Sam Altman said he was very sad about Apple’s trade-secrets lawsuit and that his first reaction was that the allegations sounded egregious, while OpenAI has moved to have the case dismissed. California voids non-compete agreements, so an employer losing engineers has to litigate afterwards rather than restrain them in advance.
Sam Altman called himself “a mega Apple fanboy” and said he was “very sad” about Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI, speaking to the journalist Alex Heath. Business Insider reported the interview on Saturday.
The line worth keeping is what came next. “When I first heard about it, I was like, Man, this sounds egregious. Someone must have done something badly.”
He added that OpenAI does not want any company’s intellectual property, and does not want people who would take it and bring it in.
Apple sued in July, alleging a “coordinated pattern of misconduct at an institutional level“. The 40-page complaint names two former Apple employees, Chang Liu and Tang Tan.
