing IP is only going to have bad consequences for everyone.
It’s a criminal charge. Have you seen a legal case for that? It’s always something like The People of California v. Someone. At least in theory, every citizen is an interested party when the prosecutor files a criminal case.
It’s because of people like those that companies invent a circus full of hoops to jump through to access a random PDF that you need to do your job.
Why don’t you care about the rule of law?
Bad people in control of AI is incredibly dangerous.
Good thing they're just in control of a bunch of LLMs.
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Found out I already had a bank account with €2000 balance in my name. Temptation was high to take over the account and withdraw the cash.
Fortunately didn't touch a dime.
Long story short, my identity got stolen, account was used to collect eBay scam money and cash out from ATMs. I was a suspect and investigated for money laundering and membership to organised crime.
I had to sue the Prosecutor's Office to have them investigate the scammers and confirm my innocence. They initially refused because it was too hard... Italy.
Italy, and beyond... the lobbying that has been done to make identity theft and associated fraud primarily a crime against the institution/business and not you, and the associated implications that you somehow "lost" your identity or failed to protect it (versus the reality, one of those businesses that required that information failed to safeguard it properly) is one of the biggest scams of modern day consumerism.
When I was in the process of buying my home, with perfectly horrible timing something showed up on my credit report, a delinquency and charge off from Verizon of $1,800 or so.
I've never used Verizon. I've been with AT&T for nearly 20 years.
But after calling Verizon to dispute this as identity theft, this is what I learned - that "I" opened a Verizon account at a Walmart in El Paso, and ran up a huge bill calling numbers all around the world.
I live near Seattle. I've been to Texas twice in my life. I was even overseas during part of this alleged activity. I supplied (I shouldn't have to supply all of it, but I did - I needed this resolved because ... mortgage application) police report, travel documents and receipts, hotel overseas, utility bills, AT&T bills.
Verizon's first reply: based on our internal review, we remain satisfied that you are the one responsible for the debt, based on the documentation that was used to open the account.
Me: In that case, I would love to see and be reminded of the documentation I used to open the account, to see if it jogs my memory of some amnesia, apparently.
Verizon: due to customer privacy policy we are unable to show this to you.
Me: "So this documentation is simultaneously enough to prove it really was me, but not enough for you to be satisfied that it may not actually be me and you might be violating some fraudster's identity privacy?"
Basically.
I got it resolved, but it took far too much work.
And all the while, rather than "some company fucked up, and some other company's employee or process didn't catch it", I have to spend hours, and money, demonstrating to some other company that I didn't commit fraud against them, or they can make it impossible for me to buy a house without just paying them the charges someone else incurred.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back
It’s a total liability to hold onto anything. Even if you don’t do anything with it, it could get stolen or misplaced, and you’re liable. Not worth the headache.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Right. I noticed a coworker who recently left the organization was still running some of our software on his personal computer (evident in the access logs) and notified him that I could see, he should be more careful, etc. We agree to these contracts because compliance matters, not just because we need the job.
>Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust, responsibility and accountability, but there's people coming from low trust environments where exploiting loopholes and scamming everyone outside their inner circle is the norm, and it's the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.
They're brazen because they've never been caught or suffered consequences for their actions.
This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview.
> Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust, responsibility and accountability, but there's people coming from low trust environments where exploiting loopholes and scamming everyone outside their inner circle is the norm, and it's the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.
For an adult, I would attribute this more to internal mental makeup than anything else. I've seen individuals exhibit these positive and negative behaviors irrespective of whether they were in a high-trust society or a low-trust one, a wealthy society or a poverty-riddled one.
Additionally, based on what's going on in the world, I would say that there are very clear signs that a high-trust society is formed when adults with positive behaviors are in power, and a low-trust society is formed when adults with negative behaviors gain power.
Indubitably, there are individuals whose behaviors are moderated by what type of society they're in, but that split between moderated individuals and self-driven individuals is, IMHO, unknown, or at least, unknown to me.
I’ve been seeing this “high-trust society” dog whistle a lot lately, and I think it’s one of the funniest of its kind. You truly want me to believe that the United States, a country with a history of slavery and segregation, a country that went through a historical period dominated by people literally called “robber barons,” was a high-trust society before immigrants from less industrialized places came and ruined that?
It isn’t a dog whistle. The US actually does have a high-trust society compared to most of the world. Petty theft, snatching, pickpockets, scams, etc are relatively uncommon compared to e.g. many popular places in Europe. Americans are famously vulnerable to it when traveling because it isn’t really part of their domestic threat environment. In many areas, Americans don’t bother to lock anything. You can leave stuff out in public places and it is unlikely to be stolen.
I would say it is lower trust today than when I was a child. Some cities have developed real petty theft problems due to disinterested enforcement. It is still noticeably higher trust than most places in the world I’ve traveled.
> Petty theft, snatching, pickpockets, scams, etc are relatively uncommon compared to e.g. many popular places in Europe.
Yes, in non-popular places in Europe those are also quite uncommon, even more then in the US on average..
So the lesson here is that those type of crimes are common in tourist heavy places, like.. Times Square in NYC for example.
It really depends on the type of trust you're talking about. You're right that in many places in the US, people generally act honestly. But that's not always true -- porch pirates are still a huge problem in cities, for example.
Policy-wise, I would not describe the US as "high trust" relative to the rest of the first world. Virtually all of our non-senior welfare programs are means-tested or require some proof of virtue (e.g. "I am actively looking for a job" to collect unemployment insurance), meaning that society broadly does not "trust" people to collect benefits honestly unless they're seniors.
We can look this up empirically: https://ourworldindata.org/trust. It shows US is a medium-high trust society; lower than parts of Europe, and lower than China (assuming people answered honestly there!) but higher than most of Africa, South America and Asia.
> But that's not always true -- porch pirates are still a huge problem in cities, for example.
I mean, a huge problem in suburbs and more quiet rural areas too, where porch pirates might in theory stand out more, but also have a lot less through traffic to observe their efforts.
> compared to e.g. many popular places in Europe
Citation and lots of specification needed.
US office culture is generally pretty high trust. It has relatively high autonomy, authority, and low surveillance norms.
I don't know what that has to do with a historical period of slavery.
> US office culture is generally pretty high trust. It has relatively high autonomy, authority, and low surveillance norms.
Unless you're black, or other disadvantaged minority
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black
It isn't a dog whistle. Dubai, Japan are also high trust.
I didn't read this that way at all. Society != country of origin. The US, like any country, is composed of many different cultures and more or less independent societies, some being high-trust/valuing more cooperation and some low-trust, valuing more competition.
Yes. People who grew up in the 40s and 50s in the US are common targets of scams because the world they grew up in is very trusting. Adults of the same age who grew up in the east bloc? Much more skeptical.
> history of slavery
Every country and group has practiced slavery.
> Every country and group has practiced slavery.
The colonies and, later, the United States didn’t just practice slavery; they industrialized it by transporting by force 12.5 million Africans to the Americas for nearly 250 years.
Even as fortunes were made, that didn’t stop the torture, rape, and brutality of these enslaved people.
Even after the Civil War, the descendants of the former enslaved people had to live under the Apartheid-like system of Jim Crow that lasted for another hundred years until the Civil Rights Act was enacted in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
I think you could be more charitable, as GP said “culture,” not “society.”
Apple alleges not only individual malfeasance, but also recruitment tactics like “show-and-tell” aimed at recruiting those willing to bring company secrets (and discriminating against those who would not).
This is enough to constitute a low-trust culture that self-perpetuates.
Surely given the size of China there are plenty of honorable people. And surely in the US there are many dishonorable people, as you’ve pointed out.
Your claims are a Marxist dog whistle.
100%.
The US is high-trust for insiders (rich white people). We allowed Donald Trump to loot the richest and most powerful society in history by imagining that he would follow the example of previous presidents instead of seeing him for the sociopathic con man that he has always been.
Conversely, the US is zero-trust for outsiders such as foreigners, racially disfavored groups, and the poor. Allegedly-dog-eating Haitians and the like. We have guns and are not shy about using them. Being killed by police is a leading cause of death for young men of color, as noted by Ice Cube, and confirmed by researchers at Rutgers (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821204116).
>I’ve been seeing this “high-trust society” dog whistle a lot lately
The concept of high trust and low trust societies is well studied and understood by everyone from academics to people on the street, and is one of the reasons why high trust societies are wealthy, safe, highly developed and low corruption, while low trust societies are generally not as much. It's not a dog whistle for anything racist, you're just being a malicious commentator ignoring the facts to make preposterous accusations in bad faith.
What is also very well studied and understood is the concept of tribalism and own-group bias between people of same religions, races, castes, etc. leading them to band together and exploit the trust of outsiders for their own gain, and why wealthy developed countries developed a strict rule of law legal system to try to mitigate this fact, as best as possible, even if it's imperfect and will never be fully solved because tribalism is too deeply ingrained.
But calling the identification and pointing out of scams by people from low trust environments abusing a high trust environment, a "dog whistle", is a cheap shot left wing liberals use to farm pitty and let criminals and scammers get away with it time and time again because the scams and crimes you point out, might turn out to be majority committed by certain groups of minorities or foreigners and they can't come to terms with that being a reality, so they make up a reason that must always be racism or discrimination.
With your logic, your white blood cells are committing a lot of dog whistles too, better remove them to not discriminate against bacteria and viruses.
Poeple like you making up inexistent dosgwhsitels left and right, like the boy who cried wolf, to derail the conversation away from the crimes towards non existent racism, is what led to people being fatigued with this cancel culture, and to Trump to getting elected. I hope you're happy with what you done.
trump totally wasn't elected with the help of foreign interference no sir, it was all on the up and up will of the people to have an incompetent waging war in iran(despite saying he wouldn't) and siphoning up money from crypto scams and insider trading.
You went so far off-topic that I'm surprised you forgot to mention Jan-6
Ok, the implication that I'm reading between the lines is that this sort of behaviour is somehow more tolerated by people with names like Liu and Tan, but is this actually the case?
I know there's some evidence of Chinese people working at big tech and feeding data back to the CCP but is this a "low trust culture" issue in general or an extrapolation of that one pattern?
Heh, as a (very white) American I presumed it was America in general today. From what I can see, it seems to be turning into a place where it's all scams, rug-pulls, crypto and sports gambling. This concerns me about the world that my 9 year old is growing up in, the only world he's ever known, even the early 2010s seemed to be higher trust than the past decade has felt like.
That does seem like the way Capitalism is being presented these days. Move fast and break things struck me as also from the same "fuck it" ethos that pervades the Modern Valley.
It might be the Valley attracts this kind (of sociopath?). In "the day" I watched as some co-workers popped from company to company, never staying for more than 6 months, and getting a salary bump with each jump. I guess good for them?
You don’t have to look any first than the White House to say that behavior is well-established in American culture, too. From the prosperity gospel to “don’t hate the player”, etc. this is deeply not a Chinese thing.
> Ok, the implication that I'm reading between the lines is that this sort of behaviour is somehow more tolerated by people with names like Liu and Tan, but is this actually the case?
Of course not. Have you been following national news or politics the past few years, and the continued incredibly strong support bad actors received despite atrocious behavior and even allegedly criminal acts?
The grandparent commentor is just racist.
> The grandparent comment is just racist.
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. The concept of low and high-trust societies is well-studied [0], though how a given country maps to it may be disputed.
0: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3997396/
I think you’ve made an extreme leap in your interpretation of the comment you’re replying to…
No, ‘high/low-trust culture’ has lately been co-opted as a racist dog whistle.
This isn't true at all in general online discourse. Maybe on X, in which case I'd recommend getting off of X.
It's overwhelmingly brought up when talking about Japan (and sometimes Korea) in comparison to the US (or EU). With Japan (or Korea) being the high-trust culture in that comparison, and the US/EU being the low-trust one.
I guarantee you can do a search across mentions of high/low-trust culture across online platforms in the last 12 months and the large majority will be these contexts, i.e. Western countries described low-trust, not high-trust.
I've definitely seen it used both ways, comparing Japan to other countries as well as India/Africa.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a "racist dog whistle" myself, though - there is a very real pattern that's being pointed out but the reason I made the GP comment is that from my experience I would assume that Chinese culture is about as trustworthy as the West.
When One Nation here in Aus is yapping about “high trust societies” and talking about Japan etc. to me it is absolutely a racist dog whistle.
> Maybe on X, in which case I'd recommend getting off of X.
Agreed, get off X anyway.
> This isn't true at all in general online discourse.
Maybe, but is this relevant? Was the grandparent comment "general online discourse" or was it specific online discourse coming from a place that does in fact use such language in that way.
Huh, TIL. Thanks for pointing it out.
It hasn't. People are talking about specific events here.
With your logic, every fact you dislike that makes your side of the argument look bad, can be dogwhitlse.
I feel like it used to be an effective dog whistle, but has ceased to be since Trump and company came around.
> Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust...
That is just a long sentence for "us" vs "those people".
Having said that I don't entirely deny the effect of society on people's behavior. But at the same time, I have seen people from so called high-trust society being all polished and nice on the surface while being assholes and people from so called low-trust society being genuinely decent people despite not having the right name or the surface polish.
Also, assholes tend to attract assholes and people of the same tribe/clan/race tend to form groups.
Not sure you're being clear about what you mean, here. Is OpenAI's company culture something you consider "low trust"?
It's more about people with "everybody steals so I should steal too" also known as "tylko frajer by nie ukradł" -- "only a loser wouldn't steal that" -- mentality.
And while its somehow "cultural" it's more about people hanging together having similar moral views.
> This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview
Why not? Sounds not that hard. I actually believe this is something that would make a candidate looks good in an interview for many large corporations.
I remember that experiment where they live kids with candy alone and see who takes it and lies about it.
>Why not?
Because people lie?
> This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview.
It is in fact very easy to scan for.
Rich people do this all day and it's why they're rich. There's nothing shocking about seeing a non-rich person try the same thing in hopes of becoming rich.
> "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb f*ks" - Mark Zuckerberg
Sometimes there are no consequences
> >This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply you.
To me this sounds more like an extreme response to imposter syndrome, as in take the documents and the actual knowledge with you so you won't be exposed
OpenAI chosen not the sharpest tool in the shed
When espionage was your goal all along...
assuming these employees are not just trying to shift the blame to OpenAI to cover their asses.. that's the beauty of American civil courts and the discovery process. An accusation was made. We'll find out through a transparent court process which side is telling the truth (or more likely to be telling the truth in the case of balance of probabilities).
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Meh, I'm not returning my nice 4k wfh monitor unless they ask for it specifically
Exfiltrating secrets via monitor burn in would be wild though.
Or you can just snap a photo with your personal phone.
lol openai will be fine, but this guy and everyone in his blast radius is fucked. play stupid games win stupid prizes.
Nah man that's how you end up in the permanent underclass. If you want to make it you have to throw everyone and everything else under the bus, be a bizarrely mustache-twirling evil misanthrope and general freakazoid-type loser, and most importantly get too big to fail / too rich to sue bc you have the good lawyers who can basically stall suits to death. Here's an application to Wendy's.
I swear, some people are too quick to be offended or just can't recognize sarcasm.
I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession. It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.
Relevant articles in IEEE Code of Ethics:
3. to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist;
4. to avoid unlawful conduct in professional activities, and to reject bribery in all its forms;
From NSPE Code of Ethics for Engineers:
III.4.b. Engineers shall not, without the consent of all interested parties, participate in or represent an adversary interest in connection with a specific project or proceeding in which the engineer has gained particular specialized knowledge on behalf of a former client or employer.
https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8 https://www.nspe.org/career-growth/nspe-code-ethics-engineer...
Software people want to be “engineers” when it’s prestigious and (financially) beneficial, but avoid the actual classification when it comes with industry standards of behaviour.
Not me, at this point I would be perfectly happy with a licensing board.
> It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.
Oh, it absolutely does, just not in the direction that's good for society. OpenAI (as one example) didn't become like this by accident, it was intentional. Sam Altman isn't going to hire ethical leadership for his company, they would just get in his way.
Ethics are probably internalized long before someone commits to an engineering career. I'm not sure they can be taught later.
This is obviously true to a large extent, but it is also weirdly necessary to explain basic ethical precepts to a surprisingly large number of otherwise well-educated people. Believe it or not, a significant number of people simple don’t know that it’s unethical to, e.g. exfiltrate code or data from a former employer. Making it clear that this is an ethical line may have some value.
> understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession
Nah this is just pushed on you to disempower you. If you take trade secrets elsewhere lawyers will be used to attack you.
Speaking of lawyers when they move practices they take their IP with them, funny that.
> I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession.
That’ll never happen with the current incentives. Programming is too easy to get started with and too well-paid to not attract unethical people who are only interested in money.
If the CEO goes not care about ethics why should the employees?
> I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession. It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.
For some reason, the ethics followed by Asians, especially the Chinese are not fully compatible with the ethics of the west. Sometimes Chinese people call it being smart to circumvent or bypass the rules, something that would be called cheating in the west.
Culture issue. From How to Apply to Y Combinator[1] by Paul Graham:
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
> we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.
1: https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html
Nah
You can beat the system and be disobedient while still behaving ethically. In fact that's the very best time to beat the system and be disobedient.
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.
Sam Altman clearly has no qualms with lying and being unethical and eventually was at the front of Y Combinator, so that question either doesn’t care for ethics, doesn’t do a good job of filtering, or specifically filters in favour of unethical behaviour.
Or unethical people are hard to spot, in part due to, you know... their lack of ethics.
It’s well-known Brockman and his wife donated $25 million to MAGA Inc., the main super PAC supporting Donald Trump.
The main higher-level factor is our patriarchal culture (and more bad things tend to stem from places where that’s intense).
Not sure what this has to do with Sam being hired at YC 10 years ago
Fair. An interesting question: how quickly can we detect something without being thwarted by anisotropy / the multiplicity of backward paths? ie- retrodiction
Let’s organize the temporal order a bit. This is what some research turned up.
“Groups of senior employees, concerned with Altman’s leadership and lack of transparency, asked Loopt’s board on two occasions to fire him as C.E.O., according to Hagey.”
“As Mark Jacobstein, an older Loopt employee who was asked by investors to act as Altman’s “babysitter,” later told Keach Hagey, for “The Optimist,” a biography of Altman, “There’s a blurring between ‘I think I can maybe accomplish this thing’ and ‘I have already accomplished this thing’ that in its most toxic form leads to Theranos,” Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent startup.”
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/veLhW
I read he’s a vegetarian out of concern for animals, and that’s a good moral sign (but perhaps less relevant here).
Are / were there precursor concerns arising to signal back then? I don’t know.
I'm quite confident that the error was:
"Despite potential warning signs, we believe Sam to be an ethical person"
and not
"We know that Sam is an unethical person, but that's either not a problem, or an actual asset when it comes to running our venture fund"
The former is definitely still an error, but it's quite different from the accusation being leveled on this thread.
I agree. I don't think there's much public information out there about the due diligence involved in his hiring.
> Or unethical people are hard to spot
That’s covered by my options: “doesn’t do a good job of filtering”.
> due to, you know... their lack of ethics.
Being unethical and being able to hide it are entirely orthogonal.
Those are definitely not entirely orthogonal. Especially in business where most unethical behavior starts with or is sustained by deception – which is itself unethical – the two are very much related.
And, if YC is paying attention, this question might make a good filter for the unethical folks who’re willing to admit to their misdeeds.
That's literally what they're looking for. To filter out ethical founders.
Sure, that's possible, but the question is, is that what's actually happening?
Yes, by and large the vast majority of the thousands of companies that YC invests in are probably behaving within ethical boundaries.
While there's no shortage of horror stories and I think greater scrutiny/criticism is warranted, I doubt that it's an actual criminal organization.
I think something like "figuring out a way to stack the odds in your favour in a gameshow" would fit that bill, and that seems fairly innocuous to me.
Though full disclosure: I did that, so that might colour my view. https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow/
The crucial part of why non-competes are gross is that they're trying to enforce what you do after someone stopped receiving anything from the past employer. If someone is helping competitors when still working somewhere, or actively taking stuff from their past employer after they've left, then yeah, of course that's dumb and should be punished. But there's no reason a non-compete clause is needed for that!
The companies are based in California, so regular non-competes are irrelevant. This is solely about IP theft.
I was responding to a direct statement by the parent comment about non-competes. If you think they're irrelevant, you should complain to them, not me.
That’s the key point, what’s happening here is theft.
Theft of trade secrets and a non-compete are unrelated and separate things.
Yes, this is why garden leaves are popular in quant finance.
You get paid for about a year to do nothing so that the trade secrets from your firm (trading strategies) expire.
That's very different from a non-compete. A non-compete is about your own know-how, not the company's.
Your gripe is with the parent comment then for mentioning them in the first place, not me. I was just responding to their aside.
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
Reminds me of how Sam Altman told the board that a safety reviewer had approved one of their AI models when the reviewer had done no such things.
What does the financial compensation need to be for an engineer to actually do this? I'm gonna assume that if you work at Apple and are being recruited by OpenAI, you are not a dummy. Then you probably know that doing something like this runs the risk of you getting sued by a trillion dollar company.
If I had a potential employer ask me to do this, I would reply "oh hell fucking no", withdraw my application, and notify my companies security, legal and HR teams.
But then again it's easy to have the moral high ground when you're not staring down an offer that will completely change your and your families lives. I'm sure most employees probably thought what I'm thinking until they are looking at a 7 figure offer.
It seems to be a common trait of the AI people to just brazenly violate the law. It’s like a requirement for working at openAI is to think rules don’t apply to you because you’re so smart.
> It seems to be a common trait of the AI people to just brazenly violate the law.
Isnt Apple part of the same group, doesnt Apple collude with other companies to suppress wages?
No it's because they think they're saving the world.
Although they are doing pretty much the precise opposite of that. As it tends to be, I suppose.
They only say that as a pretext for theft.
Nothing more dangerous really.
I hate to use the word sociopath, because it has such a fine point on it, but if you believe there are smart "sociopaths" out there, might they be attracted to AI in general (companies like OpenAI or SpaceXAI specifically)?
Sam Altman raped his sister and assassinated a whistleblower. He's been removed from his last two companies for being a habitual liar (he managed to strongarm his way back into OpenAI of course). He only has money brcause he sold his first company based on fraudulent user numbers.
Hard to imagine people will go work for the plagiarism machine run by a sociopath because of their high ethic and moral standards.
I was describing a "magnet" effect, you're describing a "filter". Interesting.
Claims in a lawsuit always seem very favorable towards their side or else they wouldn’t have filed. The truth usually ends up more in the middle.
> Non-competes and the like are gross but what's described here isn't just "bring your expertise to OpenAI" it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
Most of what happened in this case is straight-up illegal and other parts can be covered by NDA. No need for non-competes to prevent any of this.
Sure, “Trade Secret” non-competes are usually a pretext employers use to keep low-wage workers under their thumbs, but protecting bonafide trade secrets is their only sorta legitimate use, IMO. The world would be better if they were illegal, but letting engineers disperse confidential information from their last employer wouldn’t be the beneficial part.
Remember it's apple lawyer words, not established facts.
Yeah every job transition I’ve managed I was straightforward and some new employers instructed me to do so.
It’s weird too, these people’s history will show up on job sites and etc, people will find out… fast.
The examples seem clumsy and amateurish.
> emailing themselves
These are supposedly our brightest minds..
How do we know this wasn't Apple's plan all along? A double agent of sorts isn't a new concept.
Elaborate?
This isn’t the first time something like this happens and I always wonder how are these seemingly smart people earning good money so dumb.
Right? Just straight up documentation with no shame: From an Axios article on this
> Liu celebrated the exploit, according to the filing. "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny," he said in a message to a former colleague who was still employed by Apple.
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-trade-sec...
It'd be even funnier if the 'message' was a text sent from their iphone.
"Is you taking notes on a criminal f-cking conspiracy?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZLoMrRgFFE
I want this to run like a real f-cking business!
Appalling.
It is but it is the Silicon Valley way and business way for many. Steamroll and do whatever it takes to win and be successful. Morals what are those?
These companies are big enough (especially financially) that I'm really surprised that they do not have their own FBI/CIA/NSA departments in the world of corporate espionage.
Don't worry, some do.
Exactly. If ever there was a y'all deserve eachother situation, it is this.
Meh. It's one megacorp stealing stuff from another megacorp, hardly "appalling", who cares. I'd probably react the same way; I just wouldn't leak it to my next employer, that's dumb.
A sum of people with this attitude is what a megacorp is and why they're hated.
flagrant
It’s even more ridiculous when choosing to do it Apple. It’s hard to think of a company with more legal resources and which is more protective of its hardware IP.
And vindictiveness.
Steve declared thermonuclear war on Google because Android re-skinned to use BUTTONS.
> because Android re-skinned to use BUTTONS.
No. Steve's rage was justified, IMO. It was because Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board while simultaneously being Google's CEO and Google was surreptitiously building Android at the time. Mother of all conflict of interests.
There was a recent story that reminded me of it. Mike Krieger was on Figma's board and Anthropic's CPO, while Anthropic was surreptitiously building Claude Design.
It wasn't very surreptitiously, Google very loudly bought Android Inc. for 50 million in 2005, two years before Apple ripped of the phone that won the iF Design Award in 2006, the LG Prada.
> Apple ripped of the phone that won the iF Design Award in 2006, the LG Prada.
Nice, albeit implausible story. Apple had been working on multi touch screens for a long time before that. They applied for a patent on it from 2004[1]. And TBF, neither Apple nor LG invented capacitive touch screens. Multiple discovery is a thing.
[1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7663607B2/en
Android’s original offering was nothing like modern phones. They didn’t have multi touch and they expected physical keyboards. Android added multi-touch in 2.0 Eclair in 2009 as a clear response to iPhone’s popularity
> Steve declared thermonuclear war on Google because Android re-skinned to use BUTTONS.
Was there ever a point in time where Google was not the default search engine on iOS?
Yes, briefly: https://qz.com/apple-google-yahoo-search-engine-safari-antit...
Disney comes to mind…
If I remember, there was a former Apple employee, who was quite influential with The House of Mouse…
Nintendo?
I’ve been present when the world comes crashing down around people who thought they were too smart to get caught.
The surprise in their eyes is always very genuine.
Google/Waymo + Uber/Otto comes to mind here with Anthony Levandowski.
Google and Uber started as courtroom enemies, but probably had to commiserate some on Anthony Levandowski probably being the worst hire they both made.
Amazing character. Started as a regular robot-loving engineering kid, was in the right place at the right time and earned something like $140 million from Google, mostly from truly ludicrous performance bonuses, went to Uber for another giant payout, was worth nine figures. And sure, he was convicted for crimes, but he got one of those definitely-legitimate Trump pardons.
And then he managed to turn that into a negative $50 million net worth.
And also he briefly started a religion based around having an AI inventing a Christian god or something because his story wasn't crazy enough.
> And also he briefly started a religion
I always assumed this was a tax-avoidance scheme
When all that went down, I was at Facebook. And some recruiter posted the news that Anthony was no longer at Uber, with a message like “this is a great opportunity to secure a top tier hire!”
I replied (on Workplace) “Absolutely the fuck NOT.”
Either people are being really, really silly (which cannot be discounted), or the potential reward is so high as to override whatever qualms a normal person must have. Is that it? Is this people looking at a solid career at Apple or sudden millions from OpenAI, and thinking the risk is worth it somehow? Or, more darkly, is it people thinking _this is my only chance and I have to take it_? Or is it trickle-down lawlessness?
Sometimes the reward is pitifully small. There was a podcast about insider trading and sometimes the insiders will give the information for free or a negligible sum. There’s something in human psychology that facilitates collaboration even in unethical acts.
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.
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.
Statistically yes but we need to look at the actual distribution and I doubt it’s just a handful of outliers.
INT 18 WIS 3 is a terribly dangerous build in this world.
To your point, I've come across many who conflate the 2.
Wisdom seems like making good choices for long-term positive outcomes, where there are no rulebooks, lots of uncertainty, and the incentives thrown in your face to act in one direction are only a tiny fraction of the whole picture.
Intelligence seems like an aptitude to grasp concepts that lend itself to wielding a specific thing to a certain utilitarian end.
I'm sure others have said it better than me. But the folks I've met who are obviously intelligent seem to lack the ability to understand the consequences of their choices, and have already predetermined they're not only justified in their myopia, but somehow assume/ presume social support from everyone around them no matter how short-sighted their ideas are that come with obvious negative consequences if you look even one-step beyond their immediate outcomes.
Something like that. All to support your point.
More like lot of people are leaving Apple for OpenAI (no surprise) and an Apple manager wants to send a signal to everyone leaving to chill with what they walk out with. Corps have to perform a lot of theatre because there is lot of info constantly leaking out.
And now the entire industry knows they are too stupid to be employed.
Overconfidence. These people think they are much smarter than others to be caught.
Those people are designers. And they don't necessarily understand software, data, or security. When I explained to my non-technical friends about how they were being tracked by website cookies, it sounded like a sci fi story to them. But yes, it's dumb.
I was more surprised by how they managed to keep using work devices after termination. This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.
> This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.
It's very safe to assume Apple has a standard exit process, for low level ICs.
Tan was Apple's vice president of iPhone and Apple Watch product design. This person worked for Apple for 25 years and likely a friend of top executives. I wouldn't be surprised if he just hugged everyone and casually walked out on his last day.
You assume they have a standard exit process.
A VP is not a designer, and doesn't have a standard anything.
seemingly smart is the key here. intelligence doesnt make up for ethics.
And I'd question the intelligence also. I don't think employment at FAANG means a lot in that regard.
Yeah but it isn't just unethical, it's also deeply stupid -- you will be caught.
Because companies get an advantage by having their people do this. You only hear about the times they get caught, but apparently they get caught so rarely that it's worth it.
Everywhere I've ever worked, if I went to management and said "hey, I've got some files from my last job, if you want to see them," they would say "absolutely not, please get rid of them RIGHT NOW," and probably fire me.
But, I don't work in Silicon Valley.
I had the opposite issue, I once got criticised for not bringing client information with me.
I work for a Silicon Valley headquartered company and would expect the same.
Companies don't get to be worth billions of dollars without doing something unethical.
It's people who hold these beliefs who commit these acts. They're so convinced everyone around them is depraved, usually–at least in part–through personal experience, that they don't stop to consider the alternative.
Nah. Simple logic: look at Thiel and Musk. Two of the most deplorable human beings out there
"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
- Steve Jobs
Great artists steal ideas, not a painting off a gallery wall.
> Through Apollinaire, Picasso contacted the poet’s ex-secretary, Honore-Joseph Géry Pieret, who was ready to steal artifacts for a reasonable price. In 1907, Pieret broke into the Louvre and took several sculptures with him. Months later, Picasso would reveal his ground-breaking Cubist work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which was heavily inspired by Iberian and African sculpture.
https://www.thecollector.com/famous-artists-turned-crime/
Well their whole model is a stolen art collection :)
Why not both? Three cheers for escape artists!
a "metal-finishing technique" _is_ an idea.
joke
When you are bulk copying data off your former employer's network share, that is a lot more than "stealing ideas".
Having a certain type of finish on the metal is an idea. Tricking someone into using Apple’s exact trade-secret finishing technique is copying. Making a new, even better technique, that’s so good the general public forgets about Apple and thinks you’re the new benchmark… that’s the kind of stealing that quote is talking about.
Yes, and if you analyze the finished metal and put in the work to reverse engineer it, fine, have at it. That's not even theft. If Apple really wanted to keep it completely secret forever, they can't sell it, so thats the risk they accept.
But thats very different than scheming to steal actual property, which these files are.
The concept of applying some kind of Apple-ish texture finish to metal is an idea. A research-heavy, highly specific, finely tuned, multiple step, trade secret, brand signature metal finishing technique is a painting.
Kinda seems like OpenAI didn’t actually have that idea or the ability to execute it, if they had to go to apple’s supplier and lie to them to get them do it.
Funny thing, Steve Jobs is the only source that attributes this quote to Picasso, and it seems very likely he made it up.
The idea behind the quote most likely came from T.S. Eliot: Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
Should we believe that OpenAI is not stealing secrets of companies using their models?
> it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
Thank you for recognizing this. As much as the developer community has come out against companies non-competes in the past, we should come down on even harder on one of our own stealing, because this does the most harm against the case against non-competes. It's grosser in the sense that one company doing a foul thing is bad, but ideally people can band together and work to dismantle the foul thing. But a person legitimizing the foul thing is the greater harm.
> Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan.
That's one of the dumbest things one can do while on their soon-to-be ex-employer's network.
I hope Apple crushes openAI in this lawsuit and everyone who leaves for OpenAI and bag of cash instead of their dignity and honor is made known.
How did he keep laptop?
Apple colluding on no poaching agreements was far worse and more damaging. So I don’t feel bad for them.
AirDrop you mean lol? Anyone can now have a local LLM make a QR code based data transfer script
make sense since they stole all of humanity knowledge for their gain
Companies take cultural cues from leadership. When you have a puffed-up sociopath who has never accomplished anything but lying his way to the top, this is what you get.
I'm both infuriated and worried that such a flim-flam man has put himself at the center of the U.S. stock market.
Every single time.
If someone calls himself open, you should know who it is and what to expect.
Generally speaking, companies retaining a competitive advantage with each other is good for their investors but bad for the public. It's usually to the public's benefit for employees to share knowledge, it makes goods and services cheaper and more available.
Short to medium term yes. However there are arguments to be made that this would significantly stifle innovation longterm.
If "eliminate all IP law" is your preference then that's fine but it isn't a reason to commit crimes while we have these laws.
IP law can be a thing while maximizing transparency by not including trade secrets as a concept.
Civil disobedience.
Civil disobedience involves flagrantly and publicly and obviously violating the law so you can be arrested to draw attention to whatever issue you have with the law. If you’re breaking the law and trying to get away with it, that’s just criminality and isn’t honorable or respectable.
Civil disobedience is the breaking of laws your conscience tells you are unjust -- and accepting all possible consequences that come along with such an act.
Doesn't mean you have to make it trivial for the consequences to find you by literally walking yourself into jail.
You are mistaken and gp is correct: civil disobedience is usually thought of as done in public. "My conscience tells me it's fine to steal from this rich bastard because property is theft" is not civil disobedience.
Without the intention of personally profiting from breaking these laws. Which is what these people are doing.
If they released this information publicly then you might have a point.
> Without the intention of personally profiting from breaking these laws.
> If they released this information publicly then you might have a point.
Good point. Conceded.
We have the laws, but I don't have to feel outraged when regular people undercut the oligarchs and those people's interests align with my own.
It’s other oligarchs using regular people to undercut their competitors while offloading most of the risk to those regular people, though.
Apple will lose this because they didn't do the due diligence to do basic protection against this.
Apple doesn't have a history of losing lawsuits.
Let's look at their history with EU, shall we? :D
Apple does have a history of settling out-of-court after claiming disproportionate damages. NSO Group and Corellium come to mind.
As a counterpoint, why should a “metal finishing technique” be proprietary? Lying to the vendor that Apple said it’s ok is obviously wrong, but an employee taking that knowledge in their head doesn’t seem wrong to me. We have moved past the age of indentured apprentices and the freemasons.
Because Apple paid to produce that knowledge? It's good that people can spend a lot of time and money developing new knowledge and then for some period of time they get to exclusively reap the rewards of doing so.
Do you mind if I MITM all of your work output, your emails, your code, your messages, and attach my name to it and then receive your paychecks in exchange for my work?
> Because Apple paid to produce that knowledge? It's good that people can spend a lot of time and money developing new knowledge and then for some period of time they get to exclusively reap the rewards of doing so.
You’re describing patents?
Trade secrets. A legally recognized thing, and legally protected.
And NDAs. I may develop a non-patentable technique. That doesn't mean I can't share it with you under NDA and, if you breach said NDA, enforce it.
I'm describing "intellectual property," patents being only one way to legally protect such property.
Trade secrets dont have a time limit.
But if they can pay some people to produce the knowledge they can also pay them to not share it after they change employers. Just like regular noncompete clauses I don't see why this is something that require more than regular contract law or why it should be inherent instead of negotiated for a fee.
I 100% guarantee that this was forbidden by the contract the employee signed.
> Do you mind if I MITM all of your work output, your emails, your code, your messages, and attach my name to it and then receive your paychecks in exchange for my work?
You just described the whole AI industry
Sure? That's also bad.
To me, the fraud is the issue. If the person actually has the knowledge to spec out the whole technique, then sure, they can ask for it. But if they just said "give me what you give Apple" or describes it in detail and the vendor says "no I only will give that when Apple says they're okay", I don't see anything wrong with that either.
My reading is that the employee did not know the method but only of its existence.
It must have some sort of value if OpenAI went through the trouble to get access to it.
This may be just one bad employee, i.e., Mr. Tan. Your quoted sentences say OpenAI did such and such, but it may all be just Mr. Tan. That's not to say OpenAI is not responsible because they are supposed to give strong guidance to new hires that they are not to bring any confidential information from their former employer.
OpenAI is a company built on copyright violation.
That means it’s in the corporate DNA to treat laws as things for little people.
Apple have deep enough pockets that they can actually sue OpenAI but I bet OpenAI are surprised they got caught.
Now ask yourself, would the Codex agents on your machine ever over step legal boundaries? Would OpenAI ever make use of data you, voluntarily, send to their servers?
If they did could your company afford to sue OpenAI and would it still be too late to save the business?
And Apple is a company built on anti trust violations[1].
Every company that sees it profitable to break the law and pay a fine seems to do it. There are no “good guys”.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/apple/659296/apple-failed-complianc...
That doesn't make any of it morally excusable. "The other guy is just as bad!" is an argument for toddlers.
The reason why "the other guy is just as bad" is we've removed real consequences from these companies and people.
Someone should probably be in prison for the Grok CSAM thing for instance.
While we're calling people out, this one is extremely rich: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-... . The old man dying, to me, is not that most extreme part. It's the part where Meta has internal documents about guidelines for minors having romantic relationships with chatbots. WTF! Quoting:
This isn't a very great defense, either. Apple started the trend of seeking federal protectionism to avoid liability for market damages. Now OpenAI, with their own federal connections, are going to seek to exert political pressure for a settlement. This is a turnabout-is-fair-play moment in the ugly, lawless Thunderdome arena of modern businesses.
Grok and Meta are non-sequiturs here. Their reputation isn't being put under a microscope - Apple's is. And just looking at Apple's history suing businesses like NSO Group and Corellium doesn't instill much confidence in their ability to protect their IP or exact damages outside of a legal settlement. Up against OpenAI, they'll be forced to fold for all the same reasons they had to throw away their (entirely justified) case against NSO Group.
I think you're incorrect here, what's being put under the microscope is not Apple, it's OpenAI and as a consequence a large swath of the AI industry. (It's the same people moving between the same companies -- probably similar ethics at all these places)
They absolutely deserve to be under a microscope.
Sure - again, this is like saying that "NSO Group is under the microscope" - which they were!
But Apple lacks the political intuition to take NSO Group down. Apple is reliant on the US Federal government, which in-turn is deeply reliant on both NSO Group and Apple. It made all the sense in the world to force the companies to settle, even if it was an absolutely gross miscarriage of justice. We're going to see the same thing happen here; OpenAI will cry foul to the feds, who will inevitably determine that they can't let their investments pickpocket one another. Mr. Trump will send a very strongly-worded voicemail to Sam and Tim, asking them to make amends or face limited federal support in their future ambitions. Both of them will likely settle out-of-court and then announce a partnership to bury the hatchet.
It will be gross, unfair and likely cause irreparable market harm. In other words, forcing Apple to abandon their lawsuit is nothing that the fed hasn't done before.
It sounds like a possibility, I will grant. However, I think having their dirty laundry aired at a time when they're losing enterprise customers to anthropic is going to be extremely painful. "IP theft from a competitor" is absolutely a thing a company is going to look at before they trust all their IP to a provider.
Developers walked into their walled garden with joy. It's no where near what this article describes.
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.
Completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand though. Ok, so every massive company (including OpenAI) is built on anti-trust violations. I agree we should go after everyone for this, but whether Apple has done bad stuff is a complete distraction from IP violations at OpenAI
steam/valve are good guys
I'm not sure on that:
1) Lots of people think they are partly complicit in all the skins trading/gambling that children do, which is basically skirting gambling laws. This has culminated in a current lawsuit in New York which claims they broke gambling laws.
2) They also currently have a large antitrust lawsuit going on, due to them requiring Most Favored Nation pricing while setting a 30% commission fee vs 12% on competitor platforms, which exploits market position and artificially raises game prices to Steam's benefit.
1) This is a legit point although i don't see Valve as a big problem in that area. They invented lootboxes but refused to be as bad as others who followed them. Today with valve these things are restricted purely to cosmetics.
2) is weak. The 30% rate was set in 2003 when Steam had zero market power and was identical to the rate used by Apple, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. Valve later added tiered reductions (25% above $10M, 20% above $50M), bringing the effective average to ~24%. The rate moved downward while the platform added massive infrastructure: free multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, global CDN, refunds, and community tools. The 30% buys far more today than it did two decades ago.
Developers can also generate unlimited(or i think now limited to some ratio of steam sales) Steam keys and sell them anywhere else with Valve taking 0% commission. If valve were extracting monopoly rents, this escape route would not exist.
The actual lawsuit targets the PMFN price parity clause not the commission itself. And on PC, which is an open platform where Epic's 12% store gained roughly 3% share in seven years despite hundreds of millions in investment, the monopoly framing falls apart. That 12% is also based on EPIC using lots of anti-competitor and anti-consumers tactics and using Fortnite money to prop up the store.
The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.
Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront. Sure you can sell your game and give away steam keys - but you can't sell it for a lower price than on Steam, and we still want you to encourage your users to come to steam and buy things. We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends. This is just a way to stay default, not some sort of charity.
Yet somehow they have convinced lots of gamers that they should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value and that that's a good deal (taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026).
They are like everyone else, abusing network effects to achieve excess profits, unnecessarily taking £12 from a £40 game sale just so that Gabe can get another yacht (despite already having 4). I don't see why this is needed? If the market was efficient and this wasn't down to monopoly power and network effects, the fees would equalise, the £40 game can drop to £35 so people get cash back in their pockets, while the developers still get more money, and epic's store and steam would STILL be a gravy train. But they aren't the good guys - if they have a chance to cement their power or get an extra few bucks by being anti-consumer they will.
30% was set when they were handpicking every title, a home internet line today was a $10,000+ a month DC connection, and they could legitimately replace a publisher taking 60%.
The fact they whittled away the value they provided time and time again until they became a market of slop and had the audacity to keep a 30% cut is insane.
It's funny that gamers villainize Sweeny for being the person that they think Newell is. It turns out trying to deliver value in a market has tough as gaming is not easy, and you will make tons of mistakes... at least compared to extracting nearly every dollar you can and leaving a skeleton crew to run the ship.
And I guess make $1,100 PS4s as a side hustle.
> 30% was set when they were handpicking every title ... they could legitimately replace a publisher taking 60%
The "handpicking" era was a walled garden developers spent years protesting. Greenlight was a direct response to developer demands for openness. The "slop" you complain about is what developers asked for. Valve then built discovery tools (reviews, curators, personalized queues, Next Fest) to handle the volume.
> they whittled away the value they provided time and time again
Since 2003 Steam added multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, Remote Play, game recording, Steam Families, regional pricing, refunds, the Steam Deck/SteamOS ecosystem, and ongoing VR investment. The effective commission dropped to ~24% for successful titles through tiered reductions. The rate went down while the platform expanded massively. That is the opposite of whittling away value.
> leaving a skeleton crew to run the ship
Valve grew from 78 employees in 2003 to ~550 today. Revenue per employee is high because the business is efficient. A company "extracting every dollar" does not fund Proton to make Windows games run on Linux at its own expense, develop VR hardware, or sell the Steam Deck near cost.
> gamers villainize Sweeny for being the person that they think Newell is
Sweeney himself explained the difference in 2019:
"It's nearly perfect for consumers already... There is no hope of displacing a dominant storefront solely by adding marginally more store features or a marginally better install experience. These battles will be won on the basis of game supply, consumer prices, and developer revenue sharing."
https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-ceo-the-only-way-to-displace-st...
He admitted Steam was already an excellent product. His conclusion was not to build something better. It was to buy exclusivity and remove games from Steam, forcing consumers onto a store that lacked basic features for years. Epic spent $444M on exclusivity deals in 2020 alone. It wasn't an affinity for some gabe cult that consumers rejected Epic but because Epic offered them fewer choices and a worse experience.
> make $1,100 PS4s as a side hustle
Valve sells hardware to establish new platform categories, not as high-margin "side hustles." Valve's hardware strategy has always been about expanding the Steam ecosystem, not milking unit margins and current hardware shortages fucked them.
Even Valve has its sins with questionable monetization, alleged anti-competitive practices, and of course DRM, it's just, for their size it's challenging to find companies that aren't much worse for these bullet points.
Still, a rare exception of a company that seems worth the openness of one's mind. It's pretty shameful that this alone is worthy of praise, even forgetting the things Valve does that are just generally positive.
Questionable monetization meaning essentially turning a blind eye to and profiting from the gambling industry that skirts regulations and targets kids that is enabled by the market for rare skins in their games (as well as the inherently gambling-like means that those skins are sold in the first place).
I'm not even exaggerating when I say that feels utterly benign these days. Merely just choosing to not police it is certainly a choice, but it's still a far cry from the more active participation in basically exploiting people that is pretty much normalized these days with stuff like sports betting and prediction markets.
I don't say this feeling that it is good, just that it is where it feels like we are at right now.
Valve is a company built on getting children addicted to gambling.
_built on_? not built on the games they developed or the platform they built?
Both!
Valve had to be dragged kicking and screaming by Australia just to provide the basic fundamental right of refunds.
Large corporations are not your friend. They are the enemy; they vary only in type and depth of diabolicalness.
I do always think it's interesting that the "bad" guys like EA had, for a long time, much friendlier store terms (refunds) than Valve did.
I also never thought that it was very nice of Valve to historically have security practices that are so bad that a group of security experts wrote them a letter begging for better security practices.
Yeah they’re not too shabby
Okay, yup, this line of reasoning has me removing agents from my personal machines. I was enjoying the convenience and waved that internal niggle away with a vague feeling of "they would never exploit this", but you're right, I needed that wake up call.
You could consider open source coding harnesses (I quite like Pi especially its customisability) as a middle ground and alternative.
And for what it's worth, Codex is still open source under Apache 2.0. Claude Code is closed-source.
Doesn’t matter if you’re using an open harness if the model is still cloud-based and closed!
> Apple have deep enough pockets that they can actually sue OpenAI but I bet OpenAI are surprised they got caught.
Maybe? But more likely their 'surprise' will be that it's actually happened, because the people doing this kind of thing must surely know it's wrong and won't be telling their bosses, and/or their bosses definitely won't be passing that info up the chain. Just like movies, 'plausible deniability'.
Everyone is deluding themselves if they think their enterprise privacy contracts with these frontier model companies (especially in CA) aren't reading and processing their private data
That was a wild read.
Don't matter to people who look at codex as a way to replace employees
Maybe. But those people might care about their IP being stolen by Codex.
If they were, they would not be shipping code to those platforms already.
Apple has all the money in the world to take this to court, I don't see why they'd accept a settlement. The discovery process alone could honestly destroy OpenAI by making investors and employees nervous enough to look elsewhere. Would be especially interesting if this crosses into criminal territory, especially if there's solid proof of upper management or executives being aware.
> I don't see why they'd accept a settlement.
glances at Kushner's $1 billion OpenAI investment through Thrive Capital
Are you sure they won't settle? Apple settled their case with NSO Group, even though they were (and still are) hacking iPhone handsets. Seems to me like Apple is happy to settle cases that interfere with their political ambitions whenever America's government asks them to stand down.
If Apple's protectionist treatment is predicated on non-interference with other protected companies like OpenAI, maybe they will be motivated to settle out of court.
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.
Obviously they are looking at your IP and code. Anthropic trains on your data regardless of you opting out, I know that one for certain. There's no coincidence they "keep your data temporarily despite opting out" - because they wash it in legal loopholes. There is no opt out. These companies WILL steal your business. Only a matter of time before they are sued as well.
>Anthropic trains on your data
This is why companies are wanting the AWS hosted models because they trust AWS running of the same models more than the vendors themselves.
Only for Opus etc. For “Fable 5, Mythos 5, and future models on Bedrock with similar or higher capability levels,” your usage data is retained for 30 days and shared with Anthropic which you can’t opt out of.
> Anthropic trains on your data regardless of you opting out, I know that one for certain.
How do you know that?
Well we don’t know but just look at figma, claude for it happened and then Claude design come out.
They knew exactly how developers worked from using figma as training data.
They systematically violated copyright when they grabbed whole internet to train their models. Do you really believe that they will stop stealing because they signed some funny ToS? Especially when every bit of data they have and competition does not have is making their model better.
There's an important difference between "knowing" and "believing".
This. People repeat stuff they suspect might be happening like it's facts. Would I be surprised? Only a little. Does that mean it's definitely happening? of course not.
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 long as you procure the text legally, be that through web scraping or by purchasing books directly. And it’s annoying that people try to muddy the water on this.
I am an author of a couple of books that are part of the Anthropic settlement.
"be that through web scraping or by purchasing books directly" - or by creating synthetic iterations of the inputs your LLM API service receives.
People downvote you like you're being paranoid, but we're literally discussing this in a thread that shows how little respect those companies have for any sort of trade secrets.
How does the allegation make any sense?
AI labs can hardly just throw random confidential data into the training and then hope it does not leak into the output of their model in an obvious way.
If that would be found it would destroy their main source of revenue, it could became a major national security or healthcare enforcement matter, and result in criminal investigations.
Some of the smartest people on the planet all in the same room, data at their fingertips… they randomly add it to the training set?
Labs at least must study prompts in an airgapped fashion. From there, consider how they could generate synthetic data to train another model. After, require trusted staff to do multiple levels of independent granular reviews of all fruits of the highest-value stolen inputs. (Or for model training data only, data never has to leave the airgap.)
Definitely risky, anyway. Surely some AI user has sent data, in confidential mode, with a unique shape they expect to be able to recognize if a later model recreated a facsimile even with heavy substitutions… but labs could bring risk of getting caught (over next few years) down quite low with extraordinarily ultraparanoid strategy. (But hopefully everybody is just behaving!)
That is an interesting thought.
They could run some sort of analysis to find high value input, such as proprietary technology, algorithms, or strategy.
Then they could group them together for one specific topic, and produce a report that analyzes if the information is plausible.
If so, they can have it send to staff for review, who could then create a test set that rewards the model for going into the direction of the proprietary solutions known to work.
I'm no expert, but at least something like that sounds plausible to me. I still very much doubt they are doing this.
It's actually simpler: your code is not the valuable part, it's the telemetry/metadata/conversation surrounding your session that's valuable. Every time you press escape, every time tell Claude/Codex that it's being an idiot, your back-and-forth conversations, etc. "when/why did we fail and how can we improve?" is what they want to know.
They can use LLMs to launder confidential customer sessions into trainable data. Then they can claim that they don't train on "your data" without it being technically incorrect.
Exactly. They can also feed you a stupider model to goad you into handing over more of this training guidance as well. The incentives are aligned for evil behavior. Open source really needs to win this race, or we need much tighter scrutiny on these AI companies.
That's not at all how they do it. They wash the data. The end result is they can steal your IP insights without it being explicitly tied to your business. All of the decisions you made to build your product? Those become the standard suggestions in the next model for people building the same sorts of products. All of that error correcting you did, which in a normal business would be considered hard-earned IP (like in the case of Apple's lawsuit - the "what not to do" is just as valuable as the "what to do"), is now free correction for the next model to produce the perfect result in a one-shot. Now the AI company can commoditize your labor and your industry, or compete against you if they so wish.
I downvoted because the reply has nothing to do with the argument.
If I know for a fact that you're cheating on your wife, and someone else asks how I know that, then a third person chirping about your sketchy business dealings is entirely irrelevant to the question, no matter how much suspicion it might otherwise raise.
Weren't they required by a court to keep everything, despite the privacy policy etc.? Or am I mixing up my companies in constant law battles.
They were required to keep all non-European user logs for a temporary period between April and September 2025, because the media companies suing them think these logs may be the only evidence in existence that could prove or disprove their alleged misconduct.
How is it obvious? We have strong legal agreements that state otherwise, do you think they are just lying and risking thousands of lawsuits?
I think it's more likely that there are 3/4 of a billion users that don't have these agreements and just pay for ChatGPT Plus and don't opt-out of anything, and are feeding the scaling machine every day.
> do you think they are just lying
Yes. They're constantly lying, and constantly getting caught for it. They have a reputation for it. Why do you think this would be any different?
Their standard opt-out agreement frames it as if they won't train on your data, but they do anyway, due to legal loopholes. They essentially clean-room everyone who opts-out, so while it's "technically" not training on "your" data, to the model it makes no difference. Your alpha and IP is not safe. Paying customers are now more easily able to clone your business as well, not just Anthropic themselves.
The only reason this hasn't leaked yet is fear. Anthropic is a very litigious and dangerous company. Only a matter of time though, someone there will grow a spine and speak up.
Can you elaborate on the loopholes here?
I'm unwilling to speculate whether or not OpenAI is breaking their agreements (I honestly have no clue), but as an NLP researcher I'm certain they could launder data by having an LLM rewrite it and subsequently train on the rewritten data.
Papers like "Curated Synthetic Data Doesn't Have to Collapse" [1] and "How to Synthesize Text Data without Model Collapse?" [2] demonstrate it's possible to do this.
Since OpenAI's Privacy Policy [3] explicitly allows for the use of deidentified data, it's possible they consider rewrites (maybe paired with a model used to identify explicit PII) to be deidentified. Whether OpenAI's legal team thinks rewriting in this way technically means they aren't training on your data isn't something I'm able to comment on.
Here's the relevant Privacy Policy statement:
Please note all the hedging words I used (maybe, possibly, etc). I honestly have no clue if they are doing this. I'm merely elaborating on a possible loophole like you asked.[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07724
[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14689
[3]: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/
It's exactly what you've said. I'm speaking about Anthropic though, I have no idea whether OpenAI does it.
> Anthropic agrees that Customer (a) retains all rights to its Inputs, and (b) owns its Outputs. Anthropic disclaims any rights it receives to the Customer Content under these Terms. Subject to Customer’s compliance with these Terms, Anthropic hereby assigns to Customer its right, title and interest (if any) in and to Outputs. Anthropic may not train models on Customer Content from Services. “Inputs” means submissions to the Services by Customer or its Users and “Outputs” means responses generated by the Services to Inputs (Inputs and Outputs together are “Customer Content”).
This is the only commercial ToS clause about how they handle your data for subscription users. They only promise not to train the model on your exact input and exact output. There's nothing about not washing your data - the "clean-room" approach, which is obviously easily automatable by a company that specializes in automation. That is not training a model on your data, it is using a model to create derivatives of your data, then training it on "their" derivatives.
People really needs to apply pressure and start demanding answers from these companies regarding this - because it is a huge problem. Historically, the amount of labor required to do something like this would make it entirely unfeasible, so this is all new territory. The existing laws and the requirements around clarity surrounding these conditions do not reflect the technology progress.
Side question to you, considering your occupation:
Could you please list a set of core papers (or other resources) that give a beginner an overview or even understand of the fundamental concepts and techniques with LLMs?
Thank you!
I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what works best for a beginner. I started my PhD when the original Transformers paper [1] had just been released. I had no background in NLP whatsoever and used the original paper to write a Transformer and the full training pipeline from scratch during the first couple months of my PhD without referencing any existing code (only reading the paper and it's references).
So I'd say, if you're motivated you could do the same. That said, I've always been a self-starter and I started my PhD after working for a decade. I'm sure there are other resources out there, but I'm not equipped to say what's best for a beginner (I found the original paper to be excellent, but most everyone during my PhD, including my advisor, found it to be inscrutable; I think it's written more like an engineering focused paper, which might be why researchers found it difficult to grok, but with my previous industry experience it seemed quite clear).
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
ChatGPT has 3 to 4 billion paying users? And still haven’t turned a profit?
Think he meant three quarters of a billion. Although that seems way too high for paying users still.
They said 3 quarters of a billion
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.
This is way overstated.
OpenAI will certainly launch devices. It is to be seen how competitive they are and how much product market fit they achieve.
OpenAI also has better data retention policies relative to Anthropic on SOTA models.
Do you really believe those policies after stories like this?
The word "stories" in your sentence is very instructive
It's a "news story". Do you think Apple would be suing OpenAI if it was just a "story"?
Good point. If these are the ethical standards they go by, who’s to say they’re abiding by any standards to keep my data private.
My guess it winds up like the old FAT joke about Android.
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.
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 seriously now that it’s become a useful means to criticize AI companies with.
I think this comment is quite disingenous -- it's like if there's a rule that says "nobody can walk on the grass" that you object to because you'd like to have a picnic with some friends; your claim is that if someone gets out a bulldozer and drives it across the lawn to make a parking lot followed by an army of lawyers that anyone who wanted to picnic is objecting purely because it's a convenient way to criticise the bulldozers.
These examples don't really add up to me.
You can continue to enjoy the books and articles etc
They are just also used to create a new thing
In the picnic example, the picnickers can't use the lawn anymore.
As an aside: as somebody who lives in a dense area, I also would stay off the lawn. There's a utilitarian element where you have to rotate which lawns are used, and avoid using them when wet etc so as to maximize their utility. The picnickers should find a lawn that's open.
Which is why OpenAI and Anthropic think it’s fair play for other companies to distill their models, right?
I’m not sure if “theft” is the right word or not but selling copied dvds on the street is completely different from “sharing is caring” piracy. These companies took the entirety of human knowledge for free and now want to sell it back to you, and even openly tout that it will put most of us out of our jobs.
It’s not the same thing as downloading a car or a purse for private individual use.
Because the AI companies also stole from things society values extremely high: artists, workers, children, and humans.
I don't really care about IP for the exact same reasons you say, but what I hate even more are rich elites thinking they can continue stealing massively from the commoners unabated.
We just spent the last 15 years seeing big tech literally making society worse, and I think people are finally fed up with the results.
Ignoring patent law has done great things for 16th century continental Europe and more recently China. Rent-seekers and ladder kickers shouldn't always be respected, they'll slow down societal advancement to a crawl if you let them. The question is whether the gains these AI companies are making from their transgressions are overly privatized.
I think significantly fewer people would have an issue with this if the profit was socialized. The fact that a company took all of humanity’s data and is profiting from _is_ the issue.
And we can also ignore model law; we should require OpenAI/Anthropic to provide unrestricted access (at standard API rates) to their competitors so they can use this to train new models.
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?
unrelated, but I love the writing style of this comment
Written by gpt-5.6-sol
Nah, I was just listening to some Thievery Corporation and had some thoughts. You ever listen to the group? Brought me back to college days.
You have better taste in music than 5.6 sol
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.
OpenAI really doesn’t have infinite money. They have a lot of money, sure, but it is being burned like crazy, we know this. It is widely known that they are deeply unprofitable.
Compare that with Apple, a company that throws off billions of cash every quarter. This isn’t a legit comparison.
Legal fees are insignificant to open ai. Either they get profitable and the money does not run out or they don't, eventually can't raise more and close leaving these proceedings irrelevant.
At no point is money as a resource being spent on this legal case any kind of meaningful constraint. Equally true for both open ai and apple.
You? You're toast if you need legal justice with either co on the other side. The law exists so that the strongest might not always get their way. It was a good ideal, maybe we should bring it back.
yep the most that will happen is apple/openai co-branded devices or some sort of "corporate synergy" now that everyone knows apple tech is in the upcoming openai stuff. there's no value in it for apple to go nuclear like there was for google to push a competitor out of the market w/ uber vs waymo
A billion dollars would buy a hell of a legal team. You think they couldn't scrape that up from investors who stand to lose substantially more if OpenAI gets blasted?
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)
I agree that both companies have sufficient capital that legal resources are a a wash. But:
> It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.
This we don't know. We don't know what Apple wants to accomplish with this suit. They may be more interested in the injunctive relief than the monetary recovery. They may want to weaken OpenAI as part of a strategic pivot toward marketing local, private AI inference. As everyone has noted, the factual allegations are detailed and extensive - Apple likely has OpenAI dead to rights on this.
Exactly. what financial benefit can Apple get from a nonexistent OAI hardware business with no launched products? What actual harm has been caused so far? This is all about preempting future harm by slowing their product launch by years or, like Waymo/Uber, forcing OAI’s hand to cut losses and sunset their hardware ambitions permanently.
Infinite money if lawyers are accepting AWS and Azure credits. You got to store those discovery documents somewhere after all.
OpenAI's money belongs to investors and can be pulled if, say, investors got spooked. Apple's money is much more real.
Investors get spooked the only thing they can do is mark it to zero. There's no "getting your money back" It has been spent on salaries, servers, Washington PR firms, political donations...
> OpenAI also has infinite money
And an infinite money-eating bonfire
Unless Apple protracts the case, that won't become an issue.
Drag out a legal battle? Surely, Apple would never do something like that[1].
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....
Lmao if only one could pay lawyers in equity and promissory notes
>> OpenAI also has infinite money
Except OpenAI needs every cent of that money for compute, and they don't have healthy profits that can replenish what they spend.
Their financial situation is simply not comparable to that of Apple's.
The OPs point wasn’t that OpenAis financial situation is comparable to Apples. It was that the likely cost of litigation is a drop in the ocean for OpenAi too despite their comparative lack of cash to burn. Legal disputes like this cost in the hundreds of millions over many years, so well below 1% OpenAis last single funding round in single year. If they got a tiny benefit from this (very gross) behaviour it may be finically well worth while. OpenAI may very well go under IMO, but this will barely be a straw on the camels back.
OpenAI has no shortage of vc money sources.
For now.
OpenAI wealth isn’t really that liquid
Well OpenAI is offering equity to the US Government (and who knows who else privately) Tim Apple famously refused to bring manufacturing back to the US when the current president asked and play hardball on infosec. While this is a civil case, increasingly judiciary seems to be an extension of the executive. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Does this ring true in California?
Yes, the Supreme Court can reverse anything, and they're re-evaluating the Apple/Fortnite case (which was surprising to a lot of people).
I don't like bringing politics, but the recent 5-4 decision on birthright citizenship doesn't promote a lot of credibility in the current Supreme Court.
This is when I wish Jobs was still in charge of Apple. I never quite liked him, but I like Altman way less. And Jobs would CRUCIFY the whole openAI team for this. It would be beautiful to watch.
That's a very twisted kind of relative deification.
It wouldn’t be effective at accomplishing anything. He wanted to go thermonuclear (his words) on Google and Samsung. Yet here they are, equal heavyweights to Apple.
I love Apple, and I’m a fanboy, but they are not the good guys.
More and more I’m coming to the realization that they’re definitely not the good guy, but certainly seem to be the least bad.
"Great artists steal."
For real. If Apple can prove half of this complaint, OpenAI need to be jumping straight to "how can we settle this immediately." Can you imagine how much fun Apple lawyers would have taking this to a jury trial? Especially considering overall Apple knows that the public overall vaguely likes Apple and distrusts "AI" companies for, hmmm... (alleged) IP theft.
I'm also wondering about all these involved ex-Apple people who decided to pivot to crime, it seems like OpenAI has to fire all of them, no? Because how do you just keep them, knowing that they're all basically tainted, and that Apple will be coming back to sue you again for anything that seems "inspired" by Apple products or tech.
What a massive cock-up for whoever (Tan?) is at the top of this conspiracy, to think this was worth the risk, and to have not known that the chances of getting caught going this far outside the legal boundaries were less than 100%.
Also OpenAI is the one that bought all the ram chips for the years to come, so no one likes them
Apple’s proposed remedy: give Us all the ram.
Glorious Leader Trump likes them. They gave stock to him.
Too bad for them that Trump probably won’t be on the jury
I hope they can pull it off.
That said, silicon valley is full of stories where people brazenly stole from company A to start company B and pretty much got away with it.
EDIT: this is the one I remember:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems%2C_Inc....
The silicon valley TV show even had episodes on this! Man I miss that show. They'd have so much funny material nowadays if they came back.
Definitely in my top 5 favorite shows of all time. I still rewatch it from time to time.
What kind of repercussions will OpenAI face?
In the extreme case it may result in OpenAI having to abandon their in-progress consumer hardware products, but honestly that might actually be good for them. I really can't see all that investment being worthwhile. Better for them to stick to their core competency.
More realistically - OpenAI will cooperate, the specific employees involved will be punished, there will be a settlement, and this whole matter will be forgotten.
Based on a cursory read of the situation, it seems similar (at least on its face) to the Waymo vs Uber situation. In that case, Uber payed a Waymo an equity stake and signed an agreement about which technology they would/wouldn't use. The key person involved also was sentenced to 18 months in prison (pardoned after 6 months).
Basically nothing. I mean they’ll have to pay up but money clearly isn’t something OpenAI worries about. They’ll just raise more from the infinite vc money tree.
In the end some guy from apple (lets call him Mr. Johnson) will have to hire a plucky band of hackers and security experts to operate from the shadows and get revenge. Isn't having corporations be above the law grand!
Apple may get a chance to rifle through OpenAI's trade secrets. And they may win an outcome where there is direct court supervision over what OpenAI is allowed to build and how.
OpenAI will just put the employees involved under the bus. They can claim the information acquired wasn't used for OpenAI's benefit or authorization especially since the device isn't actually out yet.
Given that they tricked a vendor in using a secret metal finishing technique by lying and saying they had permission… I’d say the “wasn’t used for OpenAI’s benefit” argument is going to be a difficult case to make. They’ve got intent at the very least.
Is there any other AI company with as much controversy as this company?
- ~murdered~ (dead) employee who's mother is on a anti-sam hate campaign - ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company - conflict of interest with Microsoft
Despite Anthropic's bad press, they haven't been as dishonest as this company.
proactively creating the script for the movie
> ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company
Are we discussing Steve Jobs in 1985?
Any time there is that much money and power involved there is going to be intense drama.
> Are we discussing Steve Jobs in 1985?
Steve Jobs left because he lost a corporate power struggle. Sam Altman was fired because the board thought he was too fundamentally untrustworthy to remain as CEO (if we're to believe their statement ofc).
Different kinds of "controversy" IMO
Steve also actually, you know, left. And stayed away for over a decade.
This is not drama though, it's more inline with unethical, immoral, and bad. It's indicative of company with bad character.
Apple should buy OpenAI
Apple doesn’t want a financial sinkhole. They’re in the business of actually making money.
With what money? I don't think you have looked at OAI's valuation lately.
What they’re actually worth is probably something within Apple’s cash range but investors have other ideas.
A company that behaves like this in one area, cannot be trusted in any area. Any enterprise that endorses/allows OpenAI products to be used is taking a big risk.
The same can be said about Apple. Several companies have complained about them taking a meeting with apple, presenting their product, only to have Apple then rip it off and build it in house. To say nothing of sherlocking.
As an old timer, I saw this firsthand happen with Motorola. Apple did the same shenanigans, stealing IP and engineers. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.
Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.
Presenting a product prototype or idea at a meeting is vastly different from an ex-employee stealing corporate secrets - to me at least.
I always wonder why this long-supported theme doesn’t get more mindshare amid tech commenters’ worship at the altar of Apple.
"Good artists copy; great artists steal" - Pablo Picasso, but was also used by Steve Jobs, ironically.
Example?
I’m not one to defend huge companies, but OpenAI is a huge company.
It’s possible this kind of behavior is endorsed throughout, or it’s possible it’s limited to this specific group.
We know nothing beyond what Apple has alleged.
I’ve been at companies where just one group - or even just one person - did something unconscionable and kept getting away with it until the story hit the headlines. And I can tell you, it was never just an isolated incident involving just that group. It’s also all the people who knew something was up and didn’t say anything. And it’s the corporate leadership fostering a pervasive culture of turning a blind eye to ethical problems. Often by allowing people in power to ensure that sounding the alarm is a career-limiting move.
It very well could be a culture issue.
If it is, would you extend your opinion to say Apple turns a blind eye to ethical issues as well?
All of the employees divulging secrets came from Apple after all. The person named in the lawsuit was a 24 year Apple veteran and a VP at departure.
It sounds more like they were kept in check at Apple and when they left they showed their true color
VP is a leadership position, and has significant influence over the culture
Pointing out it cuts both ways doesn’t imply that it doesn’t cut one of the ways.
> It’s possible this kind of behavior is endorsed throughout
> It very well could be a culture issue
I agree
> It’s possible this kind of behavior is endorsed throughout, or it’s possible it’s limited to this specific group.
As others have pointed out elsewhere this is literally the type of behavior OpenAI is founded on. Gathering up other people's IP and using it to build their own thing. It's how all the big LLMs are built.
You think the group tasked with developing whatever hardware device they're trying to build is isolated away from senior leadership and is running rogue?
Why not? It may be the old plausable denable thing. Like so many examples. Pressure from the top but no instruction to do $badthing.
We need to take a peek at their diaries again
Not being able to prove is one thing, pretending it may not be the case is next level of positivity. There are definitely going to be pockets of hard working smart folks in every place, however the company as a whole would get a bad name even if few folks are indulged and the company is not doing anything about it.
Do you know who the CEO is?
Same thought I had, I realized I was zero percent surprised reading the claims made, it feels like a perfect representation of the personality Sam Altman shows the world.
Are you joking or are you confusing huge valuations with huge headcount?
OpenAI had >5000 employees last year. How many work in the hardware group?
This is only like the 12th reason not to trust OpenAI. The culture starts from the top
You can trust Apple. I mean they openly lied to a judge last year under oath, but you can trust them.
I'm the farthest thing from an Apple fanboi you can find, but Apple's not so unethical as to make all this (OpenAI trade secret) stuff up. The OpenAI settlement they'll no doubt get from this won't amount to 30 days of their App Store rent-seeking that they were propping up with those lies.
If they can't prove any of this stuff they wouldn't file the suit. No matter what you or I think of Apple, the chances that this went down at least as criminally as they allege, are very high.
> Apple's not so unethical
Apple colluded with other companies to suppress wages.
Apple earned some trust unlike openai.
Can you provide a source? Otherwise your comment is useless.
Judge's ruling.
> To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.
> [..]
> Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies. They did not seek to withdraw the testimony or to have it stricken (although Apple did request that the Court strike other testimony). Thus, Apple will be held to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
This thread is certainly achieving Apple's PR goals
Meh. Consider that you had no choice and no say that your data out there, both present and historic as mined, aggregated and analyzed by data collectors, was used as a training set for the LLMs. I think you’re a tad too late with your warning. They’re already thieves and they know it. And they know you can’t and won’t do anything about it.
Public/crawlable data is very different from private/internal documents and code that employees might prompt with.
> A company that behaves like this in one area, cannot be trusted in any area.
A company locking down their phone platform cannot be trusted with their laptop OS.
I'd really love to see OpenAI use ChatGPT to mount their defense. Eat your own dog food! It should be PhD level right?
Apple kindly wanted to make OpenAI add in some legal liabilities to their IPO filling.
Discovery is going to be great fun (for Apple).
Discovery is the entertainment for the rest of us.
this will settle before it gets to discovery I bet
Depends on the objective of Apple. It’s hard to imagine they’re after a quick payout. They may wish to keep this in the news cycle as long as possible. I could see them both harming open ai and sending a message to employees thinking of leaving that if they even consider breaking their confidentiality agreements, it will absolutely ruin their careers.
doubt it - in the uber/waymo thing the guy got pardoned by trump after lobbying from thiel/luckey, probably a similar outcome for this guy since altman has trump's ear rn.
I keep seeing this take in the comments, but why wouldn't Apple make an example of OpenAI? They can certainly afford to. There's no lawyering your way out of a case this cut and dry, if it makes it to court. OpenAI has already signaled intent to become a direct competitor to Apple, why wouldn't Apple publicly humiliate them before they can get that product off the ground?
Apple isn't bringing this lawsuit for the cash. For publicity reasons this will go to trial.
Yes, exactly. Probably a settlement similar in spirit to Google v Uber RE: Anthony Levandowski stealing self driving IP
Hard to believe when they could use this opportunity to hurt a competitor.
A settlement can be in favor of apple still
The irony to me is Apple did the exact same thing to Motorola back in the day, which I saw firsthand as a Mot eng. Poached employees and IP. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.
Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.
Of course, this is essentially the basis of capitalism. Corporations are just people, folks, spread the knowledge and we all get richer.
The best corporations I worked at had people dedicated to reverse engineering competitor products and were deeply steeped in the market, the worst were those where product just cared about making their bosses happy.
Interesting how Tang Yew Tan worked at Apple for 25 years (!!) and then threw it all out for this.
“Don’t over plan your life. Be open to the wonders and opportunities that present themselves,” Tan said.
[sharing reflections on his journey from MIT graduate to Apple executive to OpenAI Chief Hardware Officer as part of the Distinguished Speaker series hosted by the School of Engineering]
[https://thetech.com/2025/10/30/tang-tan-openai]
who knows, maybe he had giant gambling debts or other addiction(s) or bad real estate investments and/or lost half of it all to an ex-wife first. things that Jony might be readily aware of. assuming there is more than a kernel of truth to this - and i can't imagine not, the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account - it doesn't surprise me that Tan was a criminal, it's that he was such a bad criminal
What did he scrub? Looks like an account with posts to me
> the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account
who responded to what?
https://x.com/drewpusateri/status/2075708238650089981
and
https://x.com/drewpusateri
Isn't scrubbing any of the data on a public platform that everyone sees AFTER you are being sued is not the smartest decision?
Eh, not a lawyer, but my experience with internet PR problems is that the Internet is pretty lazy with a short attention span.
Take something down and most of the Internet is too lazy to dig up an archive and they wander off to find something else to score internet points off of.
not even the first time https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/iyo-sues-former-eng...
Edit: this was a year ago
Wow. Was just going to comment about how Tan threw away his professional credibility. This stuff will be the first result that comes up in a search or LLM.
He’s made terrible decisions since leaving Apple. I wonder if MIT/folks will now investigate his entire academic career as well.
What a way to throw away 25 years of hard work. Started off as a designer and worked his way up to VP. I’m sure we’ll hear from anonymous Apple employees about the nature of this person. Maybe he was pleasant to work with?
Reminds me of the (infamous) eBay sellers back in the days who collected perfect ratings for a couple of years just to suddenly turn into scammers, pulling off what was known as a "long con" or "exit scam."
Which reminds me of most reddit right now
Where do you think he learned it? While working at Apple from them doing the same type of thing.
I would think programmers would at least verify a bug before announcing a bug. Lets hear both sides of the story before judging.
And how many years of being passed over for promotions, I wonder.
Not that it justifies what he did for a moment but you can absolutely work somewhere for a long time and end up resenting it by the time you leave.
> And how many years of being passed over for promotions, I wonder.
He was Vice President of Product Design when he left Apple. How many more promotions could there be?
Approximately three.
Being spurned is one possible motivation, but so is an outstanding offer, where you go from middle of the pack performer with career stagnation to superstar leading the hot new product.
This is a really bad look for a company that has vast quantities of our IP stored on its servers.
I don’t put my company’s IP on their servers, because I don’t trust them to not steal it.
I do hope Anthropic are better with IP, and I think they may be. Given Dario Amodei hasn't been sued by OpenAI while building Anthropic this seems likely.
I think Amodei may actually be quite a good human, despite my trust in big tech being at an all-time low.
Amodei tried to regulation capture the AI access and also tried to ban open weights. So I disagree with you.
I’m unconvinced that morality is a simple Boolean. He might have ethical standards that are different that others though.
Yes. I'm not sure whether Amodei's motivation for attempting to ban open-weight models was for safety or to strengthen Anthropic's position though.
Hasn't his lab not released a single open weight model?
No no you just don't get it, they haven't released one because it's too dangerous and a you're not allowed to have access to it for your own good!
You have not a single clue what kind of human he is
That's also a bad look for any company who willingly hands its IP over
this time they stole from people who have the resources to fight back
It’s really unsurprising. Stealing IP is their whole business model.
The employees doing the stealing are serious offenders here and I hope they lose all the job security they just had. There’s no way they wouldn’t know they’d be fired if Apple found out what they were doing, but the money was too irresistible to them and they thought they’d get away with it.
this is just a repeat of the whole Uber case in regards to self driving vs Waymo.
the people responsible will be sent to jail - and if they can pay trump for pardons they will get out - but if not they're looking at 10 years at the FEDs.
Casually dragging new employees into the deepest shit, it’s breathtaking. Also the naïveté of going along with it??
> He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information
Apple: they stole our trade secrets. OpenAI: we just asked GPT-5.6 to predict what Apple was working on and it was weirdly accurate.
Just remembering randomly here, xAI also sued an employee who went to OpenAI for trade secret theft:
https://winbuzzer.com/2025/09/01/xai-sues-former-engineer-al...
If instead of downloading the files they took the info out in the form of neural network trained on the files and able to reproduce the information, that would be just fair use, 100 pound.
Is the same clean room technique used for code bases.
Apple was smart to move to Gemini before suing OpenAI. But I feel nothing's gonna come out of it.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-uber-executive-s...
Prior art suggests jail time and product failure
Altman showing how desperate he is to get into hardware. He knows local models that supplement models in chip are the end of OIA
This may be the reason why OpenAI reportedly delayed its IPO.
They might have had an inkling that this was coming.
I read that Apple warned them about a potential litigation in February so you could be correct.
Probably among many reasons for the switch to Gemini for their band aid AI until they get theirs were they want/need.
OpenAI are really starting to look and smell like “the bad guys” in the industry.
Anthropic is doing the same thing but at an even larger scale than OpenAI, ironically. OpenAI was just unlucky enough to get caught.
Yeah but it also seems like they have the best model right now?
"Open"AI, Apple, Anthropic, "Space"X are all bad guys
I forgot they were still working on a device, any guesses what it is?
I’m guessing a wrist wearable
I’d guess phone, anything else is too compute-constrained and just an accessory for them, plus has to pay 30% of subscriptions and can be disadvantaged strategically.
Likely a device where the largest share of interaction pattern is through voice conversations and chats with the system to get it to do things for you: messages, email, etc.
It would have to run Android, and try to provide compatibility for existing apps in order for this to be a successful device.
My money is on drone with missile pods.
Maybe handcuffs, hee hee
An egg
… in these trying times?
Fried egg fried egg gotta get down on fried egg
Aybody's lookin forward
To tha
Weakened
The one from Black Mirror?
the only ai device that makes any sense is a robot
Mr Tan is suddenly going to be in a LOT of trouble
Which equals fame and intrigue in the Trump era, big congratulations to Mr. Tan on his new found wealth
It's not really surprising that a company that is essentially built on stolen IP will steal more IP when there's an opportunity .
It's ok because this information was just being used to train their models.
If you sleep with dogs you're gonna get fleas. These AI companies have made billions by stealing other peoples content, what makes you think they would be above stealing from Apple?
This is going to be interesting.
Only because both companies have access to billions and infinite lawyers.
Apples billions are in cash
OpenAIs billions are in IOUs to Nvidia
Do you think there are any lawyers which take Azure credit as payment?
IPO has entered the chat.
Too late.
Michael Burry intensifies
OpenAI has concepts of money.
OpenAI investors have concepts of money. OpenAI has their money.
I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
2026 Wimpy would be an effective serial entrepreneur.
Only one has Actual Money™ and quite a lot of it.
Lawyers: rubbing hands together
Yeah it reminds me of tha Pink Floyd lyric “..we’re so happy we can hardly count!”.
Can you pay for lawyers with RAM, GPUs or IOUs for tokens?
Imagine comparing what apple has access to vs a deeply money losing firm
More importantly Apple can effectively bring up the shadow of this lawsuit whenever OpenAi tries to acquire money.
They can make legal fillings and calls to Bloomberg to keep the story going as long as they want to and suck some oxygen out of any IPO ramp up.
The “nuclear bomb vs coughing baby” meme comes to mind.
I would guess these days Apple probably has more lawyers than engineers.
Quick reminder that Apple was part of the silicon valley crew that partook of illegal non-poaching arrangements with other SV companies, helping to stifle salaries and more.
But, that's a bit of a tangent. On the other hand, Apple is accused of (and a jury ruled against them on the issue) hiring from Masimo to steal trade secret. Appeals are pending, of course, but it's a reminder that Apple is not lily white on this topic.
The jury ruled against Apple only on the issue of patents, and the claims of trade secret theft were dismissed. There doesn’t seem to be evidence that the Masimo employees who went to work for Apple brought any confidential information along with them.
Yeah I cannot feel any sympathy for either companies here.
They all do this exact thing, including Apple. OpenAI was just the last one to get caught.
And if OpenAI uses this hardware information to bring less locked hardware to the masses, wishful thinking I know, then more power to them.
If AI keeps improving, it is very important to make sure everyone gets at least a smidge of a chance of equal access to AI otherwise the income disparity will grow even more. And Apple is the last company in the world to think of the masses. They sell $1000 aluminium monitor stands: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-monitor-stand-price-re...
In every company I've worked at (all with >1000 employees), there is always some text in the offer or onboarding documents clearly stating that you should not bring any previous employer's trade secret or intellectual property to this company.
I wonder whether Open AI's offer letter or onboarding document also says such a thing.
I expected this to be mostly about Apple being angry that OpenAI hired its hardware people, but the complaint sounds more specific and obviously it is still only Apple’s side for now.
Is this the simple case of being used to stealing so much (most ai companies pretty much stole all of data available on the internet with little consequence) that they also felt comfortable stealing data from companies?
Copy of the Complaint.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...
9. In the months before he left Apple, Mr. Tan met with OpenAI or its collaborators and discussed meetings with a key Apple supplier. He began emailing himself information about Apple’s suppliers and internal summaries of the consumer electronics industry. And today, when interviewing Apple employees for jobs at OpenAI, Mr. Tan uses Apple’s confidential information to gain access to even more insider knowledge. He has used an Apple internal project codename to ask, “What’s the plan[?]” for an unannounced Apple product. He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information. These directions to bring Apple’s parts to OpenAI job interviews surprised at least one of the candidates, who commented that he “didn’t even know we could take those from the office.”
10. This is part of OpenAI’s strategy to extract Apple’s confidential information. OpenAI has been instructing Apple employees to bring “CAD/design artifacts” and “prototypes” to their interviews and to divulge details about their work such as “subsystem and component selection,” the “tools or methodologies you use for system integration, such as CAD software, simulation tools,” and “Vendor selection and communication/collaboration with vendors.”
11. OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can. After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols. Unsurprisingly, Apple’s investigation has found a pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.
This reads like there are enough alleged serious federal felonies that DOJ needs to get involved immediately.
People do this kind of stuff because people rarely go to jail for white-collar crime.
Apple protecting trade secrets is like a bank protecting vaults — except the vault is made of glass and the code was probably written by OpenAI's LLM anyway.
Bad look for Jonny Ive
So I guess we can forget about next AI IPOs for a while, can't we? It's Crazy that Elon may end up winning this one, too.
There comes a point in a startup's life where more controls are needed. Red tape. The stuff that slows down the big boys. Problem is, the red tape is scar tissue from previous informal process failures.
Sam, thinking that he could get away with everything.
The master strategist of the west.
Sam Altman is doing Sam Altman stuff.
Wow. Makes me see OpenAI in an entirely different light.
My gut instinct is to call you a mooncalf, given the lengthy documented history of OpenAI "re-appropriating" things and wanting to profit from it. So here is my honest question, what light did you see them in before and what did you base that on?
Maybe lead with the question instead of the feigned insult?
> Wow. Makes me see OpenAI in an entirely different light.
Based on what has been already going on there, not even surprised anymore.
I'm curious, who is actually making the calls and who is actually doing the scouting for these people. If this is coordinated, the chain must long, so let's see it!
What a neat culture OpenAI has.
This is a drop in the ocean compared to what Anthropic does behind closed doors.
I’ve seen an uptick in these types of comment on HN - vague ominous sounding attacks on Anthropic.
It honestly seems like a coordinated PR effort from OpenAI folks to “both sides” the companies.
Which would, if true, be a further indictment of the culture at OpenAI.
Based on what?
They do all of this, plus far worse. Including but not limited to flooding the internet with guerrilla marketing and sentiment-shifting bots across all social media platforms.
This is the sort of company they are, and it's just the tip of the iceberg: https://clawd.rip
I skimmed through some of that and nothing implied similar behavior. Do you have a better reference?
I tend to see far more obvious bots attacking Claude than any other - which makes sense, they're winning.
Same, the main network I see bots on is X and there’s a really obvious bot attack on them there since the fight with the DoD.
Reddit and X are flooded with them.
It would not be bard hard to believe if you told me that they stole Siri and then they put it back on the shelf.
Why are most lawsuits filed on Friday? To avoid the excessive news cycle? But in this case, Apple might want that.
probably the real reason why Apple opted Gemini over ChatGPT
There's also the possibility it was a coincidence, and the stakeholders in the Gemini decision are breathing a heavy sigh of relief.
Based on the timelines at play here, I'd wager this.
Pretty foolish of them to play so unethically only to lose such a big account and now gain an open-and-shut lawsuit that will seriously damage their ability to compete in hardware for a very long time.
Maybe they believed Apple would roll their own AI and not have to license Google's.
Changing suppliers is potentially the reason why Apple’s AI strategy was so delayed.
I heard oai turned apple down, not the other way around
I don't really get it. High profile people working for Apple leave for OpenAI, obviously for money. Is it worth it though? You already have a good job, enough money and work for an iconic company.
I mean people in these positions taking these decisions, wouldn't have actually benefited way much more if staying at Apple and actually disclosed OpenAI attempts to steal IP and technology?
Seems to me that OpenAI has a culture of questionable ethics that includes this incident but goes way beyond it. This seems very “on brand” for them.
just desserts. let them fight each other. every major monopolistic corporation in this country was founded on theft anyway. lets not clutch pearls here guys...
How far are we from OpenAI being “too big to fail”?
Eventually this bubble will burst. Question is what’ll do it.
(I’ll say I don’t use OpenAI after the DoD stuff, so don’t misconstrue this as approval.)
This season of Silicon Valley is getting spicy
Reminder that Apple hired 30+ engineers from Masimo and stole multiple trade secrets, including their blood-oxygen monitoring tech, leading to a $634 million judgement against them. They also asked President Biden to intervene and pressure the ITC to reverse their ruling.
Not saying OpenAI is innocent here of course, but really no large corporation is. This is just how the game is played.
The $634 million judgement you’re referring to was only for Masimo’s patents, and the other claims they made about trade secret theft were dismissed.
> only for Masimo’s patents.
Sorry but there's no such thing as "only patents", these are often what companies live and die for.
The handwaving of Apple wrongdoings have no limits.
All of three of these companies are huge $10+ billion corporations who are capable of doing good and bad simultaneously. If you’re happy painting them as black or white, that your choice, but some people are interested in the specific facts of each case.
All I did was quote a fact without any additional comments, and you are the one being dismissive and handwaving it away.
Get ‘em Apple. Begin the IP wars have…
> According to a report by The New Yorker, Swartz described Altman as a "sociopath" who "can never be trusted" and "would do anything
Who is surprised by this development?
Apple suing someone when they lose ground in a space is never surprising.
> At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies
I sure hope they weren't referring to Siri here
Although I haven't tried the new Siri.
New revenue streams
Weirdly, this seems like they're trying to train a model to work like Apple? They seem really interested in processes and how stuff is done, rather than only the finished artifacts.
Given that allegedly hardware information was involved I’d lean more toward this is for developing either custom silicon based on Apple’s designs or OpenAI wants to make consumer hardware. Aren’t they making something with Jony Ive too?
There's rumors they've been planning a phone.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/29/everything-we-know-abou...
It would make sense. Massive distribution vector
I assumed consumer hardware too though I can't imagine what OpenAI hardware would look like. Another take on the "smart speaker" that has hit the consumer market with a resounding "meh?"
A lot of people have tried to copy Apple’s finished product and they never get it right, because they don’t have the process behind it. How something looks is only a small part of it.
That doesn't seem that weird to me. Good processes lead to good artifacts.
Apple just seems like a weird target for that kind of stuff, is all.
>In its lawsuit Friday, Apple accused Tang Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and a former Apple executive, of coaching his hires from Apple on how to evade Apple’s security processes for departing employees.
The word "coaching" is very malleable, and could refer to perfectly legal conduct, or conduct that is illegal, unethical, or both. How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are? One would assume he was told by previously-departed Apple employees. Would they have been forbidden to disclose information about the outgoing process? I would think so, given how careful Apple is about these things.
> Apple accused another former employee, Chang Liu, of using a former colleague’s Apple-owned laptop to access and download technical documents while working at OpenAI. Mr. Liu told that Apple employee what information about unannounced products she should study before job interviews, Apple said.
I would be very hesitant to assist a former colleague who is still at Apple in this way. Apple is well known for using deliberate leaks to smoke out leakers, and it would be easy for them to get a current/loyal employee to go through the interview process at a competitor for the purpose of finding out if the competitor is trying to get Apple employees to act unethically/illegally.
EDIT: I see my comment, which I posted on the HN thread for an NYT article, has been merged into the comment section of a different article, and is now being downvoted a bunch. Please understand I did not post this comment here, so if it seems out of place that's why.
> How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are?
The openAI employee in question is also a former Apple employee.
Not just any employee. A 24 year veteran and at the time of departure the VP of design for the iPhone and Apple Watch
Ah, somehow I missed that even though it was included in the quote I copied. Thanks!
> After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28453229-apple-v-ope...
Lawsuits like this tend to be surprisingly easy to read, partly because they intend for the public/journalists to read them.
> How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are?
Either by being a former Apple employee, or polling former Apple employees.
Nothing is too low for Sam. I expect any kind of shady shit from that company
I will never grow tired of highly paid so-called geniuses so deluded by their own hubris they think no one will not only not notice them moving GBs of data onto a USB on their last day of work, but assume they also don't have logs of everything you accessed and everything you took.
Little no-name companies have this capability with off the shelf software.
Large companies like Apple have entire departments of staff whose job it is to monitor data theft.
It's bonkers and I love every single story as if it's never been told before.
This kind of stuff happens all the time. The employees in question are just incredibly bad at covering their tracks, normally they'd get fired and that would be it.
It is fishy that OpenAI's leadership didn't have the watchdogd in place to catch it. And there's this huge public lawsuit about it now. Plus there's the Elon lawsuit. Makes me think somebody wants OpenAI to go down. Almost like a sacrificial scapegoat, in order to achieve psychosocial unity in the programming community, or something like that.
> Chang Liu
What did he steal, Garageband?
Hot take, but Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could. Of course Apple can sue and they will probably settle some amount with OpenAI, but acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment, and OpenAI is uniquely worse at stealing corporate secrets is laughable. Especially considering Apple’s famous history!
> Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could
The closest involved Apple selling Xerox pre-IPO shares [1]. And there are zero allegations any PARC employees who moved to Apple with confidential information the this has gone down.
> acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment
It's not. It's why it gets litigated and criminally charged. I won't disagree that there is a section of Americans who think it's commonplace. But that's because they're either personally doing the crimes or surrounded by criminals.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-21/larry-tesl...
Hmmm it does seem like this seems much worse than what I thought of Apple doing (like stealing the idea for a mouse and GUI from Xerox), the best I could find is Qualcomm claiming Apple stole its modem code and gave it to Intel. That was settled before trial.
This however does actually seem far worse, reminds me more of Waymo vs Uber, people can go to jail.
Apple’s “stealing” has been dramatized because Jobs gave it a good line. It’s really not comparable to what these guys are doing.
Didn't apple get banned from selling apple watch because they pretended to want to buy IP and basically just poached and gutted the company instead?
At the end of the day leadership matters in corporate settings (or for a country for that matter). The person at the helm sets the tone for the culture - what’s acceptable what’s not etc. how to go about achieving a goal. Objectively speaking and leaving out judgement of good or bad- Sam, Trump etc all are extremely good at the skill they bring. And when they are put in a position of power they do end up revealing who they are. Thats the thing about power - once you have it will reveal who you are and you have no control over that And Thats the deal. Sam prolly has no idea about it but given who he is he only has a bunch of narcissistic megalomaniacs surrounding him and so on and so forth with dilution as levels progress
Super stupid actions by these ex-employees LMAO
These people think OpenAI can/will protect them?
And everyone will keep using them, and nothing will happen, because the markets are completely irrational, sociopathic and nobody was actually in charge, regulations are bad etc...
What is the realistic expectation where megacorporations are above a good chunk of the law, the citizens can't hopefully pass any legislation and pardons are just a matter of a donation?
WOW so these companies really are stealing enterprise data to make competing products! Fucking slimy! How can anyone trust them now?
Yeah, I find the majority of comments here interesting. Sure, it should be common sense not to email internal documents to yourself when you leave, or keep a company laptop and access internal networks after you no longer work at a place. That's just dumb and unethical and illegal.
But also, I can't find it in myself to really care about this. Trillion-dollar company takes ideas from other trillion-dollar company. Apple has done this to much smaller companies countless times. But OpenAI-on-Apple violence is so far removed from a crime that actually harms normal people that I'm not sure why I should give a shit.
Well they trained their model by scraping all digitised human knowledge and ignoring IP and CW laws so whats a little bit of corporate espionage in the grand scheme of things
Some more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48865019
The threads have now been merged, it seems.
Stop trying to cram your "P" into "AI".
Like when Apple sued Samsung. Why bother with the free market when you can just sue your competitors?
What a dumb take. Apple is the most wildly successful company in the market. You think whatever pittance they get from this will outweigh the cost of stolen ip?
Can't wait for the inevitable bailout and US tax dollars to pay for this!
Bailout of OpenAI? Doubt it, unless Trump and Musk have some sort of falling out (again).
Has nobody heard about this theory yet? https://youtu.be/RqDAMeqvUgo
That video's over an hour long. Care to sum it up for us?
Idea is that Trump would bailout AI companies and call it "job protection" or "America growth" or "national security" because they know the word 'bailout' is politically bad.
Other ideas discussed are that AI companies are going through a chain of larger and larger subsidies: VC --> Big Tech --> Governments. And that these companies haven't been able to make money off of AI so they're priming things for a bailout that's not a bailout wink wink. And that they foresee a situation where Trump will accept bribes in order to heavily regulate some AI companies but not others. Picking winners and losers.
Hence the rise of the DSA.
Reminds me of Apple suing Samsung. Why bother with the free market when you can just sue your competitors?
Some of the Apple/Samsung complaint was horseshit (and was a bit of a distraction because they knew they'd need to settle their suit with Nokia).
But it was design copying and IP infringement stuff: duplication of things already in the wild.
This is on another level. If any of this is true, it's extraordinary, and I think OpenAI will likely want to settle quickly, thus increasing Apple's AI-related earnings.
They didn't still the property, that would be illegal. They trained a model on it. That's totally ok.
According to Apple, are there any tech companies in the galaxy who haven't stolen their trade secrets?
If you can’t see the difference between a design firm pointing out obvious riffs on their first to market designs…
And a company openly instructing poached employees to exfiltrate documents on their way out the door, well…
I didn't read the full complaint but the article focuses on bringing Apple IP to interviews. It's not clear that it was intended to steal trade secrets.
The Liu guy seemingly did so but he wouldn't be the first person to try to take his own work product out the door for personal reasons.
I distrust statements like:
> “pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.”
This could mean almost anything.
They do explain that in more detail deeper in the complaint. They allege that OpenAI has obtained the offboarding checklist for Apple managers, that OpenAI is using it to issue guidance to departing employees on how they can avoid scrutiny, and that employees receiving this guidance have been ignoring Apple security personnel who try to schedule their standard exit processes.
That doesn't sound too heinous. As far as I am aware, employers aren't entitled to exit processes so long as they get their property back. OpenAI possessing an offboarding checklist accessible to any Apple manager doesn't seem like an IP issue.
I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this part other than Apple trying to imply OpenAI has something to hide.
They're more than trying to imply it. Apple says "This is the tip of the iceberg", and a lawsuit is necessary to uncover the full scope of what they think OpenAI has to hide.
> As far as I am aware, employers aren't entitled to exit processes so long as they get their property back.
They're not, but one of the defendants allegedly dodged returning his company laptop. It's then alleged that he used it to continue accessing Apple documents after he'd already left, and coached at least one other person on how to copy confidential documents without alerting Apple's security team.
If these allegations are supported, it seems pretty reasonable to wonder whether there might be more people he coached and what documents they might have copied undetected.
> Apple says "This is the tip of the iceberg", and a lawsuit is necessary to uncover the full scope of what they think OpenAI has to hide.
Forgive me if I trust neither side's grandiose claims.
> one of the defendants allegedly dodged returning his company laptop
Yeah that accusation sounds sufficiently provable that it would be surprising if it was false. That being said, Apple claims it's part of a pattern that seems very inconsistent.
Considering how brazen Liu was, this could be a case of smug engineer and not corporate espionage.